I think there is something very unappealing about the way the NUJ has jumped on the bandwagon of the James Forlong story. I think it is really unworthy of a trade union, unworthy of any organisation. I didn’t think they had any regard for the facts.” Union leaders “seized on” the Forlong story “and twisted it to their own particular political purpose”.As for the NUJ’s allegations of bullying, “I don’t believe I have got that sort of reputation. The National Union of Journalists has used Forlong’s death as a part of its argument against Sky’s decision not to recognise trade unions in the workplace. Last week, it published an anonymous article describing Forlong as “just the latest victim of an uncaring macho-management machine”. It is a charge that leaves Pollard, a former NUJ member himself, visibly angry.”I read that I also saw what the NUJ general secretary said at the time. And without the Iraq war, James Forlong would still be alive, there is no doubt about that.

But I think the combination of events that led to that, to be honest, I think we should draw a veil over. I think everybody has thought hard about it and learned lessons.”Not everyone has been so circumspect, however. Tragically, though, three months later, having failed to find a new job, Forlong hanged himself.Pollard will not talk in detail about Forlong’s death. The feeling at Sky is that to do so would only increase the pain of a grieving family. But he talks in the context of two other reporters whose deaths can be attributed to the recent conflict: “I was a big friend of Terry Lloyd’s – I worked with him for 12 years at ITN – and it was shattering; and I knew Gaby Rado [of Channel 4 News] very well, and it was tragic that they were victims of that war, doing a job that they did very well and that they loved.

James Forlong faked some footage in a Sky News report during the war on Iraq and was exposed by a BBC documentary crew Forlong was forced to resign Any news organisation would have done much the same. There is also, throughout the day, a comprehensive rolling transcript service running almost in real time, for the first time.Up until this point in the interview, Pollard has been on strong territory He is fiercely proud of his channel, and its integrity. But now for the first time, he turns to what he calls “the most painful thing that has happened to me in my entire career” – the events that followed his decision to uphold his channel’s reputation; a course of events which ended in the death of a Sky News reporter.The facts are brutally simple, albeit ethically far more confusing. The legal precedent is the Clive Ponting trial – when Channel 4 were gearing up to do nightly reconstruction with actors of the evidence, and the Attorney General stopped them.So Sky “worked back from that to what was legally acceptable, and what we came down to was a reading of the evidence by journalists out of vision.” Viewers of the nightly 30-minute Soham round-up hear the words of lawyers and defendants, but see a 3D virtual-reality depiction of the court. “With the best will in the world, that is not a world-news story. It is certainly not the lead world-news story,” Pollard says.But should the BBC even be in the rolling-news business? The corporation only entered the market in 1997, after Sky had already been going eight years.