 Mr Woollacott said Western journalists were emerging more and more as arbiters of the morality of the actions of their governments, especially internationally, sometimes playing a leading role in setting the terms of the moral debate.
A Visiting Fellow in La Trobe University's Institute for Advanced Study, he said that the press corps following such stories, in spite of its national and political diversity, often projected a common moral line. It usually favoured intervention, including military intervention, as the crises of the nineties in the Balkans and Africa showed - although Iraq had now put a question mark over such activism.
'This collectivity says, usually forcefully, that a war is right or wrong, a famine avoidable, a massacre could have been prevented, or a disaster alleviated earlier than it was.
'On-the-spot journalistic debate has the advantage of being conducted in visceral contact with events. It can trump debate far from the scene, or reinforce one side of it, with its suit of authenticity.'
The morality of crisis reporters involved policy for which reporters felt some responsibility, even if it did not specifically involve their own country.
'The press corps which covers crisis stories has been, and is, ninety-nine percent Western. Whether it is seen as benign or malign, Western, particularly American, power and how it should be used, or whether it should be used, are unavoidable factors in such stories.
'That is why foreign crisis reporters are, as well as moralists, also interventionists. Intervention, or the lack of it, is a central concern.'
Collectively embraced broad moral positions can also lead journalists to one of the worst sins - sacrificing truth to the cause.
'The most significant single example of this in my experience is the way in which reporters in Pnomh Penh in 1975, rightly convinced, in my view, of the uselessness and immorality of American policy in that country, allowed that to influence their reporting of the Khmer Rouge.
'That took the form, prior to the fall of Pnomh Penh, of downplaying information - and there was some - about the viciousness of the Khmer Rouge and, later, of a reluctance to accept refugee accounts of the terrible things that were happening in Cambodia.
'It is this area of moral difficulty, morality within morality, which often preoccupies those reporters who carry on thinking over the implications of the stories they have covered for years afterwards.'
However, Mr Woollacott said the biggest question of all, beyond the rights and wrongs of any particular intervention, is whether 'the long Western tradition of activism in the world is flawed in principle as well as in application'.
Formerly Middle East and Asia correspondent for The Guardian, Mr Woollacott was until recently also that newspaper's main commentator on international affairs.
The full text of his lecture, titled The Journalist and the Moralist, is available from Tel: 03 9479 2316.
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