Sir Geoffrey Cox, who died last week, was one of the leading people who created modern British television news. Any news programme in modern Britain comes from a culture which he helped to create.

He was the editor and Chief Executive of Independent Television News from 1956 until 1968. Those turned out to be the years of the greatest creative opportunity, based on the extension of competition and new technologies. It was Cox who took the editorial decisions which were made possible by these new opportunities.

I first met Geoffrey Cox in the spring of 1954, after I had been appointed as the temporary Political Correspondent for The Financial Times. The Parliamentary Lobby was then a small and select group. The larger circulation papers had as correspondents Derek Marks of the Daily Express and Walter Terry of the Daily Mail. The Yorkshire Post had Ian Trethowan, later to become a successful broadcaster and director- general of the BBC. Cox himself was the Political Correspondent of the News Chronicle, a liberal newspaper which was in serious decline. Shortly after he left, it was abandoned by its proprietors as commercially unviable.

In the immediate postwar period, there existed an influential group of young journalists who had been given exceptionally senior responsibilities during the war. Cox was one of the most distinguished. A New Zealander and Rhodes scholar he had joined the New Zealand Army in 1940. Before the war he had already worked for the Chronicle and the Daily Express. He served in Greece, Crete, Libya and Italy, and rose to be chief intelligence officer on the staff of General Freyberg.

After the war Cox returned to the News Chronicle. Inevitably, such experiences gave journalists an unusual authority and self-confidence. I belonged to the next generation, who had been too young to be involved in the war. We looked up to the wartime journalists who were only a few years older than us.

In 1956 the editor of ITN, Aidan Crawley, resigned after only a year in the job. Cox was appointed as his successor. He brought his authority to the role. He developed a team of television journalists, most of whom he had recruited himself. They included Trethowan, Alastair Burnett, Nigel Ryan, Peter Snow and Peter Sissons. Robin Day had already been recruited; he turned out to be the most valuable journalist in what was a very gifted team.

I was never a member of this ITN team, but I had a retainer from Associated-Rediffusion as a part-time economic correspondent. This brought me into contact with ITN. We co-operated with ITN in developing live current affairs television of the big political events. We produced the first live television report of the Budget.

In 1964, with Alastair Burnett in the chair, we produced the first television coverage of the General Election to have the dubious benefit of computer-generated forecasts. I remember that our computer, a large machine with the brain of a pocket calculator, forecast a Tory victory after the first half dozen results. Harold Wilson won the election and the human commentators defeated the computer forecast.

Later in his time at ITN, Cox seized the opportunity of satellite transmission of television film. In the early 1960s television still depended on air freight to get the pictures home. By the late 1960s it was becoming possible to build international news coverage around satellite communication, although it was a scarce and expensive commodity. He believed in pictures as well as words for ITN's news coverage.

Technologies develop and change. It was Cox's approach to news which proved his most important contribution. A number of factors were involved. I'm sure that it was important that he came out of the Lobby. He had covered the Commons, and British politics, for almost ten years. He had heard Winston Churchill speak, both as Leader of the Opposition and in his second term as Prime Minister after 1951. He had a great respect for Parliament, but he also had a certain detachment. It was an advantage that he was a New Zealander. He believed in principle in impartial political coverage, but he had no temptation towards partisanship. Local British disputes between Conservatives and Labour were not his disputes.

Cox preferred hard to soft news. He found news fascinating. He encouraged his correspondents to pursue the truth of stories without giving politicians much wriggle room. Many viewers can still remember some of the tougher examinations of Robin Day. They were possible because Day had the support and confidence of Cox.

No journalist would have been able to establish such tough cross-examination of Prime Ministers unless he could rely on his editor to back him. It was Robin Day who first cross-examined Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister, to the Prime Minister's surprise, but it was Cox who was answerable for the strategy of open news, openly examined. Day - who had some claim to the title himself - rightly called Geoffrey Cox “the best television journalist we have ever known in Britain”. No one has yet surpassed that standard.

Cox's biggest formal decision was the creation of ITN's News at Ten; it is not, however, a particular news programme that mattered most. Modern British television news has a reputation for being impartial, tough-minded, open and honest. It does not tell lies and it does not cheat. Geoffrey Cox was the editor who did most to found this tradition. He always competed on excellence and he usually won.

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