Interview: Jon Snow, Channel 4 News (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
WHEN the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced journalism earlier this month, blaming its "lethally damaging" practices for dehumanising Britain, he was witheringly put down by pundits from The Guardian to Sky. But over at Channel 4 News, Jon Snow found himself nodding in agreement. Snow, the famously opinionated son of an Anglican bishop, had had his doubts about Rowan Williams, previously accusing him of "running scared" of public debate. Yet now, he says, he is delighted that Williams has questioned what Snow sees as the media's "massive unaccountable influence".
"I certainly thought he was right to question standards and agendas," he explains in ITN's basement canteen. "It is absolutely time we have a look at what we do. It's better in broadcast, because we're regulated - and I never thought I'd thank God for the regulator - but print is where the problem is. They are just desperate to have a privacy law inflicted upon them, which seems odd." He arches his eyebrows disapprovingly. "I'd rather have a regulated press than strong libel laws, but I don't really see how you could inflict regulation now."
The "fiction" of newspaper editors sitting in judgment on themselves, Snow suggests, is "a manifestly absurd process" which only further exposes the industry's lack of accountability. The problem, he says, is that a cynical culture within journalism leads politicians to respond with spin. "There's a feeling that most people in public life are liars or bastards, and I don't think that's true. Politicians may get things wrong, but I don't think they're out to line their pockets. We are a remarkably uncorrupt society."
Snow, 57, one of broadcast journalism's most accomplished figures, enjoys that rare privilege among his peers of his editors' acquiescence when he speaks his mind. A self-declared "bloody public-school pinko liberal", he infuriates the conservative press with his perceived Leftwing views, and peppers his daily Snowmail email bulletin with unguarded comments about Robert Mugabe's latest "atrocity" or the "absurdity" of Government transport policy. His autobiography, Shooting History, is packed with examples of his political engagement getting him into trouble, not least his rustication from Liverpool University after a student protest.
Yet isn't ITN, as a public-service broadcaster, obliged to be non-partisan? "I don't have 'views'," Snow replies, a little disingenuously. "I am shaped by what I see, and sometimes that's at variance with what 'the view' should be." Besides, he points out, he has written extensively for The Daily Telegraph as well as The Guardian. "There's no such thing as a neutral human being. You've got to tell it as you see it, to take the side of justice and truth. But did I call Mugabe a 'fascist'? No. When the Attorney-General said to me the other day, 'You've got an agenda,' I replied that my agenda was to search for the truth. Though I knew what hemeant."
In 29 years at ITN, 16 of them presenting Channel 4 News, Snow has reported from around the world, winning a number of Royal Television Society awards and this year the Richard Dimbleby Bafta for "outstanding" work. In that time, the decline of serious foreign reporting, he says, has been "tragic". "You used to be able to start from square one, spend weeks out there finding out what was going on. Now, you're paid to sit in an edit suite, watch the stuff streaming in and read the Reuters copy."
Channel 4 News may be "the last bastion of doing it the way it should be", he says, but developments elsewhere in the ITN building clearly have not impressed him. "I worry about the sausage-machine effect of new technology - to want it all now, [rather than striving to get] a pair of eyes out there to report back. One of the reasons there's been a haemorrhage of people watching television - though thankfully not on our programme - is that the news is boring, samey, there is a process ... ITV News is much more about electronics and gizmos than it is about faces. It's not my idea of fun."
This week, he is back on the road, hosting the show from Uganda from Friday to next Tuesday as part of a dedicated African season. On tonight's 7pm bulletin, Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning author, presents a special report from Nigeria, followed on other nights by films from Congo and Liberia.
"We felt strongly that we should transmit Channel 4 news from an African perspective," Snow explains. "What does Bob Geldof look like from Africa? What do they think of Live8? Do they mind that it's an essentially white, rather geriatric line-up? It must be quite odd, mustn't it, for white men in suits to visit some golf centre to discuss them?"
Uganda holds a special meaning for Snow: it was here, as a VSO teacher before entering journalism, that he was radicalised. "It raised my awareness and changed the way I looked at life," he says. "That's something we can do in journalism too. We can introduce people to a place about which they know little and care less, and maybe change their sense of connection to it."
Having come to the media from the voluntary sector, he admits to "an afterburn of a conscience, a sense that you sold out and took money". He may one day take his conscience to an NGO - possibly working to reform the UN, which he suggests might be done by locking each nation's "brightest and best" on an island for six months and telling them to find a better way of working together. "And," he chuckles, "you could call it Celebrity UN Island ... "
Is Snow a celebrity? "No, absolutely not," he says firmly. "Do celebrities bicycle?" Ah, but that could be part of a well-crafted image. "In which case I've spent 30 years cultivating it," he replies, affronted. "Listen, I came up with the one scoop in the bloody general election - the Attorney-General's opinion on the legality of the war. The person who leaked it to me didn't say, 'Hmmm, I wonder if Cliff Richard would be a good person to leak it to?' No, I worked at it."
Yet would he have been paid around £600,000 for his memoir, had HarperCollins not considered him to have showbiz pull? The book's disappointing early sales were said to have contributed to the departure of Caroline Michel, head of the publisher's literary division. "They tell me it's doing very well, with 42,000 sold in hardback, and 25,000 [paperbacks] in the first month," Snow retorts. "And whatever HarperCollins decided, there were five other publishers bidding."
The book offers a fascinating glimpse into Snow's career, from an invitation to join MI6 (he said no, apparently) to the nepotism that won him his first job (his cousin, the broadcaster Peter Snow, worked at ITN). Yet he writes with a degree of emotional distance: he treats the bullying and sexual interference he suffered at school as simply curious mind-broadening experiences, and fails to mention his brief engagement to Anna Ford.
"There's nothing I regret, apart from any pain that I've caused," he reflects. I presume he means the sacrifices made by his long-term partner and mother of his two daughters, the civil-liberties lawyer Madeleine Colvin, as he risked his life in war zones. But no: when I mention her name, he is startled, and clarifies that he is referring again to the Attorney-General.
A final question. He recalls in the book a childhood ambition to become a Conservative MP, after meeting the then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, a family friend. Does he ever think, "what if"? "I'd have been a very distressed person," he says, with a pained expression. "It's this absolutely dogmatic 'good behaviour' issue that would bother me. It's just not a natural human condition to tie yourself into a team from which you may never dissent."
(Evening Standard, June 29 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
WHEN the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced journalism earlier this month, blaming its "lethally damaging" practices for dehumanising Britain, he was witheringly put down by pundits from The Guardian to Sky. But over at Channel 4 News, Jon Snow found himself nodding in agreement. Snow, the famously opinionated son of an Anglican bishop, had had his doubts about Rowan Williams, previously accusing him of "running scared" of public debate. Yet now, he says, he is delighted that Williams has questioned what Snow sees as the media's "massive unaccountable influence".
"I certainly thought he was right to question standards and agendas," he explains in ITN's basement canteen. "It is absolutely time we have a look at what we do. It's better in broadcast, because we're regulated - and I never thought I'd thank God for the regulator - but print is where the problem is. They are just desperate to have a privacy law inflicted upon them, which seems odd." He arches his eyebrows disapprovingly. "I'd rather have a regulated press than strong libel laws, but I don't really see how you could inflict regulation now."
The "fiction" of newspaper editors sitting in judgment on themselves, Snow suggests, is "a manifestly absurd process" which only further exposes the industry's lack of accountability. The problem, he says, is that a cynical culture within journalism leads politicians to respond with spin. "There's a feeling that most people in public life are liars or bastards, and I don't think that's true. Politicians may get things wrong, but I don't think they're out to line their pockets. We are a remarkably uncorrupt society."
Snow, 57, one of broadcast journalism's most accomplished figures, enjoys that rare privilege among his peers of his editors' acquiescence when he speaks his mind. A self-declared "bloody public-school pinko liberal", he infuriates the conservative press with his perceived Leftwing views, and peppers his daily Snowmail email bulletin with unguarded comments about Robert Mugabe's latest "atrocity" or the "absurdity" of Government transport policy. His autobiography, Shooting History, is packed with examples of his political engagement getting him into trouble, not least his rustication from Liverpool University after a student protest.
Yet isn't ITN, as a public-service broadcaster, obliged to be non-partisan? "I don't have 'views'," Snow replies, a little disingenuously. "I am shaped by what I see, and sometimes that's at variance with what 'the view' should be." Besides, he points out, he has written extensively for The Daily Telegraph as well as The Guardian. "There's no such thing as a neutral human being. You've got to tell it as you see it, to take the side of justice and truth. But did I call Mugabe a 'fascist'? No. When the Attorney-General said to me the other day, 'You've got an agenda,' I replied that my agenda was to search for the truth. Though I knew what hemeant."
In 29 years at ITN, 16 of them presenting Channel 4 News, Snow has reported from around the world, winning a number of Royal Television Society awards and this year the Richard Dimbleby Bafta for "outstanding" work. In that time, the decline of serious foreign reporting, he says, has been "tragic". "You used to be able to start from square one, spend weeks out there finding out what was going on. Now, you're paid to sit in an edit suite, watch the stuff streaming in and read the Reuters copy."
Channel 4 News may be "the last bastion of doing it the way it should be", he says, but developments elsewhere in the ITN building clearly have not impressed him. "I worry about the sausage-machine effect of new technology - to want it all now, [rather than striving to get] a pair of eyes out there to report back. One of the reasons there's been a haemorrhage of people watching television - though thankfully not on our programme - is that the news is boring, samey, there is a process ... ITV News is much more about electronics and gizmos than it is about faces. It's not my idea of fun."
This week, he is back on the road, hosting the show from Uganda from Friday to next Tuesday as part of a dedicated African season. On tonight's 7pm bulletin, Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning author, presents a special report from Nigeria, followed on other nights by films from Congo and Liberia.
"We felt strongly that we should transmit Channel 4 news from an African perspective," Snow explains. "What does Bob Geldof look like from Africa? What do they think of Live8? Do they mind that it's an essentially white, rather geriatric line-up? It must be quite odd, mustn't it, for white men in suits to visit some golf centre to discuss them?"
Uganda holds a special meaning for Snow: it was here, as a VSO teacher before entering journalism, that he was radicalised. "It raised my awareness and changed the way I looked at life," he says. "That's something we can do in journalism too. We can introduce people to a place about which they know little and care less, and maybe change their sense of connection to it."
Having come to the media from the voluntary sector, he admits to "an afterburn of a conscience, a sense that you sold out and took money". He may one day take his conscience to an NGO - possibly working to reform the UN, which he suggests might be done by locking each nation's "brightest and best" on an island for six months and telling them to find a better way of working together. "And," he chuckles, "you could call it Celebrity UN Island ... "
Is Snow a celebrity? "No, absolutely not," he says firmly. "Do celebrities bicycle?" Ah, but that could be part of a well-crafted image. "In which case I've spent 30 years cultivating it," he replies, affronted. "Listen, I came up with the one scoop in the bloody general election - the Attorney-General's opinion on the legality of the war. The person who leaked it to me didn't say, 'Hmmm, I wonder if Cliff Richard would be a good person to leak it to?' No, I worked at it."
Yet would he have been paid around £600,000 for his memoir, had HarperCollins not considered him to have showbiz pull? The book's disappointing early sales were said to have contributed to the departure of Caroline Michel, head of the publisher's literary division. "They tell me it's doing very well, with 42,000 sold in hardback, and 25,000 [paperbacks] in the first month," Snow retorts. "And whatever HarperCollins decided, there were five other publishers bidding."
The book offers a fascinating glimpse into Snow's career, from an invitation to join MI6 (he said no, apparently) to the nepotism that won him his first job (his cousin, the broadcaster Peter Snow, worked at ITN). Yet he writes with a degree of emotional distance: he treats the bullying and sexual interference he suffered at school as simply curious mind-broadening experiences, and fails to mention his brief engagement to Anna Ford.
"There's nothing I regret, apart from any pain that I've caused," he reflects. I presume he means the sacrifices made by his long-term partner and mother of his two daughters, the civil-liberties lawyer Madeleine Colvin, as he risked his life in war zones. But no: when I mention her name, he is startled, and clarifies that he is referring again to the Attorney-General.
A final question. He recalls in the book a childhood ambition to become a Conservative MP, after meeting the then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, a family friend. Does he ever think, "what if"? "I'd have been a very distressed person," he says, with a pained expression. "It's this absolutely dogmatic 'good behaviour' issue that would bother me. It's just not a natural human condition to tie yourself into a team from which you may never dissent."
(Evening Standard, June 29 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE MEDIA INTERVIEWS HERE . . .
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