REMEMBER when teletext was new and revolutionary? Most of us first came across the "electronic newspaper" by watching 'Pages From Ceefax'. In the halcyon days when TV used to close down, BBC transmitters would fill the empty hours by screening a smattering of the text service over music so cheesy it made the James Last Orchestra sound like a thrash metal band.

The up-dated version of teletext is BBC News 24. Like Ceefax, it is a round-the-clock service providing news, sport and entertainment information - with the bonus of moving pictures. And like teletext's early days, those of us with old fashioned tellies only catch a glimpse of BBC News 24's output at odd moments.

These generally coincide with the cataclysmic. When a major story breaks, BBC1 hands over to News 24. This happened on September 11 and again after Flight 587 crashed into a New York suburb on Monday afternoon. This is how I came to watch BBC News 24 unfurl each story. Readers who recall my uncanny knack of being away from the Evening Press newsroom whenever a major story breaks will not be surprised to learn I was at home on Monday.

BBC News 24 is the Corporation's digital flagship. It consumes millions of pounds from the licence fee, despite its tiny audience (this peaked at 366,000 digital viewers on September 11), and new BBC chairman Gavyn Davies is known to be a fan.

The channel certainly rose to the challenge on September 11. But on Monday it struggled. Badly.

The world had one thought when we first heard about the crash. As New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani put it: "Oh my God. Not again."

In other words: could the terrorists have struck again? Could another deranged Osama bin Laden supporter have committed more mass murder?

This fear was natural, but it should never have been replicated or fed upon by an objective news organisation. Unfortunately, BBC News 24 was guilty of doing precisely that.

Again and again its correspondents were invited to speculate on who may have "been responsible", was it a hijacking or a bomb, what were the security arrangements like at JFK International Airport and how did United Airlines' security record compare to its rivals?

True, the presenters would regularly remind viewers that the cause of the crash was unknown. But even these announcements were skewed to suggest a man-made atrocity was the most likely scenario.

What the entire BBC News 24 team seemed to forget in those early moments was that an accident was far more likely. Yes it would have been a cruel coincidence. But planes are regularly downed by human and mechanical failure. They are very rarely downed by terrorists.

Even when Mayor Giuliani revealed how several eyewitnesses had reported seeing an engine fall off the plane, this was ignored.

Finally, at 3.50pm, nearly two hours after the aircraft's demise, a correspondent made the point that I had been waiting for: that take-off is the most stressful point in an aircraft's journey. This is the point when a fault is most likely to prove catastrophic. Anyone remember Concorde in Paris?

Viewers had a similarly long wait before anyone thought to mention the impact of the disaster in the Dominican Republic where the aircraft was headed.

Before September 11, the response to the end of Flight 587 would have focused on safety issues. Today we are so transfixed by terrorism that this was automatically assumed to be the story - a victory for the extremists.

What a shame that rolling news can roll so far off course. In the end I switched off and waited for the real story in those old-fashioned things called newspapers.