Richard Sambrook: 'War coverage has changed for ever. We might end up with a death live on TV'

Opinions, these days, are going cheap. With the country vociferously split down the middle over Tony Blair's war, dinner parties up and down the land resound to shouts, shrieks and door slams.

But one man cannot join the middle classes' new parlour game. Richard Sambrook, 46, the director of BBC News, has to maintain strict impartiality on everything contentious – and that includes the war. "People sometimes ask me what I'm going to do after the BBC. And the answer is that I'm going to have opinions again. They've been repressed for so long. In dinner party conversations, I find it quite hard to have an opinion, because I'm so used to the 'on-the-one-hand, on-the-other' outlook."

After three years in the job, Sambrook's office in Television Centre reflects the tension. As with every office worker who has young children (Sambrook has two), there are the mandatory drawings pinned up (the Queen, Christmas pudding). Sambrook has two screens permanently on: BBC News 24 and Sky News. But what's that on the window-sill? A perfectly unbiased arrangement: Saddam Hussein's face staring out from a table clock is carefully counterposed with a Bush-Cheney coffee mug from the American elections.

That Sambrook is so keen to display his lack of partisanship is hardly surprising. The BBC's first director general, Lord Reith, summed it up thus: "When feelings run deep, impartiality can seem like bias." Deploying his resources like an infantry general – a satellite truck here, Rageh Omaar there – Sambrook is only too aware of the microscope under which his decisions will be examined. Attacked on the one hand as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation and on the other as the Bush Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC is under scrutiny as never before.

"I have the attitude that it's water off a duck's back. And that sometimes irritates people on both sides of the debate. In the thick of it, it is very easy to be swayed by the latest complaint or the latest fashion. You have to have your own magnetic north. If the instincts turn out to be wrong, then presumably the governors or Greg Dyke will get rid of me.

"In circumstances like this, when there are such deep divisions, everyone tries to recruit you to their argument. And they take the fact that you haven't been recruited to their argument as evidence of bias.''

Particularly one newspaper. The Daily Mail is relentless in seeking out BBC knocking copy. And the press has had some recent successes in shaming the corporation: the Queen Mother tie incident; eliciting an apology for an allegedly partisan audience on the post-11 September Question Time.

Does Sambrook feel vulnerable to press attacks? "I hope I'm not obsessed with the Daily Mail. I do read it. I read all the papers. But not first. It is clearly a paper that has an anti-BBC agenda. That's perfectly legitimate. It's allowed to have, that's fine. We have to acknowledge that and move on. We can be too defensive about things like that. Even Daily Mail readers like the BBC and understand what the paper's trying to do when it attacks us.

"We get a bit too hung up about it sometimes. I understand why we're sometimes seen as arrogant. Sometimes we have to be able to say, 'I'm sorry, we got it wrong'.

"We're held to account to a standard far higher than most of the press. Quite right, we're publicly funded. But that forces us sometimes into being very defensive. One of the things Greg Dyke has done is to relax that a bit. We should be allowed to have that more mature relationship with the public."

Wishful thinking, perhaps. It was all so much easier in the old days. On Sambrook's wall is a reminder of better times for news editors: a poster of the Billy Wilder movie The Front Page, set in the more polite times of the 1930s. When he is not obsessing about news, Sambrook relaxes in front of US television series: The West Wing, ER, The Sopranos or 24. But News 24 takes most of his energies these days.

In the 1991 Gulf War, rolling news was new and CNN had the field pretty much to itself. With the advent of Sky News and the Beeb's own offering, News 24, the current conflict is a learning process for television news. As we talk, Sambrook's monitors offer a choice of rolling news channels. On News 24, there is an Ministry of Defence briefing from General Sir Mike Jackson. Sky News offers us ... the MoD briefing from Mike Jackson, while on the ITV News channel there's ... a briefing from Mike Jackson. What sort of choice is that?

"We have started to move apart. There's starting to be a gap between us and Sky. We do more of the, 'Brian Hanrahan sit back, where-are-we, what do we know, what don't we know?' than Sky does. We have presentation from Oman, from Doha – a greater reflection of Arab perspectives than Sky.''

But if you really want an Arab perspective, there's always al-Jazeera. While Western commentators reserve their spleen for the Qatar-based channel, which last week transmitted Iraq television pictures of coalition prisoners, living and dead, Sambrook is more understanding: "Al-Jazeera is a perfectly straightforward Arab television news channel which is still learning. They have different values and a different perspective and a different tolerance for gruesome pictures and so on. They have to pay heed to their – principally Arab – audience."

Meanwhile, he has to pay heed to a different audience back home. The "embedding" system, in which journalists are posted with military outfits, has been criticised – not least by the Beeb's former war correspondent Martin Bell. Critics have noted the partiality of presenters and the tendency to use military jargon.

Sambrook sees the flaws in the system but defends it. "I see the risk of journalists getting too close to the people they are working alongside and on whom they depend for protection. But it is wrong for us to resort to jargon – in the first Gulf War it was 'collateral damage' and there are individual cases where that's happened this time – and we tighten up on it.

"But in the round I hope that that doesn't typify our coverage. Other than in Baghdad and in northern Iraq, it's extremely difficult for us to work independently, on safety grounds – as the death of an ITN team showed – so we are inhibited from independent journalism in a way that we weren't during the first Gulf war. We need to be a part of the 'embed' system to understand what's going on and to have that access to the military. But that in itself is not enough. You need to have other ways."

And there's another worry. That by being so close, ostensibly as observers, news crews will influence soldiers' conduct, making the military play up to the cameras. "I hope not. And I'm sure the military will say not. But I think it'll be a long time before we can make a judgement about that. War coverage will never be the same again. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. But understanding the implications will take a long time – we'll review it, the MoD will review it. But war coverage is changed for ever. There are all sorts of issues; the proximity of journalists, the fact people at home can see their sons in the middle of a war, the possibility we might end up with a death live on television, which I sincerely hope never happens.''

But does this wall-to-wall coverage mean that the public is better informed or just more confused? "I think they are better informed thanks to rolling news but not as much as perhaps they should be. The phenomenon of this war has been the 'embeds'. And although we have always had military pools, the fact that they are now able to report live, faster and closer to the front line means we have a lot more of very compelling, vivid snapshots. But that's all they are, snapshots. The really difficult thing is to pull all those snapshots together and digest them and make sense of them.

"And that's not the strength of 24-hour rolling news. That's the strength of current affairs and the set-piece bulletins people have to fall back on."

Clearly, Sambrook's real passion is for old-style bulletins and Panorama-type investigations. While others may worry about declining ratings for these programmes, Sambrook insists he is unconcerned. "I think that you have to ring-fence news and current affairs from the ratings battle a bit. The Iraq debate we did got three or four million viewers. It was an important piece of public service television.''

This conflict looks unlikely to be the short, sharp affair we were led to expect. And that is a problem for Sambrook. "We'll continue to put current affairs programming in peak time for the duration. There is an active debate about whether it is BBC1 or BBC2. At the outset it was unquestionably BBC1. It may be, if this goes on for a number of weeks, that it's more BBC2. We have to balance the audience interest and public service interest.

"At the start of this, the two coincided, so that was easy. If it goes on for many weeks, it would be predictable for the audience's natural interest to wane a bit, but it would still be in the public interest to continue to put out programmes, and we'll continue to do that. When the two diverge, you have to bring other tools to play – use a bit of BBC2, move it around a bit."

In general, Sambrook is pleased with how the corporation has handled this messy affair. So far, his troops have not let him down. "I don't like talking about a good war, because I don't think war is ever good for anybody, but I'm satisfied with what we're doing. We're doing a difficult and professional job well. It's not perfect; it never will be.'' The BBC's news chief is doing his best to keep a cool head. Just don't invite him to your dinner party if you want a ding-dong argument.