If you doubt this, keep reminding yourself that yesterday Radio 4 news thought that the most important piece of news anywhere in the world was a promise by John Major to give more money to sport. (This finally made the BBC radio news yesterday at 1pm.)That's a bit more like world news. Certainly the Tribune is streets ahead of the 8am news on the BBC's much-vaunted Today programme. In Tuesday's Tribune the main stories, outside the inevitable Olympics, were about the catastrophic floods in China, the reasons why Japanese surgeons refuse to do organ transplants, the vicious crackdown on crime in China (more than 1,000 people executed since April!), European traffic problems, and a food poisoning panic in Japan which is killing and paralysing enough children to make mad cow disease look puerile. But I do get the International Herald Tribune every day as a sort of World Service substitute, because the Tribune has good world coverage and wonderfully little British parochial news and none of the Malcolm-Rifkind-in-the-radio-car stuff that passes for news in the much-vaunted Today programme.

But then the much- vaunted Today programme is for the most part parochial, speculative and about party politics. The news at 8am had been preceded by an item in which Stephen Dorrell was asked how the disunited Tory Party could keep going, and he said that if you were looking for disunity problems the Labour Party was the place to look, and he kept saying it, and you say to yourself: "For this they dragged in Stephen Dorrell off the street? For this I switched on the much-vaunted Today programme? This they call political debate?"I cannot get the World Service where I live, so I do not know what news they were putting out at the time. The shadow cabinet elections and the Railtrack item are not news items, just rumour or speculation about news items.The only real news items there, honestly, are the Amnesty report on Israel, the PM's promise of a boost for sports training and Jessica Mitford's death, and none of them is exactly what you might call riveting The rest are parochial, or party politics, or rumour. The cable TV item is a non-story, perhaps included by the BBC because it suggests cable TV programmes are not as good as the BBC. The Bournemouth mother story is a one-day tabloid screamer which deserves no place on Radio 4. Princess Diana's PR arrangements are not of interest to anyone, except perhaps Jane Atkinson's mum and dad.