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Edward Victor and Sarah Smith interview award-winning CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera journalist, Afshin Rattansi, about newsgathering and his novel, "The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels" published by Booksurge and available on Amazon.com.

Edward Victor: Afshin Rattansi, your new book looks at -among other things- the way news is made in newsrooms. Given that you have worked at three top networks, the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera, do you think there has been any change since you wrote your book?

Afshin Rattansi: A character in the third novel of the quartet reappears to work at a large media organization around the time of the war on Yugoslavia. That war was covered in an extraordinary way and was widely criticised afterwards. After all, reporting on hundreds of thousands of people dying in the heart of Europe is what journalism textbooks after World War II were written for and yet, anyone using TV news to find out what happened in Sarajevo would have been confused at best. It was only after the war that some excellent programmes were made.

"The Dream of the Decade" deals with unwitting bias or unwitting lack of balance. Every story was nuanced by the life experiences of the kind of people that get the jobs in newsrooms. Though the book deals with coverage of stories on the environment, healthcare and many other issues, the in-built bias of journalists reaches its apotheosis with regard to war reporting. Whether it be the wars on Latin American states in the 1980s or the war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it's remarkable how hard it is for a viewer to hear a spectrum of views on any war.