You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.

We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service.

It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.

This week, we're seeing what our colleagues were saying in years gone by

and wondering whether their pearls of wisdom have lessons for us today.

Martin Bell was the BBC's man in Washington, and he also covered a whole series of wars,

including the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

He went on to become an independent member of Parliament in Britain.

Well, in the 90s, he took a forensic look at the journalism business.

As a BBC correspondent, he'd been trained to be objective.

But with years of reporting experience behind him, he came to wonder what that meant,

and whether, in fact, it could even be achieved.

I'm going to talk about what I know about, which is TV news. It is the most powerful

news medium yet devised. It reaches every day into all our homes. It chronicles and conditions

and even decides the rise and fall of governments. Generals adjust their strategies to take

account of it. Even diplomats have occasionally been moved because of it to take some

action that they would not otherwise have taken. And yet, if on a broad definition you reckon the

concept of news to be 2,000 more years old, and to have begun with conquerors like Alexander

the Great who took a historian to the wars with them, or like Julius Caesar who wrote up their victories themselves,

then on that timescale, TV news has been with us for not much more than the twinkling of an eye.

Let me start with a heresy.

I was trained in a tradition of objective and dispassionate journalism.

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