Lucky I felt, but perhaps a little jaded. I have had the privilege of a front-row seat to history for the past 25 years, and I have met many world leaders at conferences in Moscow, Paris, Brussels, and Hong Kong.

I walked with Pope John Paul II to the grave of a priest murdered by secret police in Warsaw during his second visit to his native Poland at the height of the cold war. We didn't talk, I just looked at his expression and the way he prayed. I remember a party at the US embassy in Moscow not long afterwards, where Dave Brubaker played "Take Five" on the saxophone while four reporters enjoyed a cocktail with Henry Kissinger and heard all about how President Ronald Reagan felt about his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. I stood next to Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, in the October snow on Red Square during the last Soviet celebration of the October Revolution. I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu leading the prayers at the Regina Mundi Church in Soweto on a hot Sunday afternoon in 1976. We were holed up inside while outside, at the height of the anti-apartheid uprising, police manning machine-gun posts refused to let anyone enter or leave until the following day. I walked with then UN Secretary General Xavier Perez de Cuellar through the human waste and misery of a place called Camp Korem at the height of the Ethiopian famine in 1984. People were dying all around us, and our brief conversation was interrupted by the rasping coughs of skeletal children with killer respiratory diseases. I will never forget the way a tough French Foreign Legion officer in Rwanda in 1994 burst into tears when we found the bodies of a group of women who had been decapitated, their daughters, not yet in their teens, still alive but unable to walk because their Achilles tendons had been slashed by madmen with long knives. And I had tea with one of the great democrats of our times, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in Governor's House two days before the hand-over to China. There was another tea in Cherrapunji with one of the last maharajahs of India.

I remember the conflicts in Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, floods in Bangladesh, the civil war in Algeria, Iraq during the Gulf War, Friday prayers in Iran, big NATO and European Union meetings in Brussels, and the horror in mid-town Moscow in 1993 when the White House was shelled and it seemed the world was falling apart all around us in a hail of bullets...

Why write about all this? Because a reporter has to be there to get the story, to convey to readers back home what is going on. I had the great luck to work for United Press International in its heyday, and, later, for a great newspaper in London as their chief correspondent. And I always remember the words of my Editor, Herbert Pearson, who said: "Get out there and talk to people. We don't want stories written from clips, or Internet sites. Go and hear and smell the place and tell us what it's like." I spell his title with a capital E, out of enormous respect.

So, naively perhaps, I came to New York for the World Economic Forum thinking I would have some heady days with the world's movers and shakers and would be able to report some of the latest thinking by the people who influence our lives so profoundly. I was particularly looking forward to the Forum because for the past 32 years it has operated like a sort of town hall meeting. The sort of place where Bishop Tutu can make small talk with Jack Greenberg, the chairman and CEO of McDonalds; where Kofi Annan can talk computers with Carleton S. Fiorina, chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; where Hamid bin Ahmad al-Rifaie, president of the International Islamic Forum for Dialogue, can rub shoulders with Israel Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel; or where Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, can meet French academics.

And perhaps I, too, could meet and talk with some of them... But I could not have been more wrong. I am jaded because I know that politicians, businessmen and stars all use journalists to convey their messages and inflate their egos. Otherwise, we are traditionally viewed with mistrust, often as liars, especially when something appears in print that they do not like. That's what happened with the unpleasant fuss over our story at the Forum because we said its organizers were discriminating against the world's media and denying them access.

I try to keep an open mind, not to brand all businessmen and politicians as corrupt, or all lawyers as shysters out to make a quick buck. I have never trusted politicians and businessmen, and they don't trust me--that is the basis of our symbiotic relationship in this world. By the very nature of our profession, we journalists are natural dissidents. But we do have to work like lawyers who often have to defend the indefensible, and we do it professionally and scrupulously because we are answerable to the public. The way we were treated at the Forum defied belief. It was insulting to be made to queue in the cold for well over two hours on the first day because the Forum's overstaffed media team only had one camera to take our mugshots and appeared thoroughly disorganized. And then to discover that the orange badges we were given allowed us access only to a neighboring hotel away from the conference venue at the Waldorf-Astoria. How would we cover the meeting from the Inter-Continental Hotel around the corner? Not to worry, we were politely told, you have a large television screen in the pressroom there to relay the proceedings in real time. You have our Web site on which you can follow events. Alas, there were only four computers for over 400 journalists in the pressroom. Photographers were banned from the Waldorf altogether, and television and radio technicians were told that, if they wanted, a member of the Forum's staff would take their recorders into the Waldorf and plug them in for top-quality audio-visual reproduction at a cost of $250 a pop.

Naturally, my colleagues began to bristle and grumble. I looked at the program. On the first day, Thursday, there were no fewer than 20 meetings, most on topics well worth covering. There was a meeting on the state of the global economy with such eminent figures as Fan Gang, national director of the Chinese Economic Research Institution; Jacob Frenkel, president of Merrill Lynch; and Klaus Zimmermann, head of the German Institute for Economic Research. Another panel on the subject of security and making the world safer featured foremost American and Russian experts like Sergei Karaganov, chairman of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy; and Gareth Evans, the former Australian prime minister who now heads the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. There were meetings on artificial intelligence with the world's leading computer experts. And, most newsworthy of all, one session with Colin Powell; NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson; French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, and other statesmen set to debate the state of the world in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

It could not have been more interesting. But, instead of broadcasting the important meetings to us, Forum organizers gave us a two-hour pipe-in of the artificial intelligence meeting which, no doubt, would have been of interest to specialist technology publications. We had to wait half a day for a press release on the meetings with Powell, Lord Robertson and Karaganov. The document merely summarized in three lines what each of them had said without giving quotes. The Web site could not be accessed for further information, if there was any to be had. In frustration, I called my editor, Alexandra Simou, and told her I was not in a position to do a proper job. I did not have the coveted white badge for entry into the Waldorf. At the public telephone alongside the one I was using, I heard José Passos of the major Brazilian daily O Globo, scream down the line at his editor: "I know I'm in New York. I know I should get the story, but I have no access. Yes, I have accreditation, I know you worked on that for three months, but it is second-class accreditation. We are being discriminated against. I'm sorry I missed the Powell quotes. We never got them..." Here he was, he said, in New York at great expense to cover the meeting, and he did not have a story to send back. Claus Tigge, the correspondent of the major German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said he had told his newspaper he was going to pack up and leave. He would not be insulted by having to rely on information chosen for him, or by having to ask questions at 10-minute news conferences by personalities the Forum chose to wheel out to the press. As the days dragged on, CNN said the Forum meeting simply became "more and more opaque." The BBC described it as "secretive." But it was worse than that. For four days, hundreds of journalists reported on the meeting without being there, with access only to what the organizers chose to show them on television. It was reporting by remote control, or, to put it bluntly, by selective censorship managed by a group of people using the most sophisticated technology available.

Charles McLean, a former NBC producer and the Forum's media chief, had decided on a strategy of what one journalist called a "subtle form of censorship." Be that as it may, the Forum known by the name of the Swiss mountain resort village where it is traditionally held, is a private club, and private clubs can invite whomever they choose. We accept the situation, despite the frustrated howls of protest to our demanding editors. But it turned nasty, too. I had to call my editor to say that our photographer, Amarjit Sidhu, had been barred from covering a meeting with Bill Gates to which he had been invited. McLean did not explain why, but his people had started aggressively removing copies of our newspaper for running a story about "media apartheid" that did not please the millionaire Swiss impresario Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. I was personally warned by one of his staff that if we insisted on distributing copies, we would all lose our second-class badges. The action was petty and childish, and it damaged the Forum because our colleagues reported it far and wide. Schwab was visibly infuriated when, at his final news conference, there were more questions about the treatment of the press and The Earth Times than about the substance of his convention. The Financial Times wrote about the plight of The Earth Times in its wrap report on the Forum. Its senior editor, Guy de Jonquières, said that not only journalists, but businessmen and politicians were tired of the Davos formula, and of the fact that 45 minutes allotted to some meetings simply did not suffice to discuss world affairs. He summed it all up when he said that the gathering had lost its old sparkle.