Geoffrey Cox, the founder of News at Ten on ITN in 1967, was described by Sir Robin Day as the finest television journalist in British broadcast history.

He had an impressive career: a Rhodes scholar from New Zealand, he became a foreign correspondent for the News Chronicle in the Spanish Civil War. As a Daily Express reporter, he covered the Anschluss in Austria in 1938 and the Soviet-Finnish War and was in Czechoslovakia as Hitler took over the Sudetenland. He was one of the last reporters to leave Paris before the Germans arrived.

During the war he was chief intelligence officer to General Freyberg in the New Zealand Division and was twice mentioned in dispatches. He served in Greece, Crete, Libya and Cassino. For a while in 1943 he was New Zealand's First Secretary in Washington and took part in the Pacific War Council, attended by Churchill and Roosevelt. After the war he was lobby correspondent for the News Chronicle. The summit of his career was as editor and chief executive of ITN, 1956-68.

Geoffrey Sanford Cox was born in New Zealand in 1910. After Southland High School he took an MA at Otago University and went on to Oriel College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar in 1932-35. He joined the News Chronicle in 1935. As a cub reporter in those days he was paid only if he got a story in the paper. When the news came through that Queen Astrid of the Belgians had died in a car crash in Switzerland the news editor called out in the newsroom: “Anyone here speak French?”

Cox stepped forward and was told to ring around to locate a witness. He did so and wrote a full report for the paper. Only later did he reveal that the witness spoke perfect English.

Cox was quick to identify the menaces of Nazism and Stalinist communism. In 1932 he travelled through the Soviet Union and gained a lasting impression of what he called harsh political authoritarianism and the conviction that he would see another major war in his lifetime.

In 1934 a German Rhodes scholar at Oxford, stung by Cox's anti-Nazi views, challenged him to serve a period in the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi Youth Labour Service, to see the true nature of National Socialism. Cox accepted the challenge and spent three weeks drilling in uniform and draining marshland near Hanover. (He later suspected he was not helping the grain harvest so much as preparing for a bomber airfield.)

Another German acquaintance invited him to join his family in Nuremberg to watch the parade at the annual Nazi Party rally. Cox found himself with a grandstand view of the historic 1934 rally, studying Hitler's face through binoculars, barely 50 yards away, and seeing Leni Riefenstahl and her camera crews making her propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will.

In 1936 the News Chronicle sent Cox to Spain to cover the civil war. It was a lucky break. The paper was antiFranco and it seemed likely that any Chronicle reporter in Madrid, if the city fell to Franco, would be jailed, as the paper's Arthur Koestler had been when Málaga fell. The Editor, Gerald Barry, was reluctant to risk one of the paper's stars so Cox was sent instead.

He filed vivid reports of life among a civil population being bombed on Franco's orders. In his book The Defence of Madrid he painted poignant portraits of the men who volunteered to fight fascism: a French and a German officer who had commanded opposite trenches at the Somme in 1916, now united against fascism; a Canadian surgeon then foremost in the field of blood transfusion; Jews, Communists, social democrats, liberals united in one cause.

Cox's reports caught the eye of the legendary Editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen, and in 1938 he was assigned to Vienna for the Express and soon afterwards to the plum posting as Paris correspondent. From there he went to report on Hitler's victorious arrival in Vienna during the Anschluss and the takeover of the Sudetenland.

Cox turned down an invitation from his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, to become an Express leader writer. Though he had enjoyed a measure of freedom in his reporting, he had misgivings about the Express's appeasement policy. Writing about his decision later, he said: “I had not become a journalist in order to tell other people what they should do. I was ... not a preacher or advocate. I wanted to tell other people what was happening in the world about them and leave them to make up their own minds.”

Cox later learnt that Beaverbrook intended to fire him for refusing the job but Christiansen saved him because he was needed to cover the crisis in Prague. Michael Foot got the leader writer job instead.

In the winter of 1939-40 Cox reported on the Soviet attack on Finland. In 1940 he reported on the German invasion of Belgium - he escaped from Brussels on a French radio van.

One of his best pieces of writing was his description of the lassitude in Paris during a beautiful spring as they heard the far-off sound of German artillery. He recalled being briefed with other correspondents by the Minister of lnformation, who gave assurances that the Government would not leave Paris. As the minister was speaking two porters entered the room and carried away a filing cabinet announcing to the minister that the Government was moving to Tours.

Cox planned a line of escape for the Daily Express staff in Paris. They bought a large Renault and a 100-litre drum of petrol, stocked the car with maps and pâté and wine, and joined the refugee exodus south. The weary, dark-eyed children on the road to Tours as their parents scoured the shops for food struck Cox as he wondered whether Britain would be the next to experience the German onslaught.

He joined an overcrowded P&O liner diverted to the Gironde. The Germans bombed the liner but missed. When she sailed, her decks were crowded with former prim ministers, ex-ambassadors, ex-ministers and journalists. On board they swopped sardines for some of the caviar, which was all that Baron de Rothschild had brought when he hastily left his château.

In that exodus from France were Eric Sevareid, the great CBS reporter, Edward Ward, of the BBC, Virginia Cowles, who became the foremost woman war correspondent, and Sefton Delmer, of the Express.

Christiansen offered Cox the opportunity to become a war correspondent for the Express. He declined. In four years of reporting he had formed the view that Britain should stand up against Hitler. He felt that now war had come he should fight in it, not just write about it.

After the war Cox was political correspondent for the News Chronicle and made a name for himself as a broadcaster on the BBC. He took over as editor and chief executive of ITN in 1956, a year after the birth of independent television in Britain. At the time ITV was on the verge of collapse. Aidan Crawley, ITN's first editor, had resigned in a row over budget cuts, and journalistic talent was drifting away to the BBC.

Cox was given the ITN job by the chairman, Captain Tom Brownrigg, who was general manager of Associated Rediffusion, the London founder member of ITV. Brownrigg had been senior staff officer to Admiral Cunningham, wartime C-in-C in the Mediterranean. Cox was one of the New Zealand soldiers evacuated from Crete by the Royal Navy after it fell to German paratroopers. In that operation the Navy lost half the Mediterranean Fleet. “If I had had my way, you would never have been taken off,” Brownrigg said to Cox. “I was dead against sending in more ships. Cunningham wouldn't listen. He said the Navy had never let the Army down.”

Cox soon began to prove himself as a pioneer in developing TV news in Britain. At a time when most of the organs of the press were partisan on political issues, his achievement was to spot the appeal of a news service that would present complex issues in an easily digestible, fair and balanced way. He de-spun the news.

The Television Act required Cox, as editor, to present news with due accuracy and impartiality. “I saw this as an advantage rather than a constraint,” he said. He held that these few words could free a television news editor from the proprietorial pressures then widespread in Fleet Street.

There were other pressures too, such as the 14-Day Rule, which banned television from discussing issues due to come before Parliament within 14 days. Then came Suez. Cox believed that the crisis was too big for reporting to be constrained within the rule. Interviews at London airport, vox pops and reports from the UN all violated the rule. When the rule came up for renewal, the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, dropped it.

Another taboo was the reporting of parliamentary elections. But in 1958 the Rochdale by-election was a big political story. ITN persuaded the political parties that television could cover an election campaign while it was ongoing, in a way that was honest and fair, and Granada Television put candidates on the air. For the first time in British broadcasting, the voices of candidates arguing their own policies were heard on television. The right of broadcasting to report election campaigns was never in doubt after that.

A stickler for accuracy and balance, Cox instilled in his team the conviction that one should never be afraid of the news. No matter how politically sensitive it was or how painful the issue, the best armour for fearless reporting was accuracy and balance.

In those early days, after an ITN broadcast the team would linger in the news room to hear the verdict from the editor’s call from his Hampstead home to the duty editor. It became known as the Ham Rating. He once gave a dressing-down to an over-exuberant young producer. As the chastened journalist left the office, Cox said: “Just remember, it’s better to be rocketed for something you’ve done than something you haven’t done.”

The hallmarks of Cox’s editorship were his belief in the appeal to viewers of hard news — woe betide a producer who put a soft feature in the running order — and his exploitation of the portability of the 16mm newsfilm camera, the Cine Voice. It was to be, as he put it, the workhorse of television newsgathering as the Dakota was to aviation. “See it happen on ITN” was his catchphrase. He urged his camera crews, reporters and film editors to make the best use of what was known in the trade as “natsof”, natural sound on film, the actual sounds from the location, such as crowds cheering or tanks rolling down a street. This extra sound dimension added impact and authenticity to the reporting, and there were hard words for anyone who trampled all over good, natural sound with verbiage.

Cox had a flair for picking editorial talent, and he spotted Sir Robin Day, Sir Ian Trethowan and Sir Alastair Burnet, among others.

Perhaps the biggest impact of ITN on British broadcasting was the the development of challenging interviewing. Cox, recalling his time in Germany and Austria, was convinced that had there been television news in the 1930s the rise of Hitler might well have been averted because the power of picture and probing questioning might have exposed Nazism for what it was. Accordingly, he encouraged rigorous questioning of public figures, a style that had been introduced in ITN by his predecessor, Aidan Crawley. There was to be no list of questions in advance, no dry runs.

In 1956 the former President Truman came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. A don campaigned to block the honour because Truman had ordered the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.

Robin Day, for ITN, opened his interview by asking Truman whether he knew that a woman in Oxford was trying to block his award? Truman did not.

Day then asked: “Mr President, do you regret having authorised the dropping of the bomb?”

In the broadcasting climate of that time, this was an iconoclastic way to start an interview. Truman replied: “No, I do not. I made the decision on the information available at the time and I would make the same decision on the same information again.” He then gave his reasons why. It was powerful and unprecedented television.

In June 1957 ITN had another scoop when Day interviewed President Nasser of Egypt during the Suez crisis. Day firmly put it to him whether he now accepted Israel as a sovereign state. “You are jumping to conclusions,” Nasser said. The news agencies circulated a full version, and ITN was established in world broadcasting. Cox was appointed CBE in 1959.

The satellite age of news gathering dawned in 1962. It was rudimentary by present standards, with a transmission slot of two to twenty minutes. When the satellite was made available to broadcasters from New York for the first time, the BBC mounted a Panorama-style magazine, presented by Richard Dimbleby. Cox was determined to use ITN’s 20 minutes for hard news reporting: he brought in live coverage of a UN row over the Congo; a Martin Luther King protest in Georgia; and a powerful live interview with a woman in Arizona who had taken thalidomide and had been refused an abortion by the courts.

In his final years in ITN, Cox’s energy was devoted to persuading a resistant ITV that the time was ripe for a half-hour news programme in prime time in place of the skimpy, traditional, 14-minute bulletin. Satellites made it possible to broadcast news film on the same day, without its having to be airfreighted, and people were turning more and more to TV as their main source of news. Cox also felt that a half-hour news would give ITN’s editorial talent a chance to stretch its wings rather than seek more spacious opportunities elsewhere.

It was a long battle, and eventually the Independent Television Authority gave its support and a 13-week experiment for News at Ten started on July 3, 1967. Alastair Burnet, who had left ITN to edit The Economist, agreed to be a presenter. Andrew Gardner and Reginald Bosanquet were the other regular newscasters. Through daring, hard work and not a little luck, the programme pulled off some impressive scoops during the experiment and the high ratings astonished everybody.

The head of an ITV company put it elegantly in the third week: “If someone had told me a month ago that a half-hour news programme could land several editions in the week’s Top Ten, he would have been led off to the loony bin.” The programme was confirmed in the schedules.

When News at Ten was taken off the air on March 5, 1999, Cox wrote in The Times that the programme’s end “will strike a blow at the functioning of democracy in Britain”.

He had steered ITN towards serious popular journalism, understandable to those who had little knowledge of a given issue, yet mature and authoritative to the better informed. He left a legacy of values that are still the foundation of much of the best of today’s broadcast journalism.

Cox left lTN in 1968 to become deputy chairman of Yorkshire Television when it was founded. He later became chairman of Tyne Tees Television, and of LBC, the London commercial radio station, and of UPITN, the international news film agency. He was a life member of the Garrick Club.

Cox was knighted in 1966, and in 2000 he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

His wife, Cecily, died in 1993. She wrote a series of stories about life in wartime New Zealand, and Cox published them in 1997. He is survived by two sons and twin daughters.

Sir Geoffrey Cox, CNZM, CBE, editor and chief executive of Independent Television News, 1956-68, was born on April 7, 1910. He died on April 2, 2008, aged 97