Television has changed wars; now war is changing television. On Sky Digital there are eight channels offering continuous news coverage of the war in Iraq. As one watches them one is struck that there is no such thing as impartiality. Each channel gives very different pictures of the progress of the campaign.

In the middle of yesterday morning, I was switching through the channels. Sky News had a report that Basra was now under the control of coalition forces; there being no British casualties.

BBC News 24 was reporting increasing Iraqi resistance and said: “The US rhetoric will be held up to scrutiny.” I had already formed the impression that Sky’s coverage was consistently more positive than that of the BBC. Sky editors seemed to expect the coalition forces to win; the BBC is more defeatist. Indeed, the BBC has forecast British defeats in four out of the past five wars.

CNBC was reporting the battle for Umm Qasr; it gave a straightforward account of a minor exchange of fire. CNN was concentrating on coalition losses from “friendly fire”.

CNBC goes for good pictures, but CNN, like the BBC, has tended to emphasise the negatives. ITV was covering from Preston an ecumenical church service about the war; I caught a brief snatch of the sermon, which was comparing peacelovers, such as Neville Chamberlain, unfavourably with peacemakers who stand up to dictators. This sounded unexpectedly robust, but I did not hear the whole sermon, and may have misinterpreted its full message. Certainly it was not pacifist.

EuroNews was running a series of pictures with a “no comment” tag; they were designed to make their point, nevertheless. The first pictures showed threatening UK tanks moving through the desert. The second showed a peace demo in Beirut, with attractive Levantine ladies holding up posters of Saddam Hussein.

Fox is the only US news channel with conservative sympathies; it balances NBC, CBS and ABC which are all liberal news channels. Not surprisingly, Fox was showing an armchair admiral who was asserting that the US advance was “way ahead of schedule”.

Finally I turned to the Chinese channel, CCTV-9. It was running an interview with a Chinese military analyst, Zhang Tianping; he was arguing that both the US and Iraq had developed new strategies since the first Gulf War. The US had concentrated on developing precise weapons based on new information and communication technology.

The Iraqis had lost most of their advanced equipment in the first Gulf War, and had based their new strategy on a guerrilla war response. He thought this would result in a longer war than the US had expected. This analysis I had not heard before.

Of the eight channels, four have been more positive about the war, Sky, ITV, CNBC and Fox, and four broadly negative, CBC, CNN, EuroNews and CCTV. Their individual bias seems to be remarkably consistent. My own hope is that the US admiral will prove to be correct, that the coalition’s advance is “way ahead of schedule”, or at least well up with it.

I do find the positive news coverage more convincing. It matches my own view of reality and, no doubt, reinforces it. I am, however, becoming attracted to CCTV. The Chinese analysts have their own national spin. But they operate at a higher level of courtesy and intellectual subtlety than we usually see on Newsnight. And Newsnight has its own spin as well.

It is no disgrace to the news journalists that they are not impartial. On all eight channels one can see that the editors attach importance to news stories which fit their own pre-existing beliefs. BBC editors are, by and large, Guardian readers, and live in a Guardian world. Even more strongly, CNN editors seem likely to be New York Times readers; they have an American liberal mindset. News stories which fit their mindset seem to them much more credible than items which contradict them.

Americans are thought of as people who recklessly bomb innocent civilians; therefore, to a BBC editor, a picture of an injured baby in a Baghdad hospital is an entirely natural event, to be shown repeatedly. Americans are people who fight low-casualty wars; therefore, to a Sky editor, the belief that the coalition has taken Basra with no British casualties is the significant event of that moment. As we all have different beliefs about the world, we would all make biased television editors, if that were our job.

Times Recommends

• Treat Africans as part of the human jigsaw
• Too bitter a pill for me to swallow
• This Bill is a panic measure in a tarnished age