It is not easy. Life is rapidly becoming more a dialogue than a one way shout – certainly both newspapers, television and radio, if they allow themselves to be open to it, are democratizing. Shallow is the journalist who does not leave an email address through which the reader may respond to what he or she has written. Irresponsible is the television outlet that does not field a website through which to respond to what has been broadcast.

That is not to say that there is not a dark side to the information age. Pornography and political extremism are major engines of the internet. From Christian, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists to Maoists and madmen – they are all out there. Within hours of me conducting a tough interview with Israel’s deputy ambassador to London, a new Middle East war had erupted in my inbox. Ten days on and fourteen hundred emails later, there was still no ceasefire from either side and it was laced with some of the most appalling personal hatred and abuse I have ever read.

It is becoming ever harder for Governments to lie. Look at our so called dodgy dossier that was the supposed MI6 intelligence for war in Iraq. The adjudicator of a PhD in California sees it on the internet and recognizes it as containing the work of one of his students.

But on the down side, a debate rages on the net as to whether it really was a plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. Conspiracy theories claim the twin towers attack as a Jewish conspiracy. We found in a survey for Channel 4 that more than half British Muslims believe the latter. Around the same time we witnessed a macabre breakthrough moment in which the UK’s newspapers, unable to substantiate further sex stories against a government Minister, resorted to quoting as their sources previously unknown websites with no provenance.