Top headline today

The most important story on today's news on ALPHA (a privately owned national broadcaster in Greece) -- it scored 52.6% of the viewing share with last night's 1930 news broadcast -- its highest ever.

Forget the events of the week -- they happened just to boost this most rank of stations ratings.

Oh, and they've been plugging it all day between broadcasts, thanking the viewers 'from the bottom of its heart'.

Sick sick sick.

This is even worse than The Sun plugging Sky's coverage. Commenting on how it was the 3rd most popular channel (in multi-channel homes) that day, and how Blair was watching it. I think I'm right in saying that Sky scored its highest ever share for a daytime programme, over 15%.

It is sick and I think had broadcasters over here thanked viewers for watching then there would be serious talks with the managers of the stations.

Also - I'm hoping one of the Americans can help me out here - am I right in thinking that the main US networks are still providing wall-to-wall coverage of the events?

Oh and BTW, BBC Radio 4 have tactfully scheduled a programme call 'Commuter Killers', or something similar.

One of the minor nationals here, TEMPO, has become a de facto 24 hour news channel since Tuesday. Only I would advise that I'm using the word 'news' in the Greek perception.

There is very little hard news -- just endless discussion and speculation, with plenty of handwringing and sensationalism. Anyone who has anything to say regardless of what it is seems to given airtime.

They too have been thanking viewers for watching them and are now using the scenes of the disaster as station promotion material.

Thats just unbelievable, just milking the situation. Wasn't Blair watching News 24 when he found out? Maybe thats wrong but I heard that somewhere.

That's truly sickening. Almost as bad, in a sense, as the people who have been posing as charity workers in the states and pocketing the donations.

I'm glad that CNBC have been showing MSNBC all weekend, and that Fox News is broadcating live on Sky too. Personally, I'm more interested in the American side of this story - the actual human impact of the terrible events of the past week, and MSNBC and Fox are quite rightly giving this priority. It's a shame that CNN's coverage has been cut up so much by CNN International, as they've basically been breaking away from live reports from NY to bring us pre-recorded reports on global reaction which, IMHO, isn't as important as what's going on in America right now.