It was Lord Northcliffe who observed that “News is what somebody, somewhere, wants to suppress; everything else is advertising.” It is a mantra of which John Ryley, Head of Sky News, is acutely aware in his efforts to ensure that his channel continues to be “first for breaking news.”

Ryley has presided over Sky News, the UK’s first 24/7 news channel, for nearly 4 years. On first impressions, he oozes tenacity and ambition, both necessary characteristics for a man in what is arguably the most influential media position in modern Britain.

It was Ryley’s passionate defence of the media’s essential role in a functioning democracy that figured prominently in his address to the Cambridge Union on Tuesday. In a brief history of British journalism, Ryley spoke of the way in which, as he sees it, the media has slowly overcome a succession of barriers erected by the political elite. Predictably, he described Sky News, launched in 1989, as being at the vanguard of this “liberation of news” for both the public and journalists. The advent of 24/7 news coverage has been, in his words, “a force for democratic empowerment.”

More recently, Sky News landed a coup by successfully campaigning for a highly anticipated televised debate between the leaders of all three major parties in advance of the upcoming general election. I ask Ryley the rationale for this campaign, and his response emphasizes the “disconnect between elected politicians and the electorate.” He says that having a televised debate will “enable politicians to reconnect with the voters.” He also rejects criticism that such a debate will lead to a more “presidential” style of British politics, since “elections have for a long time focused on party leaders and very few of their henchmen.”

As to the impact of Sky News and 24/7 broadcast journalism on British politics in general, Mr. Ryley is adamant that such developments have fundamentally “changed the way that politicians go about their business.” Specifically, Ryley believes that constant television news “empowers the voter by putting politicians on their mark.” Specifically, he points to an incident in the 2001 general election campaign where a member of the public, Sharon Storer, confronted Tony Blair, live on television, about the provision of cancer care at a Birmingham Hospital.

One story that has featured heavily in the media in the past week is the death of Rupert Hamer, a Sunday Mirror reporter, in Afghanistan. In this foreboding context, Ryley underscores his commitment to the principle that “no story is worth a journalist’s life.” However, he continues, it is “essential to send reporters to bring the news back. You’ve got to have eye-witness reporting [of these events]” and the key is trying “to take all precautions necessary before a reporter sets out and, when the reporter is on the case, to take all the precautions that they come to no harm.”

Ryley also expressed reservations about the use of embedded journalists with military forces, noting that all reports filed from the field have been filtered through “military censorship.” He agreed that reporting a conflict creates unique difficulties for broadcast journalism in striving to maintain impartiality, but advances in technology have made it “easier to know how different sides are thinking, what they’re saying [as well as] trying to understand both sides of the argument.”

It is clear that Ryley believes that the media have been stifled by state regulators in their pursuit of breaking news: “I neither want nor need to be subjected to the controlling hand of a regulator armed with a set of codes and sanctions,” he says. Rather, he suggests that “we should trust journalists to exercise editorial judgments and we should trust viewers to choose the news that they want to consume.”

The obvious counterpoint here is that if viewers want partial, politicised news, which they can arguably get from the British print media, then broadcasters like Sky would have an incentive to provide partisan news coverage. Faced with this suggestion, Ryley claimed to doubt the possibility of such a development since, in his view, Sky News was successful precisely because viewers valued its objectivity.

Equally, Ryley dismissed any suggestion that the BSkyB proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, influenced editorial decisions in Sky News. In doing so, he condemned Lord Mandelson’s comments to that effect earlier in the year when the Murdoch-controlled paper, The Sun, came out in support of the Conservative Party. “Lord Mandelson is smart enough and experienced enough to know that there is no such link [between The Sun’s editorial decisions and those of Sky News], but you can see why it might suit him to create a different impression.”

As to the future of journalism, Ryley is optimistic. He sees the new “citizen journalism” of bloggers and camera phone users as “a tremendous opportunity” and “another example of news happening in real time.” Though he acknowledges the need for highly trained journalists to sift through information and to decide what is relevant to be broadcasted.

After the success of Sky’s campaign for a televised leader’s debate, what is the next hurdle? “There remains one more branch of our democratic system which broadcasting has still not properly penetrated - the courts. If the legislature is to be subjected to far greater scrutiny then so too must the judiciary, so the public can fairly judge the balance of responsibility between them.”

Sky News will stridently campaign to lift the ban on cameras in courts. When mentioned on Tuesday night, this proposal sparked houls of outrage from the Union’s audience; a number of them cited issues of privacy for victims, particularly those of sexual assault. The question of whether or not filming court trials is in the interests of “impartial” British justice will need careful consideration in the coming months. However, Ryley claims that such a campaign is “precisely what you’d expect from a truly independent news organisation able to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.”