What the media commentators are saying

Channel 4's new strategy comes in for analysis in the Guardian.Owen Gibson asks So where will all the money come from?

This was C4 as a public service broadcasting (PSB) beacon. If it was also designed to banish memories of a year that began with the Big Brother race row and ended with a fine from Ofcom over premium phone line abuse, by and large it worked.

adding that

the 110-page Next on 4 document read like an Ofcom checklist. Richards' organisation has long been concerned with how to deliver public service content to fragmenting audiences in a digital world, particularly younger viewers turning their backs on traditional channels

According to Owen,the funding will come from a comintaion of options,the much tauted license fee slicing,a straight swap fro what it recieves from the current anaologe spectrum,a share from BBC's worldwide,direct taxation or something along the lines of what Sarkozy is proposing in France.Funding from tax on mobile phones and internet providers.

In the same paper Maggie Brown says

Channel 4's ambitious plans to move into digital radio were largely ignored last week at its glitzy presentation

and speculates that digital radio could now be a problem for the channel

Greg Dyke features in the Independent,and has harsh words for both major broadcasters

I think ITV is in terrible trouble. It's very funny, Michael Grade stood up last week and said, 'the strategy is working', and no-one said, 'well, why did you just sack your programme director [Simon Shaps] then?' It's clearly not working. Look at the share price! Talk about shareholder value! It's 65p today and it was 110p when Michael went there."

and of the Beeb

He has issues too with the way the BBC is run, claiming the BBC Trust is a "fudge".
"It was clear to me it was going to be incredibly bureaucratic and I still don't think it works. I don't think it will ever work and if you talk to some fairly senior people at the BBC now they've all realised it doesn't work because it's too bureaucratic. There, that'll upset them."

Rageh Omaar writes in the Guardian on Iraq,

In the past five years, Iraq has never stopped being the most important international news story and the biggest challenge for news organisations and journalists from all over the world. Yet at the same time, our ability to report what must be the most consequential war of the past 30 years has been eroded, to the point where journalists, however large and well-funded their news organisation, can only try to provide a snapshot of the war's impact on Iraqi society.