Last night, news footage recording just a few of those deaths was broadcast on Channel 4. Out of Africa, a half-hour film by Sorious Samura, a freelance cameraman, showed graphic evidence of the atrocities being committed in Sierra Leone by both the rebels and ECOMOG, the Nigerian troops who, with the support of the West, are nominally acting as "peacekeepers". Yet despite a clear public interest, the decision to air Samura's film has been accompanied by a great deal of soul searching by television news executives.

Their concern was that the pictures - including executions of civilians, and soldiers beating a young boy - were "too shocking".

Ron McCullagh, who directed Samura's documentary, says it has taken British broadcasters more than a year to pluck up the courage to show a largely unedited version of the film. Even then, it was only after Samura won both the Rory Peck and Mohammed Amin awards for news and current affairs camera work that Channel 4, BBC and CNN were emboldened to bid for the rights.

McCullagh believes that television news treads a fine line between showing what is really going on and exposing its audience to unnecessary horrors. "It's reasonable to want to protect the audience but it can take us in a direction we don't want to go," he says, "Slowly, involuntarily, weíll end up with a sanitised version of history."

When it comes to Sierra Leone he argues that the barbarity there was "so extraordinary that people needed to see it to know what has been happening".

Richard Tait, ITN's editor-in-chief, agrees. Context, he says, is everything but when in doubt news editors should err on the side of causing offence.

"Editors should trust the audience's good sense to know when something is necessary and important. They'll watch it, understand it and won't complain." But is nothing beyond the pale? McCullagh believes there is, citing as an example one of two shots cut from Samura's film on grounds of taste. It involved a seven-minute sequence showing a woodcutter dying after being shot in the back. His heart can be seen still beating outside his chest.

"It is not necessary to show that," he says. "There is a difference between bearing witness and sensationalism."

However, McCullagh warns that if television news shies too far from showing graphic images, it is in danger of being superseded by the internet as the prime source of reliable news.

"Either TV does some growing up quickly or it will lose the right to claim it is showing the real world."