Much will be said in Stockholm about how to educate and encourage the media in its responsiblities in helping prevent conflict and genocide.

This is based on two premises, and I would like to challenge both of them.
- that the international media as a body accepts that it has such responsibilties
- that media coverage is essential in persuading governements to intervene, or to change their policies.

Of course the media are anxious to cover all big news stories. But let us consider their motives, what drives them.

This conference, the forum in which we are discussing these issues, is in itself a newsworthy event. The UN Secretary General is present; there's a large international press corps here - including the BBC; the subject matter could hardly be more important.

But a programme editor - sitting in London this morning , for example - would be unlikely to care much about any of that. His hands will be full of Tony Blair's difficulties over university tuition fees; of the primary elections in the United States; and of the latest evidence of life on Mars.

So here's our first problem in securing the attention of the media - too many other things happening, too much news, too many distractions.

When the worst of the massacres was occurring in Rwanda ten years ago, at least one compelling reason for the absence of the international media was that at the same time, black South Africans were going to the polls for the first time, and a former political prisoner named Nelson Mandela was about to become President. If that election had been violent rather than peaceful, you might never have heard from Rwanda at all.

Compuinding this, in the case of the broadcast media, are the limits of space. The editor in whose shoes I am inviting you to put yourselves has perhaps 25 minutes to present the news of the day - 10 brief reports at most. The script of an entire telecast would barely occupy a single column of a respectable newspaper. Small wonder that editors tend to stick to what has happened rather than what might; small wonder that the caravan moves on so swiftly after reporting a story, seldom to return to it.

Audiences are also a key factor for you in your editor's chair, especially in the commercial sector. Your editorial direction may be dictated by your proprietor, or by the sources of your advertising revenue. Even without these pressures, you will seek to give your listeners and viewers what they want and are interested in. As we all know, those interests will not naturally include what we might loosely generalise as ethnic or tribal conflicts, or Developing World issues. Even a public service broadcaster like the BBC has a public pledge to keep audiences at the heart of its strategy. The most honourable editorial approach is devalued if no-one is watching or listening.

Then to practical considerations - cost, for one. A feature of the last ten years or so has been that many news organisations have retreated from the expense of foreign news coverage. Instead of resident correspondents, there are so-called 'firemen', sent from base when the occasion arises. Budgets have been cut, overseas bureaux closed down.

The BBC has bucked this trend. I manage a network of more than 40 foreign bureaux and have a substantial budget. But costs are very high, and even the BBC can do only a fraction of what it would wish to do.

The costs of safety are also going through the roof. There's mounting evidence that journalists are no longer regarded as neutral observers of events, but as legitimate targets. More than 1,000 media personnel have been killed in the line of duty in the past decade. We equip and train our people as best we can for the dangers they may face, often at great expense. But in many parts of the world, repressive regimes or civil war make proper reporting all but impossible - the very places of course, where we most need to be able to report.

This is not meant to sound like some sort of elaborate apologia for media inaction. There are many committed and campaigning journalists the world over, with a keen sense of moral responsibility, and there is really no such thing as the international media in the sense of a coherent, organised body. I am intending only to point out that there all sorts of considerations flying about in the head of an editor as he deploys his resources or draws up his running order; and moral imperatives may be a low priority, if indeed it features at all.

This I hope goes some way to explain the patchy record of the media in reporting the killings in both Bosnia and Rwanda ten and more years ago. But did that coverage - patchy or not - change government policy? Will reluctant governments act only under the pressure of powerrful television images? Conventional wisdom suggests as much. But this is the second premise I would like to explore a little more fully.

I don't begin to deny the huge power that the media, television in particular, can wield over public opinion and its potential to influence government. It's 20 years this year since Michael Buerk's famous BBC reports on the famine in Ethiopia, which so moved Bob Geldof, led to Live Aid, and sparked off a huge international aid programme. And it's true that governments, and what we like to refer to as 'the international community' can be moved as well as people.

Would Operation Provide Comfort have been launched to help the Kurds of Northern Iraq after the first Gulf War, but for the TV images of the mud, squalor and death which surrounded them? Perhaps not. Would the UN have established safe areas in Bosnia but for the freelance cameraman who drew attention to the encircled Moslem population of Srebrenica? Perhaps not.

But for each of these examples, there are plenty of others whcih at the very least suggest that television images are not as influential as many have come to believe - television journalists prominent among them!

In Chechnya in 1994, the media were certainly reporting the assualt on Grozny. This at the very time that 50 heads of state and government were at an OSCE meeting discussing European security. If this was a key opportunity to send a decisive political signal to Moscow, then it was an opportunity missed.

In the previous year, in Burundi, one of my BBC colleagues George Alagiah filmed some reports with graphic evidence of mass slaughter. They were broadcast on the main evening news. But they did not provoke an active response.

And it is at the very least arguable that President Clinton's push for a settlement in Bosnia had more to do with the American electoral timetable than with months of emotionally-charged reporting of the bloodshed in the Balkans.

Politicians tend to be scathing about this form of television journalism. They call it the "Something Must Be Done" syndrome. They distrust the images they see, and suspect - often with justification - that they tell less than the full story; they find the coverage random, piecemeal and flawed - at best trite, at worst plain wrong; they resent media attempts to exert some form or moral blackmail over them; they invoke the old charges of power without responsiblity; they prefer the long view to the knee-jerk gesture. When they are spurred into action in the face of media-generated public demand, it is often the appearance of action rather than anything meaningful. This is what was referred to a few moments ago as the media becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Whatever the media is saying or doing, governments will not act in any decisive way unless the political will to do so already exists in some form - typically because strategic interests are perceived to be at stake.

There was no media pressure for George Bush to declare war on Iraq in 2003. Indeed in the UK, the press was largely unsupportive and there was a huge body of public opinion against the war. Neither Bush nor Blair alloweed these obstacles to stand in their way.

If this all sounds rather defensive and lacking in hope, it is not meant to be. I am certainly not offering it as an excuse for the media simply to opt out of any role in bringing the news of potential genocide to public notice and bolstering the case for intervention if appropriate - though not actively arguing for that intervention.

I do not claim the BBC's record to be spotless, because it isn't and never could be. But I believe that we try harder than most to devote resources, editorial effort and airtime to stories that others find too difficult, too expensive, or too lacking in public appeal. I believe that in journalists such as George Alagiah, Fergal Keane and Allan Little, we have committed and caring professionals who are more than capable of conveying a moral case without compromising themselves or overstepping the mark that leads to partisanship or partiality.

Fergal Keane has just returned from Rwanda, where he was filming a BBC documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide. Writing in his regular newspaper column last week, he described this as the most important thing he had done in his journalistic career. As journalists we do believe in holding governments to account - and that should include encouraging them to observe their commitments under international law.

So I believe that the BBC does, implicitly at least, accept a moral obligation to cover these events. How many other mainstream broadcasters will be airing such a documentary in prime time to a mass audience? Not many I suspect.

Further, I am hopeful that it will be much harder in future for genocide to take place. It is so much more difficult for repressive regimes to shut themselves off from outside scrutiny. Mobile phones, satellite phones, small video cameras and the internet have all seen to that. The BBC has sustained detailed reporting from Zimbabwe despite having been banned from the country for three years.

We do not shirk our obligations in my view. But we must be clear what those obligations are. They are to devote time and resources to the pursuit and reportage of atrocity stories. We need committed reporters who have the time to investigate the political, social, economic and historical roots of the conflicts that they are covering - so that we avoid the glib language of 'centuries-old ethnic and tribal conflict'. We need editors who, whether or not they accept moral obligations, at least understand the significance of these events and make space for them in their programmes. That coverage must be factual and fair. The facts must speak for themselves. We must bear witness to atrocities where we uncover them, and make it possible for their victims to do so. We must not campaign or take sides, or mount crusades of our own. We aim to shine a light into dark corners. The rest is up to Presidents and Prime Ministers. That is what we elect them for.