Media Headliner: Would the real Stephen Burch please stand up.(conflict between Virgin Media Group Ltd. and British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC)

The Virgin Media chief, Stephen Burch, has been forced into the limelight as the battle with Sky continues.

Stephen Burch, the man in the red corner in the ongoing Virgin versus BSkyB bout, is no stranger to controversy. Take, for instance, the kerfuffle that broke in Washington DC weeks after he'd (rather conveniently, as it turned out) crossed the Atlantic to join Virgin Media as the chief executive in January 2006.

Washington was previously at the heart of Burch's fiefdom as the president of Comcast's Atlantic division; he was accused by Democrats of attempting to curry favour in the corridors of power by handing out jobs or consultancy contracts to government officials and their relatives.

The lucky recipients of such largesse were known as Friends of Burch - or, rather pithily, yet provocatively, FOBs. The Washington Post, to take one example, focused on the presence on the Comcast payroll of Kendel Ehrlich, the wife of Robert Ehrlich Jr, the former Republican member of the House of Representatives' telecommunications committee.

Watergate this certainly wasn't - and no-one was accused of actually breaking any laws - but Burch must have been relieved that he was 3,600 or so miles away when the story broke, even if he did manage to swat away impertinent reporters with the greatest of ease.

He is, after all, a tough cookie - at 57, he is the veteran not only of a cutthroat US cable industry, but also of the Vietnam War. So going a few rounds with the fresh-faced Sky chief executive, James Mur-doch, must, in theory at least, have seemed to be something of a breeze. Strangely though, in some senses Burch has proved rather lightweight as the Sky row has unfolded.

He has, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit of a profile problem - and there's a growing feeling that it's not helping Virgin to stay ahead in a public relations battle it was expected to win. Last week's skirmish was, some say, a case in point.