I don't buy that notion at all," Emily Rooney, the senior producer of On Assignment, said. Soon after this, the words "politically incorrect" were dropped from office meetings and replaced with the more neutral term "contrarian"."I think the contrarian approach is a very clever idea," the show's story editor, Dan Cooper, said "I don't view it as an ideological approach. I view it as a fresh way to approach material - I think it could impact us very favourably as a show." Even on the Aids "myth" story, which Neil had promoted during his editorship of the Sunday Times and which he was now planning to report himself, the staff were counselled to keep an open mind. Kyle Good, the show's director, admitted she had been "really offended" by the Aids idea at first and had argued "vehemently" against pursuing it, but by August she was calmer."I don't have to agree with every story we do here," she said.

"I'm willing to look at the Aids story when they get it all together and see if they really produce a valid argument."IN LATE August I went to see Judith Regan, the woman who had been chosen as Neil's co-anchor on the show. Regan had turned her On Assignment office into a flowery dell of femininity, scattered with pieces of French provincial furniture, decorative remnants of antique garden gates and vases of roses. Tiny and fiercely chic, in pale green, size six Calvin Klein, Regan sat at her desk, periodically breaking off our conversation to bark into the telephone headset attached to her coiffure like an Alice band. Regan, one of the star captains of Murdoch's empire, is head of Regan Books, an imprint of the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, and shortly before joining the On Assignment team she signed a multi-media contract with Murdoch, giving her responsibility for bringing in book-related and other sorts of television and movie projects to News Corp. But for some reason people responded to him." Emily Rooney was also inclined to optimism on this issue. "We have to figure out a way to use Andrew's quirky appeal," she told me, "because that's what it is.

I mean he's not, you know, Harry the Handsome Anchor Man from Tulsa He is what he is. He has this pixie smile and those great little blue eyes that beam out at you I mean, he's got an appeal. The more I look at him and listen to him, the more I think, you know, there's no reason why that can't work."IN LATE August, Neil held a story meeting. He, David Corvo, Emily Rooney and Dan Cooper went through the show's current list of ideas and discussed them with the relevant associate producers. Neil was beginning to get irritated with what he saw as his staff's "unwillingness to challenge the consensus", and part of the aim of the meeting was to weed out those without the will or the wit to toe the "contrarian" line. "I think the American audience either likes you, or they don't like you," she told me. "Look at Robin Leach [the English presenter of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous] - there's an example of someone who was certainly not terribly attractive and had an abrasive voice.

On Assignment executives had expressed many misgivings about Neil's Scottish vowels (he was being made to undergo a course of private coaching sessions in order to develop more viewer-friendly elocution), but their much graver concern focused on whether Neil - once described by the British socialite Bridget Heathcoat Amory as "so ugly it makes you gasp" - could ever find favour with an audience reared on caramel complexions and lantern jaws Regan was hopeful about her co-anchor. "Tell me," she continued, warming to her apercu, "who are the big female news magazine personalities? Come on! Think about it!" She smiled "They're all blonde Walters? She's blonde Sawyer? Blonde Pauley? Blonde. Katie Couric?Regan's candid engrossment in the question of coiffure might have seemed a little eccentric, but in fact such matters are far from irrelevant in American broadcast news, where the business of "anchor aesthetics" is taken very seriously. "Well," she said, after a moment or two, "I'm not blonde." There was another, longer pause while the two of us pondered this fact. I think it's the only way you can keep a culture civilised."When I asked her how she thought On Assignment would distinguish itself from the plethora of other television news magazines, Regan paused. "You know, if I were to go and interview this guy who basically abandoned her," she said, "I would - if I didn't spit in his face, you know - I'd ask him in a very dramatic way, you know, 'Tell me, why is it that you didn't see your daughter for 10 years? I mean, who do you think you are to bring this person into the world and then abandon her?'"I have," she added, "a very profound belief in shaming people Especially men. In it, she planned to argue that responsibility for the damaged psyches of today's young people was borne by the fractured state of the American family.

At this point, the focus of her piece was the young writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the polemical memoir Prozac Nation. Regan's view was that Wurtzel's chronic depression could be traced to her parents' - particularly her father's - neglectfulness. "There aren't a lot of women in television who've had my life, been through the things I've been through," she said. "Most of the women in television don't have children because they couldn't have achieved what they've achieved very easily with children. I would like to become a voice of moral outrage, representing the voice of most women in this country."The story she was working on at the time was a piece about young Americans suffering from depression.