´óÏó´«Ã½

It was about four o’clock on Monday afternoon that we were told that a second suicide bomber had been involved in the , and that he had been shot by the police before he could detonate his device. We were also told that the shooting had been filmed and the pictures were on their way in.

We have a pretty firm rule about these things, especially at six o'clock in the evening. We do not show someone actually being killed. So we had to decide how much of the incident could be included in the piece.

In the end we used the pictures up to the moment the police officer fired his gun at the bomber lying on the ground, then froze it but carried on the sound of the shots over it. We did not then show the scene after the shooting finished.

Some would argue that none of it should have been used. But we were trying to tell the important story of the first suicide bomb in Israel for over a year, and to give some sense of how Israel was likely to react to it.

This sequence showing the chaos and fear of a suburban shopping centre in the aftermath of an atrocity of this kind is as powerful an illustration as you could possibly have of what it means to live under the shadow of suicide bombers.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Middle East situation, these events can drive change or prevent it. And it's our job to show them as directly and powerfully as we can.

There are two problems with having your programme .

One is that he's a distinguished , so the defence of muttering "what would he know about news programmes anyway" is unavailable.

The other is that he is a pre-eminent prose stylist whose polemics are laced with cutting phrases - in this case describing the Six O'clock News as a "parody of something between Down Your Way and Nationwide".

His ire had been raised by our decision to send Natasha Kaplinsky out for a week to places ranging from Dorset to Glasgow to present a series of segments on social change under the banner "The Changing Face of Britain" - you can watch some of the reports by clicking here.

He took up his pen after watching the first, in which we went to Christchurch in Dorset, the town with the most elderly population in Britain, to report on what might be the future for many other parts of the country. The segment contained a report from Richard Bilton, a piece by Natasha looking at what the town was like decades ago and an interview with the 71 year old Mayor of the town about what it was like to live there.

Now I would be the first to admit that this wasn't the strongest of the five stories we covered in Six on Tour - and if I'm honest the interview with the Mayor was a bit too local in content - but there is a more general point that Martin Bell was making. Should we be out in this way - sending a presenter to cover the growing elderly population (or the exodus of young people from Wales, Polish immigrants doing the jobs Asians used to do in the Midlands, town dwellers moving to the country, and Glasgow's record in dealing with asylum seekers as we did on the other days) in this way, when there are people dying in Afghanistan, Iraq and, on Monday, a British tourist shot in Jordan.

Of course we did cover events in the Middle East well ahead of Six on Tour. But his question remains valid - why did we devote eight minutes a night to being on the road like this? There are a number of answers I would give. Principal among them I would say that the issues we covered were important and that they sometimes get lost in among the more urgent daily stories.

But we did have a wider purpose than that - to get our programme out among some of the audiences we serve to report on things that were happening locally, but had some greater national resonance. Our reporters and Natasha also appeared in the local newspapers and on local media, providing more potential viewers with a reminder of the service we offer. And our overnight research showed that our report on the elderly was the programme item people most wanted to know more about.

As a man with a full ´óÏó´«Ã½ career behind him, who looks set to continue using his talents for many years to come, I might have hoped Martin Bell himself would have agreed with that.

If we're not careful, it's going to become something of a theme.

Last week the Six O'Clock News ran a piece showing a dangerous game being played by teenagers on a playground roundabout - in which a motorbike engine was used to drive it around at ever greater speeds, with two teenage girls hanging on grimly in the middle. Yesterday it was a fireman who got spun round inside an industrial tumble-dryer to the vast amusement of his friends, and the horror of fire service bosses (watch it for yourself here).

In neither case was anyone injured, but they might have been. Why did we do these stories?

Well, one discussion we've had recently concerns what we should do about things that a large number of people are clearly interested in, but which do not have some political or other wider significance. These are the kind of items that get filmed these days and end up being passed around, sometimes to literally millions of people, via e-mail, or are watched by huge numbers via internet sites.

Many are just curiosities, but sometimes a particular piece of human folly strikes a chord and has that shock factor that makes people want to see it - and we've decided that at least sometimes they should be able to even if they do not have access to the web.

What made these two more relevant is that they were cautionary tales that happily did not end in tragedy and could serve as a warning.

Now that's all very well, but what about the risk of copycats? Of course that is something we have to consider (for example ´óÏó´«Ã½ guidelines make it clear that we should never show in detail the way people prepare and take illegal drugs) but you could argue that we might actually stop a few people doing these things too.

It's a difficult calculation to make and a potentially troublesome one for a journalist. Should we show people driving dangerously? What about film of anti-social behaviour?

I believe that as editors we have to have a fairly high threshold for censoring something just because it might lead to imitators. So long as we point out the dangers, we then have to leave it to people's own good sense, the control exerted by parents and, in this particular case, the difficulty of finding industrial-sized tumble dryers.

Ben Rich is deputy editor, One and Six O'Clock news

Sunday brought one of those editorial dilemmas that we often face.

In the early morning, news came through that . It led the bulletins on radio and television. At around 10.30am, .

So which of these events should be at the top at lunchtime and later?

We know some of our viewers hate sports stories, and we were also aware that these tragic deaths in Afghanistan were very important too. Equally, around a third of the entire UK population watched England's World Cup quarter final, and it was a huge national as well as sporting event.

Also, when two British soldiers died last week in Afghanistan we not only led with it, but had a second report from one of our defence correspondents analysing the controversy over the mission itself, and the equipment our troops had been given to accomplish it, and another live interview. That previous coverage was also part of our thinking.

For people who don't like sports stories, the choice would be clear. But if you accept that the World Cup should be big news, the question is how big? In the end we put David Beckham at the top, although I suspect even some of our team thought it should have been the other way round. But then on the same day eight people were killed in two separate road accidents, and two women were found murdered at a massage parlour - where did those stories belong?

These sorts of choices confront us most days, and all you can do is weigh the factors as best you can, and accept that there is more than one valid view on what course was right.

It's not often that we devote the first 12 minutes of the Six O'Clock News to one subject, but last night we did just that, on the subject of drugs, and the effects they are having on our communities. There was not a particular news story it was attached to. We did our own survey with ICM of what people thought of the effect drugs were having in their area, and our special correspondent, Richard Bilton, went and visited some of the worst affected places. The issue was covered in combination with News 24, the Ten O'Clock News, and the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website.

I don't think there would be much argument that it was powerful and important stuff and that broadcasting it was in the public interest. But we did have to balance it against the other news stories of the day, and justify the scale of our committment to it.

And our committment was tested. The verdicts in the Lozell's case arrived just before lunchtime. They were the final stage in the story of the murder of a young black boy in Birmingham, who was simply trying to avoid trouble. It was a racially motivated attack that coincided with some of the most serious riots we've seen in Britain. It also had wider social importance in that it highlighted the divisions between the Asian and Afro-Carribean communities in the Lozell's area, and resonated with more general worries about integration between people of different ethnic backgrounds.

After some thought we continued with the plan of running drugs as our lead item. Our poll had shown that three quarters of people thought drugs were a problem in their area, more than half thought the police were not doing enough. By definition in News we are usually driven by events, but sometimes it's good if we step back and find the time to address in a significant way some of the realities of our society.

Days when you do an on-air correction about what the prime minister said in the House of Commons are never going to qualify as a high point. But that's what happened when, on the Six O'Clock News on Wednesday, we quoted the prime minister on illegal immigrants, without making it explicit that he was quoting a former Conservative home secretary. As soon as the piece went out, Downing Street were on the phone accusing us of unfairness.

The problem arose because the prime minister used one of those "delayed drop" answers beloved of MPs (John Prescott had done one just that morning defining the job of deputy prime minister to Tory jeers before revealing that his words were in fact those of Michael Heseltine).

Mr Blair had said (once again to Tory jeers): “There are no official estimates of the number of illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom. By its very nature, illegal immigration is difficult to measure and any estimates would be highly speculative," before revealing that he was quoting Michael Howard. Except that alert Tories found him out and interrupted before he could do the drop properly. In the rush of the edit we cut the clip off right there, thus denying him his point that no Government has ever known these figures.

So with the minutes ticking away to the end of the programme, we had to decide what to do. The problem was that in one sense it was misleading (we didn't make it clear he was quoting) but in another it clearly did represent his position. Being a well-brought up ´óÏó´«Ã½ person, I referred up and we decided that we should make the factual correction and tell the viewers, once they had made it through the weather, of our mistake. It wasn't an easy decision, but in the end if we're to say we're open to admitting our mistakes, then sometimes we just have to put our hands up.

In these days of tight budgets and efficiencies, an offer of something-for-nothing is always welcome.

And when that something-for-nothing turns out to be expensively researched and beautifully shot documentary material whose broadcast might just stop a mother having her fourth child forcibly adopted because of a medical mistake, well it would be churlish to say no.

John Sweeney's moving story of the mother whose first three children were taken away after she was thought to have abused one of them had it all - powerful testimony from the parents, a medical whodunnit around the issue of whether she suffered from (and could have passed on) a genetic predisposition to brittle bones which could explain suspicious fractures, and the gripping drama of whether her not-yet-born fourth child would be taken away as well.

It also had a raft of legal problems related to cases in the notoriously secret Family Courts, a mind boggling chain of scientific reasoning that made me realise why it had being done as a half hour documentary in the first place, and precious little in the way of detailed response from social services or the doctors involved.

So John's original script for the Six would have amounted to probably seven minutes and made perfect sense. We then cut it back until it was about two minutes and you couldn't understand a word of it. Eventually John and producer Vicky Ridell cut a powerful piece at just under three minutes that satisfied John, her, and most importantly, the lawyers. A great piece for the Six, and hopefully a bigger audience for the real thing on .