Susan Ormiston: If I can summarise your critique: excessive, that the camera lens was pointed at the violence, while much of Paris was carrying on as usual. John Ryley, do you accept that?

John Ryley (executive editor, Sky News): I'm going to sound like a Little Englander, I suspect. But seeing it from my perspective in West London, running a 24-hour news channel along with others, I was surprised by the way that French TV appeared to cover this story. If it was going on in the U.K., we'd have been all over it like a cheap suit. By Day 5, we would have had satellite trucks in every city where there was trouble going on. Rightly or wrongly, we would have done that. We would have had reporters there overnight, going live into our output. We would have "monstered" that story (as we say at Sky), rightly or wrongly. Sitting in my grubby little office in Osterley in London, I didn't get the impression that that was happening in France, and I'd like to know why not.

Susan Ormiston: M. Dassier, why weren't you "monstering" the story?

Jean-Claude Dassier: We chose to do the opposite of what has just been described. I don't have to teach you how to run an all-news channel. Of course, audience rates peak when spectacular events, when breaking news, occur. But our job is not to give a disproportionate angle on events. We should remain moderate. We should remain reasonable. When you show over and over the same pictures - one car on fire looks like any other car on fire - so it's very important not to feed the fire, in fact, and to step back and take some professional distance from the events and to analyse these events that concern our country in a responsible way.

So we reported the events widely, but I don't think we could have installed satellite SNGs in the various suburbs and sent out teams 24 hours a day to show cars on fire. It would have been a mistake. It would have been out of all proportion when you look at the reality of the events.

Susan Ormiston: Your channel in fact stopped showing pictures of the burning cars earlier this week. Why?

Jean-Claude Dassier: At first, one of our crews on the ground was warmly welcomed by the young demonstrators. They told them: “Great! Television is here. Look, we're going to give you some good pictures.” And they immediately proceeded to set two cars alight. I'm not saying the entire movement can be explained by the desire to produce spectacular, violent events for the benefit of TV viewers. Nevertheless, we have seen that there was a movement that has no political or religious backing or foundation. Faced with these events, we must restore order; we must deal with these people who in some cases attacked the police forces quite violently.

So it was extremely important in my view for all-news channels not to feed the fire. At the beginning, like everybody else, we showed the cars burning, we showed the supermarkets burning, we showed some events in schools. I personally decided to stop the broadcasting of these pictures of fires. We continued to show the damage that was being done, but we tried to quiet things down, and to quiet these confrontations that could have led to a disaster.

The French people knew what was going on. They were constantly informed about what was going on, but they were not living in an atmosphere that would in fact have been completely the wrong one if we had done what your British colleague has suggested.

Susan Ormiston: Luis Rivas, what do you think about taking pictures off the air in order to contain a violent situation?

Luis Rivas (editorial director, Euronews): As an international channel based in France, I see it like a foreigner. I respect the opinion of Jean-Claude Dassier, because each television company can do it the way they consider it, but I ask myself whether it's the job of journalists to put the limits, or whether it's for politicians to put the limits. We are journalists. The pictures we have are the pictures we have, and they're of burning cars. Where's the limit to control how many cars we can show? I respect that everybody can do what they want, but I think it's not for journalists to consider whether to show more or less cars.

Susan Ormiston : Is there a problem, though, with the microscopic view of the television lens when there's a breaking story like this, that we don't see what else is going on in the city, at least for the first few days. We had an example like that in Toronto with the SARS crisis. You saw pictures of people in masks, and we all got phone calls, saying: “It must be horrible.” But in fact it was not at all - those were very isolated cases. Isn't that a problem?

Luis Rivas: I think the problem is if we see things in the world in a national way, maybe we are trying to drive the information, in a national way. I respect the role of the French media, but I think they tried to hide, in a way, what was happening in Paris.

Susan Ormiston: Heaton Dyer, I know that you some concerns that there was a real paucity of pictures early on in that story, in part because there isn't a pan-regional French network there.

Heaton Dyer (CBC Newsworld): Actually, the paucity issue was paucity of "live." Obviously, listening to this, we've got a cultural divide here. I can't help contrasting it with the coverage of Katrina, where we were actually watching a social fabric unravel, in real time, on live television. Being responsible for a 24-hour live channel in Canada, our problem has been we have not been able to get that kind of live coverage, those kinds of live sources.

I'd be curious to know: Did LCI take live pictures, do the kind of live coverage I'm talking about, of the aftermath of Katrina? Was there any issue for them of showing the live pictures of looting, of showing the live pictures of what was happening on the ground In New Orleans?

Susan Ormiston: So you're suggesting that channels deal differently on their home turf, as opposed to other countries.

Heaton Dyer: Indeed. Clearly there's some form of self-censorship going on here. Is it a state censorship or is it a self-censorship? There is certainly a self-censorship, as we've heard. Can we ask the question: Did LCI carry live pictures of the Katrina aftermath?

Jean-Claude Dassier: I don't think we shot any live pictures in the aftermath of Katrina. We had a correspondent on the ground, and we had our Washington bureau, so we had reporters on the ground. Some American networks were reluctant to show bodies, to show the reality of the situation in New Orleans. I can understand their position, so I'm asking them to understand ours. Once again, showing a live shot of Place de la Concorde in Paris and explaining that 12 kilometres away Paris is burning, that information for me is not news. We haven't hidden or withdrawn anything. We said that there had been violent attacks against the police.

But, as American networks did in Iraq, we've tried to be responsible as journalists. The idea is not simply to aim the camera lens at certain events - we have to think about what we want to show. When you're in charge of an all-news channel, which perhaps repeats news bulletins hour after hour, and which is watched when there is breaking news - people watch all-news channels for a longer time when there is breaking news, so when you show the same pictures over and over again on these all-news channels, and these pictures are very violent, you need to step back somewhat and be moderate in the way this news is handled.

Deborah Turness (editor, ITV News): I notice that M. Dassier wanted to assure us that "la vie à Paris continue" - and that's the heart of the problem, isn't it? It always has, ignoring what's going in the banlieues on the other side of the Périphérique . I want to ask him whether he believes that in keeping his distance from the violence, and in not showing the images and in not going live, that actually he was continuing the French government's work for it - the elite that separates itself from the truth of what's going on in French society. I'd also like to know what percentage of his staff are French immigrants and whether or not they agreed with his policy.