It seems to me that Jon Snow is a crucial facet of our democracy. At a time when the BBC think that a PowerPoint presentation is journalism, it is essential that Channel 4 News continue to provide the only decent issue-lead journalism on TV. I remember some seminal moments from the Channel 4 News archive: Snow’s interview with Ted Heath a couple of weeks before Thatcher’s resignation where Heath accused her of stupidity in her misunderstanding of what Europe is about (I forget the exact quote, but I remember it as being right on the money). Judging from his book, Snow must have been silently cheering: he makes no secret of his commitment to Europe and the Euro. Later, I remember Alastair Campbell completely losing his composure, live on TV, to even Jon Snow’s visible astonishment. Blair’s spin doctor was gone a few days later.
It’s always been obvious that Jon Snow is politically engaged, but he does a good enough job of covering this up in his news presentation that it’s genuinely difficult to know where he stands on today’s issues, but from an early age he has been closely aligned with the left. As a student he went to Uganda with VSO, and it was this fundamental experience that radicalised him. Journalism seems a strange career for him to have entered after his VSO experience, participating in a sit-in at Liverpool University and working for Lord Longford’s drug charity in Soho. Perhaps he could see the collapse of any serious questioning of the government long before we did.
For many years, and this is the focus of the book, Snow was a foreign correspondent for ITN. The book is, in parts, fascinating and personal, such as when he recounts his experiences of meetings with Idi Amin, reporting from both sides of the conflict in El Salvador and his reporting from Afghanistan as the Russians invaded. He is much less interesting on events that have a wider fame, such as the Reykjavik summit, the end of Mrs Thatcher, the release of Nelson Mandela and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His strongest writing is reserved for events in Central America and Africa, although there is an interesting perspective on the Falklands War, which he reported from Chile using almost non-existent resources. It’s striking throughout how technology has changed what is now called the ‘news-gathering’ process. When Snow started out, it was a reporter, a cameraman and a sound man living, often the only western reporters covering the story. There’s more than a whiff of Waugh’s great journalism novel, Scoop.
He is strongly condemnatory of Reagan’s policy in Central America, from Nicaragua to El Salvador. I recently claimed in an argument with a friend that Reagan was a far worse president that Bush Jnr, and I stand by that, especially after the refresher course in American folly in foreign policy in the 80s.
What makes Jon Snow a great journalist is that he seems to be able to connect with ordinary people’s lives without getting so engaged that he loses perspective. Here, he condemns world leaders for knowing little about the countries they invade, a charge that can still be laid at the door of western politicians, perhaps now more than ever.
His writing style is somewhat tedious at times, and he has what becomes a very annoying habit of starting sections of the book as though it were a spy thriller. This happens so frequently that it almost completely derails the narrative for a few sentences after it happens. Surely his editor could have done something about this.
That small criticism notwithstanding, this is an interesting and humane account from our finest TV journalist. May his dreadful collection of ties and socks grace our screens at 7pm on Channel 4 for many years to come.
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