I think America has a brilliant future.

I often see cases of Internet news where there's no reconciliation for what's gone before and what's newly arrived. That training for me - which was absolutely brutal and I was terrified - was so important, especially later in life when one was faced with conflicting stories and conflicting evidence.

When came the invasion of privacy.That kind of thing turns the newspaper from a friendly organ - not necessarily appeasing everybody - into the enemy. It's one reason why newspapers have suffered circulation falls.

The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true.

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate.

We always talk about how everyone is unifocal. You can't possibly be interested in jazz and Beethoven. Of course you can. You can't both be reading a newspaper and be online. Of course you can. We shouldn't be obsessed with a gun to your head, 'You either read a newspaper or die!'

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.