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Last week I blogged on the war of words over the Russia-Georgia conflict and how it has provoked polarised views of our coverage - a blog that produced a lively debate and reflects that polarisation.

The debate has kept going partly fuelled I guess by the escalation of the war of words between Russia and the West following Russia's decision to follow the West's recognition of Kosovo's breakaway from Serbia, by recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

On last night's programme (listen here) we looked at the latest front in the war of words, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's accusing the US of deliberately provoking the Georgia conflict.

It seems to be a riposte to allegations by the Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, and echoed by Western critics of Moscow, that Russia had planned to attack Georgia and that Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on 8 August was merely a pretext.

Mr Putin's claim has been met by expressions of incredulity in Washington - but the Russians claim to have found hard evidence that Americans were with Georgian forces inside South Ossetia.

The rights and wrongs of Georgian and Russian actions have been discussed at length elsewhere on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs so I don't intend to go into that again. But I have been struck by the refusal of Western leaders to acknowledge that there is any comparison between their decision to insist that Kosovo had to become independent - in other words their refusal to respect the territorial integrity of Serbia - and Russia's decision to recognise the two Georgian breakaway regions - Moscow's refusal to respect the territorial integrity of Georgia.

Western leaders have been arguing this week that territorial integrity and national sovereignty must be respected and accused Russia of trying to redraw the borders of Europe.

This has led some commentators to accuse Western leaders of hypocrisy (here is just one by a long-time critic of the Kosovo war and Western media coverage of that conflict and others to offer a stout ).

I am not sure journalists, including us on The World Tonight, have been as effective as we could have been in challenging those who argue there is no link or comparison between what has happened in Serbia and Georgia.

This week on The World Tonight we have had interviews with Russian politicians and challenged them on why they believe Kosovo did not deserve recognition, but Abkhazia and South Ossetia do.

On Wednesday (listen here) we tried to take a dispassionate look at the concept of territorial integrity in international law and ask if the recognition of UDI by Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia had undermined the attempt to strengthen the international rule of law all the major protagonists in this story say they are in favour of.

The item didn't work as planned as the interviewee, who was on live, ended up comparing the merits of the three territories' right to independence, coming down in favour of Kosovo and against the other two. Our attempt to analyse for the audience the legal basis for the accusations and counter-accusations flying between Moscow and Western capitals, and whether they have damaged international law did not really work, though we will try to return to this as the story shows no signs of going away any time soon.

Finally, in response to some direct criticisms of my blog from last week and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s coverage:

- Some criticised my decision to try to avoid using the word "invasion" to describe Russia's offensive against Georgia. My reasoning is that there has been a very active attempt by both Georgia and Russia to shape the debate in the media over the rights and wrongs of their conflict. One of Georgia's accusations is that Russia launched a full-scale invasion of their country, while Russia presented it as a limited military operation for humanitarian reasons. In order to avoid the impression of taking sides I think it is better to find alternatives to the word invasion, which still describe what the Russians have done. "Offensive" or "incursion" are two possibles though I accept that all language carries connotations and finding words that are value-free is arguably an impossible task.

- We were accused of failing to report Human Rights Watch's investigation of the death toll in South Ossetia, which put the figure much lower than the initial Russian claim of around 2,000. In fact, several ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ outlets, including The World Tonight, interviewed Anna Neistat, the Human Rights Watch researcher who worked on the investigation cited.

has a long and, some might say, rather worthy history as a thoughtful documentary strand on Radio 4. So it was pretty surprising that the programme this week found itself at the centre of suggestions that it had been used by a Whitehall counter-terrorism unit as part of a "global propaganda push" against al-Qaeda.

The story on the front page of didn't actually name Analysis. The paper's home affairs editor Alan Travis reported that, according to a secret Home Office paper, the by the Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU), which aims to counter al-Qaeda propaganda in Britain and overseas.

It was quoted by the Guardian as saying: "We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters." It was quickly apparent to us that the programme in question must be the 7 August , presented by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, and broadcast in a slightly different form on the World Service this week.

The programme was called "al-Qaeda's Enemy Within" and explored how the war of ideas within the Jihadi movement is becoming as important as the military frontline.
Was it the result of a "push" from RICU? Absolutely not. The truth couldn't be more different.

The programme was produced by Radio Current Affairs resident expert on political Islam, Innes Bowen. She first became aware of the story about ideological and theological splits in the Jihadi movement in May, when a contact who works for an Islamist think tank sent her a link to an article in an American journal. Innes and Frank then researched the subject and proposed the programme to the editor of Analysis, Hugh Levinson. He commissioned it early in July.

Frank and Innes did have some contact with RICU during the course of making the programme and went to see three members of the unit after they had finished recording all their interviews. The people from RICU gave them some briefing materials but those weren't used in the programme.

What's more, Frank's conclusion was pretty sceptical about whether the fact that former Jihadi scholars are now issuing theological condemnations of al-Qaeda, would have much short-term effect on the ground in Britain or elsewhere.

So, the programme was a completely independent and impartial piece of original journalism, not inspired by a Whitehall counter-terrorism unit or necessarily coming to the conclusion such a unit would like.

Are we being a bit too defensive about an August story in one newspaper? Does it matter all that much? I'd say it does - because the idea that Analysis was somehow compromised is out there on the blogosphere. And it's just not true.

I've been to a fair few British political party conferences in my time. But I've never seen a delegate wearing a blue and yellow hen on his head - at least not when sober before 9pm.

If you want glitz - glamour - pzazz and you're into politics, you can't beat the American version. The scale and colour alone is "awesome" if you'll pardon the pun.

There was Michelle Obama embracing the children on stage as adoring delegates cheered the roof off at the Democratic National Convention. I know, I know; you may well hate all of this. But of course, like all good political journalism you have to look longer and dig deeper than the brightly buffed PR machine.

That's why we're working very hard to bring the US election to Radio 1's 11 million listeners in an accessible, engaging and relevant way.

Coverage of US Elections runs the risk of veering between two extremes: mind numbingly detailed, "in" and frankly dull - or so superficial it's useless.

I would argue this is a fascinating story which if done well can engage even the politically disaffected Britons. I don't need to explain to editors' blog readers why it's a good story: you're reading this because you are more interested in the mechanics of editorial priorities and arguments than most people.

Of course this is a big story: arguably the most important story in the world. But arguments like that don't engage all listeners by any means: if we get our tone and dosage wrong we will end up boring people.

Our correspondent Iain Mackenzie is in Denver to cover the Democrats' convention. You can read his latest work - including a picture of the aforementioned hen. On air, you can hear him daily this week bringing us the latest news from the convention while we use our online space for a more reflective, diary feel.

You can hear interviews not broadcast on the radio - again demonstrating that in a multimedia world radio and its online sister sites can add depth and range to coverage, not replicate it.

Next week, it's the turn of the Grand Old Party, the Republicans - meeting in MInneapolis-St Paul. Our reporter Sima Kotecha will be there to continue and expand our coverage as the US election run-in gathers pace towards November's mighty climax.

Already we've covered the story far more, and in far greater depth, than any previous US Election in Newsbeat's 35 year history and we're promising our audience even more along with some very special election programmes.

Did Russia invade Georgia or was its military operation there a case of humanitarian intervention?

This is the nub of the propaganda war that has been fought out between the Georgians (with increasingly vocal backing from the US and the EU) and the Russians (with the support of the separatist leaderships in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and countries like Serbia).

The World Tonight - along with much of the rest of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and other news organisations - has given the conflict over the past two weeks extensive coverage. Before the fighting escalated many people - including journalists covering the story - had barely heard of the places that have become such familiar names.

I think The World Tonight is an exception to this. We have been covering the simmering conflict for several months as tensions rose following the recognition of Kosovo's independence from Serbia by the US and much of the EU in February - a move seen as a breach of international law by Russia, but seen as a precedent by Abkhazia and South Ossetia who compare their situation in Georgia with that of Kosovo in Serbia - another story we have followed closely. So hopefully our listeners have been well-placed to make sense of the conflict when it escalated so dramatically a fortnight ago with the Georgian assault on the Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

I have been asked why we have done as much as we have on the story. In one sense, the increase in tension between Russia and the West that the conflict has added to is obviously an important development. Our presenter Robin Lustig has blogged on this. Some observers have even pointed out that if Georgia had already become a member of NATO (something its leaders as well as the US and the UK say they want), the alliance could well be at war with Russia today.

The other reason we have devoted considerable time to the story is the fact that it is August and at this time of year there are usually fewer big stories around which would have competed with the Georgia story. I was in France on holiday when the fighting started and the story dominated the airwaves there too.

Our coverage has attracted much comment from audiences too. Like most conflicts, this one has polarised many listeners and we have been accused of bias.

One listener wrote: "Why does the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ insist on talking about a Russian 'invasion' of Georgia? If Russia has invaded Georgia, how come Georgia's government is still in place, a peace agreement signed, troop withdrawals underway? Russian troops are in Georgia, chiefly in areas not controlled by Tbilisi for a decade or more, but this is not the same as invading Georgia."

Another wrote:"I listen to you every night and like the usual unbiased and hard questioning approach to get both sides of an issue. But last night's programme left me wondering why your presenters did not challenge the Russian view of what is happening in Georgia."

First off, I have to acknowledge that we did use the term "invasion" once but this was a slip because I think the term is best avoided as it could be interpreted as taking the Georgian side of the argument.

We have striven to be as impartial as possible in reporting this conflict. But this has not been easy. As my colleague Jon Williams has blogged, it has been difficult for our reporters in the region to get a full picture of what has been going on, though I would say they have been coping with those difficulties very well. The increasing sophistication of both sides in presenting their case via English-speaking politicians and military spokesmen has also made it more difficult for newsdesks - as on Monday - and has increased the onus on journalists to inform themselves about the ins and outs of the dispute.

I hope you agree with me that we have approached our coverage of the conflict from an informed perspective and we have done our audiences a service.

If you had asked me two and a half years ago what would be the dominant story during my time as head of news at the Asian Network, I would probably have said it would be the aftermath of the 7 July attacks on London's transport system.

At the start of 2006, when I joined the network from Radio 5 Live, it was only a few months after the suicide bombs that killed 52 people.

Many commuters were still nervous and many Asians, whether Muslim or not, were concerned about how the attacks would affect them and the way they were treated. It has indeed been a strong theme.

Only this week we were reporting about the efforts being made by counter terrorist officers in the North of England to persuade residents that they weren't picking on Muslims, rather responding to evidence and intelligence.

The fact that we could find almost no young Muslim in Bradford to talk to us on the record for fear of police reprisals goes to show how big a job the authorities have to do. We have also seen what police say are big plots uncovered and an attack on Glasgow airport.

But what I've really enjoyed about doing news for the Network is the richness of what we've been able to do.

My highlights include the story of Mirza Tahir Hussain, who was stranded on death row in Pakistan desperately protesting his innocence. It was a case we followed closely, interviewing him from his prison cell on a crackly mobile phone. I was incredibly surprised when his sentence was commuted, he was released and in an Asian Network studio all within a week.

Around the same time there was the story about the girl who was initially known as Molly Campbell who had seemingly been abducted and taken to Pakistan. The rights and wrongs of her moving to Pakistan to live with her father were discussed in courts and on the radio for months.

There was Shambo the bull, slaughtered after he was found to have TB despite the protests of the temple which owned him. Recently we covered a row over voting rights for women at a Gurdwara (a Sikh temple) in Bristol. Eventually women were elected to the committee for the first time.

At the frothier end of the news agenda we had the row over Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody. Many thought it a fuss about nothing, but many listeners told our phone in programme that they saw Shilpa's treatment in the big brother house as a reflection of their own problems with racism in Britain.

We know Bollywood is popular with much of our audience. Perhaps our biggest Bollywood highlight was an interview by our Love Bollywood programme with Indian Film's golden couple, Aishrawaya Rai and Abishek Bachchan.

At the opposite end of the hard-soft news spectrum was the research done by Sanjiv Buttoo into in British Asian communities that became the documentary Asian Network report: Britain's missing girls. It won a Sony award this year which made us all very proud.

I suppose what I'm trying to get across is that bombs, terror, radicalism and al-Qaeda are important, but there is so much more to the British Asian communities that we report on and aim to serve at the Asian Network.

Over the past week, two battles have been fought on the borders of Georgia and South Ossetia; a military campaign, and a fight for the airwaves. In both, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has found itself in the middle.

Last week, a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ team was filming near the Georgian town of Gori when a Russian fighter jet opened fire on them. My colleagues were lucky - others have been less so. Five news staff - four journalists and a driver - have been killed since the fighting erupted. Others have been threatened and robbed at gunpoint by paramilitaries. War is a dangerous business.

The battle for public opinion has been just as intense. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, viewers to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News - including those up late in the UK - were treated to the extraordinary sight of my colleague Nik Gowing conducting a live interview with Georgian President Saakashvili in his war room during World News America.

The President, "Dad's-Army" style, used a pen to point to a map detailing the latest Russian advance - and this at 3am in the morning in Tbilisi! It's one of around half a dozen interviews President Saakashvili has done with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in the past seven days.

For the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to have access to someone so influential, as a key moment, is of course vital to our storytelling. But that level of access also carries with it an inherent danger. We need to ensure balanced coverage. Fortunately, during the past week, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has had interviews with the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, the deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ivanov and yesterday, viewers to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One were treated to a live interview with a Russian General speaking fluent English, sitting in our studio in Moscow. Another first.

But war, is not only dangerous, it's also dirty. Separating fact from fiction is hard - but it's vital. On 10 August, Russia's English language news channel , reported that the death toll in South Ossetia had reached 2,000. While the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has Matthew Collin permanently based in Tbilisi - and we were quickly able to reinforce him with colleagues from Moscow and London - getting access to South Ossetia has proved more difficult.

Yesterday colleagues from Danish and Canadian broadcasters were robbed close to the border. It's not been safe enough to travel from Tbilisi to the town of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, the scene, say the Russians of destructuction at the hands of the Georgians. Not until Wednesday - six days after the first shots were fired - was a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ team able to get in to see what had happened for themselves, and then only in the company of Russian officials. It's clear there's been great suffering in both Georgia and South Ossetia, but it's proved impossible for us to verify that figure of 2,000 dead.

And for people, like journalists, who deal in facts, that means war is dangerous, dirty...and frustrating.

We started a trial this week on the website of a different way of linking from within the body of news stories to related background material - our own and other people's.

There's an early example on this :

The trial will last for about four weeks, for technical reasons is confined for now to the UK edition of the site (which you can select from the left hand side navigation) and is designed to gather your feedback and help us work out the editorial and practical implications of linking in this way from stories.

Linking to relevant background obviously isn't anything new on the site - we've always done it, mostly from the right-hand side of story pages, where we put our own related links, external ones and often a "Newstracker" box listing other news sources. We also do it regularly from textboxes within the main story.

As a rule though we haven't embedded links throughout the text, except for example when listing web sources or in diary-type pages, and of course we do it in our blogs. One of the reasons is we don't want to interrupt a news story by sending the reader off the page in the middle of a sentence.

The idea of the system we are trying out now (called Apture) is that it shows the related content in a smaller window within the same page, whilst also being quick and simple for the journalists to add. So it's a way of testing whether we can make background content quicker and easier to add, find and access, without getting in the way of those readers who don't want to be distracted by it. And it's part of our ongoing work to improve people's experience on the site in general.

For the trial we're linking to our own content as well as relevant external sources, including articles, and content. We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user generated sources.

We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to, the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible enough for pretty much anything. If you get time to have a look, let us know what you think - there's a feedback button on each link.

Have you had enough of the already?

Well, with ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳1 already showing the spectacular in full, tonight's ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News at Six has its own high wire act to perform. How do we give audiences the full highlights of what's undoubtedly a great sporting event without driving away those who've seen it already - or worse - don't want to see it at all?

Luckily, despite the fact August has dawned, bringing with it the summer silly season, we have plenty of other stories to keep you watching.

With only 30 minutes of air time what exactly is the news today? Well, like it or not, Beijing has put on one of the most memorable ceremonies any of us have ever seen. Today is not about sport but about China making a statement to the world. It's worked - after years of planning - the design, the choreography, the lighting of this three hour performance guarantees its place at the top of the bulletin.

So what else? The housing market and the strains of the credit crunch continue to claim a good slot on the Six. Today's repossession figures are startling and on another day, could easily be our lead story.

For those of you who look beyond our shores, strong pictures of fierce fighting in the disputed region of will be explained and analysed. Not a natural story for the Six? With Russia threatening a robust response, it's right to be in the show.

So, keep watching - yes there's lots on the but remember it is only once every four years, and who knows, we might win a medal or two.

As we get ready for the Olympics starting in Beijing, the games pose us a bit of a problem. A global event like this should be a gift to a news channel with an audience around the world. All those countries participating, all that action to report on. The trouble is, we can only show tiny snapshots of that action.

The broadcasting rights are tightly restricted by the , who've sold the rights to individual broadcasters in dozens of countries. Channels like ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News, beamed across the world, are therefore confined to showing a total of just one minute's worth of pictures within our bulletins - and even then not until after midnight of the day that the events took place.

Our answer is - a live interactive TV and online show hosted by Adnan Nawaz from Beijing that taps into the views and passions of fans from all over the world, and cunningly avoids the need to show any official Olympics pictures.

Instead it's about the stories behind the events. We'll be hearing first hand from our audience on how the games are being viewed, experienced and regarded around the world. Who, for example, are Gambians, Finns, Turks and Sri Lankans cheering on and why?

Adnan presented a similar show last year with My Cricket World Cup. Once again we couldn't show any of the actual cricket but the enthusiasm and passion for the game generated a huge response from fans in the participating countries.

The Olympics, of course, is far bigger. Global excitement about dressage or archery may be more diffuse than say, the men's 100 metres, but it will be interesting to explore the world's common reference points.

To kick off our coverage, we've been asking people what three words sum up the Olympics to them. The Chinese and the IOC will be delighted that upbeat words such as peace, togetherness, glory and hope crop up across the world. And, from one disgruntled Londoner: "a waste of money".

Let the fun begin.

The programme that I produce - World News America - has as its primary mission to bring smart and sophisticated ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ coverage of international issues and events to an American audience.

But we also aspire to offer distinctive coverage of stories inside America, and in the ten months since we launched the program, that has mainly meant covering Presidential politics.

Of course there's no shortage of political reporting in the US at the moment; frankly, it's more like a glut. So our effort, as I've said before, is to focus on the quality of our coverage rather than the quantity.

Last week provides an interesting example. We made a deliberate decision to steer clear of the whole flap over the McCain campaign ad comparing Obama to Britney and Paris, and the subsequent back-and-forth about whether Obama had or had not "played the race card."

It all struck me as much ado about nothing...campaigns and candidates cynically trying to throw each other off-stride, nothing at all to do with the really important problems facing the country; precisely the kind of stuff that has made so many Americans so fed up with our current politics.

Of course it got a huge amount of play in other US media, and when I picked up the on Saturday and saw that it had devoted its entire editorial page to the disputes, I have to confess to wondering whether I had made a bad call, and missed a big story.

Then I read every one of the essays in the Post. All written by extremely knowledgeable and able Washington insiders, they focused exclusively on questions of campaign tactics. Had McCain rattled Obama? Had Obama made an "unforced error?" Had McCain gone too negative too fast? Who had the better week?

Those pieces - and the story in general - were no doubt lapped up by campaign junkies. But there wasn't a single mention of an issue for almost an entire week, and precious little discussion of the actual qualities and characteristics the next American President ought to have.

I absolutely love the story of this election, and I'm proud of our coverage so far. And, despite a few moments of doubt over my Saturday coffee, I'm glad we ignored the nonsense of last week.