Although I must admit that I find the quality of BBC news to be slowly declining (I don't care what Barry from Essex thinks should be done about swine flu, thank you very much), I think the fact that it is directly accountable to the public has a good overall effect on British newscasting - we don't tend to get the vastly exaggerated (or simply false) stories making the leap from tabloid to telly quite so much as seems to be commonplace in predominantly commercial media ecosystems.