Jon Snow

 

I guess like many others last night, my eyes watered as I watched Jon Snow sign off during his last day as the Channel 4 News presenter. For over 30years he has provided leadership to a news programme that has had the audacity to challenge governments, global companies and regimes that have abused their power. He has encouraged the journalists to express opinions formed by knowledge acquired by a thorough investigation. Channel 4 News gives short shrift to the cult of celebrity that is cosseted by other news programmes and the press. In recent years I have given up any regular watching of other news programmes including the BBC as they have lost their incisiveness and dumbed down as they regurgitate the press releases and shibboleths issued by governments, celebrities and companies.

Jon Snow always sought to recruit journalists from diverse backgrounds and imbued them with a sense of respect to their interviewees whilst they held them to account by inquisitive challenges. Several fine young journalists have been nurtured in a culture that eschews hierarchy and ensures a collective purpose and energy. I saw this last year when I met some of the crew making a programme on the Covid response in Scotland on the day we were first allowed to travel more than 5 miles from home. Jon Snow had earned their huge respect by watching their backs, giving them space to develop and providing a template of how to garner news and inject some ethics and morality into interviews and reports.

I had met Jon at Liverpool University, where he was a friend of a flatmate. He persuaded me to take part in a sleep-in at the University Senate building, an anti-apartheid protest against the University investments in South Africa. He was a campaigner and networker even at that stage of life and it resulted in the university expelling him without a degree. As his reputation soared, they had the grace to present him with an honorary degree in 2011, by which time anti-apartheid values had been normalised and Jon had been lionised. This was all but confirmed in 2017 when Tory control freaks, Grant Shapps and Andrew Budgen, challenged his neutrality and called for his resignation for his extreme views. 

Jon Snow was immune from such attacks, his impeccable record of seeking the truth and his widespread respect had been assured by the length of his tenure and the multiple awards for journalism that had been bestowed on him. It has meant that Channel 4 News has been able to give us an hour of peak-time viewing that is free of interference from both the government and media moguls.