³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

As with many other recently-invented ancient traditions - like Father's Day, camel racing, and chocolate-filled advent calendars - that of the Today's guest editors began as a sort of comforting diversion to the nation. This week, it became clear that, in only its eighth year, it's become much more than that.

This week, we learned from newspaper columns, from e-mails and from social media that thousands of years of Western culture and civilisation would come to an end before nine o'clock in the morning (and a festive morning, for heaven's sake!) if we invited the wrong person to guest-edit Today. So, naturally, we're careful.

This year's wonderful, varied parade of visiting luminaries - including Colin Firth, Diana Athill, Sam Taylor-Wood, Clara Furse and Richard Ingrams - will light up our programmes between Christmas and New Year with their bright ideas, and we hope to pull off our usual, improbable trick of being Today-but-not-quite-Today for a few mornings.

The regular rules will apply. The guest editors will have an enormous say in what we do on their mornings in charge - there'd be no point in having them if they didn't - but news is news, and if something demands to be covered, we'll cover it. We'll keep our fingers crossed for golden moments of the kind that PD James, Jarvis Cocker, Zadie Smith and Tony Adams have served up in recent years.

For anyone - nearly everyone, I assume - who's been skim-reading up to this point searching for the words "Katie" and "Price" (if you've been under a rock this week, you may not have seen newspaper reports that she was to be one of the guest editors), here's the news. We've been talking to Katie about doing something with Today, and we're still talking. Katie Price inhabits a world a million miles from the one that Today usually occupies, but that's not a reason for us to ignore it. Maybe she could tell us something interesting about the way a part of this country works? That's what we ask from anyone who comes on the programme.

And what are we going to ask of this year's guest editors when they start work on 27 December? We're going to help one to explain the virtues of infidelity (if you'd desperately like to hear Colin Firth make that argument, you may be disappointed) and another to make the case for single-sex schools. We'll investigate whether the brains of left-wing and right-wing people are physically different, and we'll re-open a 50-year-old murder case. Probably, Western civilisation will survive the experience.

Ceri Thomas is the editor of . The at the Today website.

After four years of cheerful obscurity editing , I have emerged from the shadows this week with some new labels attached. I've been called a misogynist, a mediocrity, a moron. Alarmingly, I am not alone. My actions have revealed "a seam of misogyny that runs deep at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳". All this heat, hyperbole and wild alliteration I unleashed in the space of a few minutes on Feedback.

I was asked why there aren't more women presenters on Today; apparently I said that they are too thin-skinned to cope with such a difficult environment. No problem on the News Channel, I was reported as saying, where looking good will suffice. But Today is tough, and only men have the skills, and the dermatological depth, to survive.

Except, in fact, I didn't say any of those things. I don't believe them, either.

I did say that we don't have enough women on Today - as presenters, as reporters or as guests. I said the main reason is that we're part of a wider ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, and a wider news world, in which women have not been well represented in the most senior positions. I said that this is changing, and that those changes would feed through into Today. We're not at the forefront of all this, I said, because the programme is not a place for novices (and, categorically, novices of either gender: not just women). We're always likely to be a lagging indicator of trends in news.

In other words, I made an argument based solely on experience, and not about gender. Then, of course, I made a mistake.

I was asked why there are more women in parts of television news than on Today and I pursued my argument about experience. Those are slightly easier jobs, I said, and you don't need such a thick skin to do them. If I'd added a few more words - if I'd made it absolutely clear that I think that presenting Today is a more difficult job whether you're a man or a woman, and that the programme demands a thicker skin of journalists of both genders because the scrutiny is intense - we wouldn't be here now; but live interviews don't always turn out that way.

Cue instead the forces of indignation. Cue a tremendous amount of over-cooked and under-researched commentary. But don't queue here if you want a serious discussion.

You can take a scalpel to my argument if you wish. The idea that a dearth of senior women in news means we struggle to find more than one female presenter on Today is worth debating. The notion that we have to wait for the rest of the world to change before we follow suit is open to challenge too. But we're not talking about that; we're talking instead about the alleged re-emergence of bull-headed sexism in a macho workplace. Is that the most reasonable interpretation of what I said?

As ever in journalism, it's worth running a quick plausibility-check before you leap to an easy assumption.

First, is it plausible that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in the shape of Helen Boaden (director of News, and my boss) would appoint an editor of Today who thinks that women are congenitally incapable of presenting the programme? I haven't asked her, but I struggle to think that it would look good on the application form.

Second (assuming I'd concealed my antediluvian attitudes from Helen), is it plausible in this day and age - and in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ - that the editor of an important programme would be moronic enough to deliberately denigrate all his female colleagues in public, and to expect to be considered a rational being?

If the answer to either of those questions is "no", there may be an alternative reading: on some occasions, one imperfect phrase can be ripped out of the fabric of an interview and turned into a canvas onto which critics project prejudices and preconceptions. To some extent, that's always been the burden of the Today programme - and it's actually why editors and presenters, male or female, need a thick skin.

What this misplaced row says to me is that Today is still part of the problem of the representation of women in news. We haven't yet managed to become part of the solution, and that's a matter of regret. Brian Redhead used to say "We're called Today not Yesterday". And OK, in some respects we haven't earned ourselves the right to be called "Tomorrow", but we are working on it - and that's a fact which has been lost in the fog of the gender war this week.

Ceri Thomas is editor of the .

Political blogs are running hot this morning - a conspiracy between Today and the Labour backbencher Frank Field to distract attention from the launch of a government consultation on how we pay for social care. The accusation runs that we deliberately held back some comments from Mr Field in order to ambush a cabinet minister with them this morning.

Here goes with the mundane truth: Frank Field gave an interview to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service yesterday evening in which, among other things, he questioned whether Gordon Brown would lead his party into the next general election. (You can listen .)

We on Today failed to spot it - and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ system which monitors our multitude of outlets for news stories didn't pick it up either (possibly not anticipating a domestic UK story breaking on the World Service). So it wasn't until someone involved with the original programme wondered why we weren't making more of the story that we were aware of it at all, and that was at precisely twelve minutes to eight this morning. At that point we listened to the interview and decided it was worth a place on Today - and at around eight o'clock we told the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, that as well as talking to him about social care we'd get a reaction to Frank Field's comments. (You can listen .)

Small cock-up on our part for not picking up sooner on the World Service interview. No conspiracy at all.

The is designed to be one of the underpinnings of fair trials in this country. Once a prosecution is 'active' - which usually means once a suspect has been arrested or charged - the Act prevents the media publishing anything which might pose a "substantial risk of serious prejudice" to the court case which we expect to follow.

How do we square that with the way that we, the media, have covered the news that Karen Matthews, Shannon Matthews's mother, with perverting the course of justice?

Is the sort of detail that a number of newspapers are carrying - and we in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ are to a lesser extent - compatible with her right to a fair trial? In other words, is there a danger that the twelve members of the public who'll end up sitting as jurors if the case goes ahead have already made up their minds about Karen Matthews's guilt or innocence?

I've been doing some research into this area of the law recently, and a couple of interesting trends emerge.

First, judges seem more and more willing to believe that juries will disregard press coverage that they might have seen around the time that someone is arrested. In fact, they think jurors will probably have forgotten about it by the time the case comes to trial.

It's what's known as the 'fade factor'. If it exists - and no-one really knows because there's been no research to speak of - it might mean that a fair trial can take place in a few months' time regardless of what's said or printed now.

But it's got a serious downside, of course. If you're the suspect in a case, and you have to sit around for months, possibly on remand, while the rest of us forget about all those details which were published when you were arrested, that might not seem entirely fair to you.

The second interesting phenomenon is the effect of the internet. At the moment the law is based on the notion that we can create the conditions for a fair trial by denying people certain important pieces of information. So, for example, if people have previous convictions, we don't report that after they're arrested.

But what if you can't deny people that information any more?

If you're a juror sitting on a high-profile criminal trial your curiosity might lead you to check whether the alleged villain in the dock has a long criminal record. You could find that information very quickly on the internet - and, remember, it's information which would have been published perfectly properly at the time.

Can we stop that happening? Judges will certainly warn jurors not to do it, but that's no guarantee. Ministers have suggested that news organisations should take down their archive pages to stop people accessing information that might currently be considered prejudicial, but those pages are mirrored and cached all over the place. The idea of removing old news pages from everywhere on the web seems deeply impractical.

So what we have now is an Act based on two suppositions, one of which is unproven, and the other of which is increasingly undermined by the internet.

The first is that, within the jury room, jurors might be swayed by things they've read, seen or heard in the media. There's no real evidence that this is true - and judges, increasingly, seem to take the view that juries are capable of making up their minds based on what they've heard in court.

The second is the whole idea that we can withhold entire categories of information to make a fair trial possible. The internet does away with that: if 'prejudicial' information has been published, we can't un-publish it.

This isn't an argument for a press free-for-all. If everything we report can resurface in this way it's even more important that it should be fair and accurate.

But it does mean, I think, that whether we like it or not we have to trust juries more than the current law implies. And probably it requires a new law to do that.

At first glance the similarities between John Humphrys and, say, Jade Goody aren't all that obvious (the swearing, the aggression - Jade would never do that) and I certainly didn't expect John to be the first to point them out.

But after John's acceptance speech at last night's we now know that John and Jade are brother and sister in the undeserving family of Celebrity.

John's was this: that reporters in the field - correspondents like Alan Johnston who take real risks - are far more deserving of awards than 'personality' presenters who fly in to nasty places for a day or two and then disappear off home again. He's right, of course - up to a point.

The correspondents John listed, and plenty of others besides, are the eyes and the ears and the brain of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. It's almost ridiculous to have to point out how vital they are and how much recognition they deserve. But in the world as it is, and not as we might like it to be, celebrity has its uses too.

The journalistic puritan in us might want to think that words are just words whoever speaks them but the truth is that a certain sort of celebrity - one that's built on experience, achievements, reputation - can transform the power of any script.

That's not a symptom of some modern disease, it's a reflection of human relationships down the centuries. We don't dish out our attention in a dispassionate way, we give it out lopsidedly to the voice that's familiar, to the name that we trust. Celebrity can amplify. It would be daft not to use it.

Some sense of perspective always helps: Today was not, thankfully, electing the new president of Ukraine or even a parish councillor. The vote which finds itself in the dock this morning, accused of being unsound, is our rather-less-serious piece of Christmas knockabout, the listeners' poll.

The question this year (in a country sometimes accused of being over-regulated) was what piece of legislation our audience would most like to repeal. The charge sheet alleges that the poll was fixed - rigged by the ruthless lobbying machine that is the Countryside Alliance to call for the repeal of the ban on hunting with dogs.

Was undue influence brought to bear?

The truth is that it's very hard to be sure. When we set up something like this we put some basic safeguards in place - you can't, for example, send multiple entries from the same computer - but it's impossible to be certain that every single vote was cast by an independent-minded individual who heard the arguments on the programme and decided, free from any outside influence, to take part.

We do know, of course, that the Alliance had a link urging supporters to vote - but it's a big leap from there to the assumption that the link was wholly responsible for the clear-cut result of the poll. The Hunting Act is a controversial piece of legislation. Is anyone really surprised to find it on our listeners' blacklist?

"It should," , "have been a bit of festive fun with a slightly serious political edge". Actually, I have news - our vote was a bit of festive fun with a slightly serious political edge. The problem comes when people try to treat it differently.

Years ago, in the pre-internet days when we asked people to write in to nominate their Personality of the Year, I remember dozens of identical postcards arriving in the office all written in the same hand, all stamped with a House of Commons postmark, and all nominating the same member of Parliament. My message to the slightly desperate MP all those years ago, to the commentators today, and to whoever complains next year that the vote has been rigged (as I'm sure they will) would be the same: "Calm down. You'll spoil it if you take it too seriously".

Usually, the only way to guarantee that some snippet of news about the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ will appear in a newspaper diary is to ask people inside the corporation to treat it as top secret.

Generally speaking, if you do that you can expect Fleet St to be buzzing with the news within an hour or two at most. So it was surprising (and disappointing in a curious way) to find something in the that just wasn't a secret at all: from next Monday, the newspaper reviews in Today will be read by the presenters rather than the news readers.

Sandwiched in the Spy column between David Cameron on one side and Chrissie Hynde on the other, the article says the change will alarm "those who have criticised the programme for lacking political objectivity". But it's hard to see why when the presenters will be reading out the same scripts written by the same people (in the ) who write them now.

The presenters already read out some of the paper reviews, of course - early in the programme and on Saturday morning, for instance - so this is a smallish change. And The Telegraph is right: we're hoping it will help everything flow along a little more smoothly.

BASRA: Visiting Iraq is a sobering experience but, as we get ready to leave after two editions of Today (which you can read about here), one particularly sobering thought lingers: once UK forces pull out, as they say they will "sometime soon", will any reporting from here be possible?

All of us would prefer to be here without the help of the military but, at the moment, that’s very difficult to envisage. In a land where some policemen are also members of the death squads which terrorise this city, where patrol cars are found carrying roadside bombs, where the long arm of the law may also be the strong arm of religious extremism or a criminal gang, the risks that local journalists run are terrifying. Without the military safety blanket, the risks to outsiders would be incalculable.

So we’re with the armed forces, and grateful for the protection they offer. But, at the same time, it’s hard to ignore the limits they impose. As journalists, we spend too much of our time glimpsing Basra through razor wire fences or the bullet-proof windows of a Land Rover. We get out of the fortified bases into the city and the villages beyond as often as we can, but each trip is immensely labour-intensive – and much more dangerous for the soldiers who accompany us than it is for us.

Maybe those who believe that the presence of British troops and diplomats here exacerbates the situation are right. They’re certainly a lightning rod. I’ve lost count of the number of mortars and rockets that have landed on the base where we’re staying in the past four nights – perhaps it’s 40 or 50 – and each one runs the risk of falling short and landing instead on an Iraqi house much less able to withstand the impact than the breeze-block bungalows where we sleep. So, certainly, some daily acts of violence happen because the British are here. But, at the same time, we’ve heard stories of lives that have been saved by their presence. And however appalling the state of the Basra police, is it really possible to imagine that they’d be better without the efforts of ex-coppers from Northern Ireland, South Wales and every other corner of the UK to train and improve them?

It’s too early for any final accounting of the British mission here, but the army is certainly one very strong thread in the fabric of what little security remains in Basra. If we pull it out, will what’s left support a society where foreigners can come and go in peace?

In Baghdad, of course, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ colleagues do manage to move around the city independently – but the level of protection they need means it’s a fiercely expensive business. And even an organisation with the resources of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ couldn’t afford to do that everywhere.

Let’s be optimistic for a moment. Let’s assume that when the UK withdraws from this corner of southern Iraq the situation doesn’t get worse. Let’s assume that it even gets marginally better – that there are fewer death squads roaming the streets, that the police are less well-infiltrated by members of the violent militia. Even then, it will be far too dangerous to travel here independently.

And while Baghdad – the centre of everything in this country – continues to grab the headlines and catch the eye, the risk is that this city of nearly two million people slips from view.

In one sense, no surprise: there are plenty of cities of that size around the world that we barely hear from. But, without in any sense wishing more suffering upon this place, it’s possible that some pretty awful things will happen here in the years ahead – and it would be tragic if we didn’t know about them.

It was e-mail number 1,226 on the same topic which finally did it for me.

The other 1,225 had pictures attached (dogs in prams, dogs in clothes) but this one contained a new feature: a link to the dog's own website. Our fault of course - we were doing an item (listen here) about dogs' names and we'd asked for photographs - but the size of the response was still surprising, almost shocking. Have you really (dear listener) been poised next to your laptop all these years, digital camera at the ready, just waiting for the moment when you could give Thompson the Chocolate Labrador or Colin the Spinoni their fifteen minutes? That's the way it looks.

I'm being slightly unfair to us. We always knew that the dog item would have 'legs', but it's very hard to predict how much any of the subjects we cover will grab the audience.

E-mails are one way for us to judge whether or not we're hitting the right notes (and, incidentally, there've been another 30 to do with dogs since I started writing this). Like all the other means at our disposal - focus groups, surveys, and so on - they're imperfect but they serve a purpose.

And sometimes feedback comes in less subtle forms: the high-profile politician who phoned this week to say why he "loathes the programme"; the letter to a presenter which opened with the novel greeting, Dear C***. But if there was a prize for best feedback this week, I'd award it to the cabbie who was giving me a lift early one morning.

I asked if he'd mind putting Today on the radio, and he confessed he'd never listened to it. After all of three minutes he started chuckling to himself, and a couple of minutes later he turned to me. "Gawd, mate," he said, "this is dreadful, isn't it?". And then quietly, under his breath, "Absolutely minging."

How to judge an audience at a time like this is a very delicate matter. I could, of course, rely solely on Today's e-mail Inbox where the mood is clear for all to see...

"Spare a thought for those of us who have no interest in football whatsoever. We don’t give a stuff for Rooney’s foot and, quite frankly, we don’t care who wins. I intend to put a bag over my head for the next month and wait till it’s all over!!"

Leaving to one side the enticing mental image of six-and-a-half million Today listeners blundering around, heads covered with brown paper, contributions to the programme website could suggest a simple logic: no one writes to demand more World Cup coverage; quite a few people (tens, not hundreds) threaten to pour concrete into their ears or even tune to Radio 3 to get away from it. The answer must be to do less football.

It's not that simple, needless to say. We know from previous audience research that Today listeners like football less than the national average - but, actually, only a little less. And there's nothing like a World Cup to turn the disinterested into experts. Is it just the Provisional Wing of the Cultural Elite who are clogging up our e-mail with their howls of anguish?

It's probably not that simple either. There's one further possible explanation which is difficult to test or to respond to: can you be interested in football, fascinated by the World Cup, and still not want or expect coverage from your favourite public service breakfast programme? Expectations are powerful things. Maybe there's something in that.