Dermot Murnaghan was rumoured to be upset

ITN launched its rolling new channel at the beginning of August.

They brought in familiar faces from its programmes on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to lure viewers to the channel.

John Suchet, Carol Barnes and Julia Somerville from ITV were joined by Daljit Daliwal of Channel 4 and Simon Vigar from Channel 5.

Another member of the team was Andrew Harvey, who joined ITN after 30 years with the BBC.

Competition

However despite the familiar faces, the channel is suffering in the ratings.

In the month leading up to 7 December 2001, the channel had a 0.2% share of the viewing audience in multi-channel households, figures from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (Barb) showed.

Over the same period BBC News 24 had a 1.3% of the audience with Sky News on 1.9%.

This latest speculation has come at a bad time for ITN.

Redundancies

The news provider recently regained the ITV News contract but the competitive bidding meant it was forced to axe about 82 jobs.

ITN won the contract by defeating a consortium backed by Sky and CBS News, which had promised to undercut ITN by more than �10m.

As a result, ITN was forced to reduce its own price from �46m to �36m.

The BBC has also claimed victory over the hotly disputed evening news clash with ITN.

Barb figures showed the BBC's Ten O'Clock News averaged 5.1 million viewers per broadcast in 2001.

A total of 4.4 million people watched ITV's News at Ten and the channel's other late news slots.