An interview with Jon Snow

We find Jon Snow, the subtly acerbic presenter of the UK’s Channel 4 nightly news, in high dudgeon. Tall, white haired, with the twinkling eyes of a born provocateur, he has the slightly shambolic demeanour of a well-loved professor. But definitely not cuddly. He is fresh from a “frank exchange of views” with a charity representative who has reneged on an offer of a story in favour of a rival network.

This is a break for us as we catch Snow in his element: righteously indignant, unsuffering of fools, humorous and angry. Thus, Jon Snow, one of the UK’s most reliable and independent news broadcasters, in his own words “in the raw”…

How do you cover the invisible?

Caspar Melville – Let’s start by asking about 11 September. How do you think news broadcasters have coped? Hasn’t understanding of the context lagged way behind reporting of events?

Jon Snow – I don’t think you can really cast aspersions on journalists over 11 September. Everybody, every viewer, was his own journalist that day. This was absolutely a massive event. Everybody was wrestling with it, and I think whatever mistakes were made, were made in good faith. Because this happened live on camera it probably challenged the media like no other event on earth. The explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, which happened live on television, is the only remotely comparable occasion – but only a few people were killed there.

I think my only misgivings about 11 September are that if you compare it to Srebrenica in 1995, where a similar number were slaughtered, or Rwanda in 1994, the latter cases didn’t happen live on camera and so never got the coverage that this got. Because of that, the wave of reaction, and measures that might have saved more lives, were missing.

CM – What can the news do about that? How do you balance the invisible background against the breaking story where there is live footage?

JS – Well, this is the conundrum. We are up against a situation in which there is a great reluctance to devote the sort of financial and personnel resources to newsgathering required to bring news stories like Srebrenica to the screen. Economics plays a very big part in this. In Britain now, one of the major networks is slashing millions of pounds off its news budgets, because they’ve lost a huge amount of revenue and because they must satisfy their shareholders. This is where public service broadcasting comes in…

CM – So that’s the last line of defence is it, the BBC…

JS – We’re public service too, of course – as indeed is ITV, theoretically.

CM – How do you fight to retain the important, expensive news reporting that is vital? Even the BBC has cut back on news reporting.

JS – The BBC is a very wealthy organisation, they don’t need to cut back on anything. But in general what 11 September has done is to expose the terrible paucity of international documentary, news information, and current affairs worldwide. Basically as the technology expanded our horizons and opportunity, actually our view of the world has become more myopic. Suddenly, Posh Spice’s private life is more important than life in the Gaza strip…

Beyond the official version

CM – Even with the financial considerations involved in making news decisions, is there also an issue of the laziness, or lack of imagination, of news organisations? One noticeable thing in the post-11 September coverage is the very narrow pool of experts who are wheeled out. Why is it always, say, James Rubin or Richard Perle?

JS – Well, you show me the number of American officials serving presently who are prepared to talk to the media – they’re just as bad as the Saudis! Rubin has recent experience of working inside the machine, he knows how it functions.

CM – But he puts the same line over and over again. What about the dissenting American voices, of which there are many?

JS – What are we looking for when we go for Perle? We’re looking for a hawk, because we want to know what they are really thinking. Wolfovitz doesn’t give interviews, so what do you do? You’ve got to find Wolfovitz’s best friend. Guess who?

CM – Are there any restrictions placed on you about what you can or can’t say? In America there is evidence of journalists being fired for having criticised Bush.

JS – No, good lord! It’s just that in America they are very good at controlling the media. American television news is of a very high standard, the problem with it is the content, the breadth of subject. We talk to forty or fifty congressman a week now, and there is only one, out of four hundred and sixty-five, who has come out against the war. And we have interviewed him on this programme. If you tell me that there are prominent people in American public life who oppose the war and who are voluble about it I will interview them now.

CM – My feeling is that there were plenty of people who were prepared to criticise Bush before 11 September who suddenly are not prepared to criticise him.

JS – Well that’s a much more complicated thing than looking for a conspiracy to suggest that something has come down the line that says we are not supposed to attack Bush. What happens when the institution of the American presidency kicks in during a crisis? It’s a most impressive machine, and an extremely difficult one to roll over. The fact is that, to a large extent, in purely presentational terms Bush hasn’t put a foot wrong since 11 September. But you can’t just attack him because you want to attack him, you’ve got to have some grounds for doing it.

CM – Are things really different in the UK?

JS – We’ve questioned the daisy cutter bomb, very extensively last night for example. We found people who had misgivings about it. But then British ministers like Peter Hain come on and say it’s a deployable weapon, the best thing since cold tea. What are you expected to do – not report their views? Surely we should report them and hope to galvanise more of a reaction, although I haven’t seen any.

Islam, the untold story

CM – Why is it only after 11 September that we are hearing about Islam? Why wasn’t Islam, and the issues associated with it, considered newsworthy before?

JS – Well, we have to go much further back than this to understand our lack of knowledge. But there are also important restrictions. For example, there are no full time accredited correspondents anywhere in Saudi Arabia, which is as deeply repressive and ugly a regime as the Taliban.

CM – But there are journalists in Afghanistan now because they can get live pictures of bombs.

JS – There were journalists in Afghanistan before 11 September, like Kate Clarke, although they had to leave. But this is lack of access not lack of will. Most of the Islamic world, even Pakistan, is a very difficult place to cover. You need a lot of permits, and people with budget restraints are not going to be willing to have their people sitting around waiting for permission to film x and y and z.

These are unfree countries and their interest in opening up Islam to the west is very low, so that whilst you can blame us for not being interested, I think you have to blame them for not wishing to conspire with us to educate people in the west about Islam. I would say that you can’t easily blame – entirely – a lack of interest on the part of the media.

CM – How about the context of oil? The evidence is pretty strong that there is a big oil story in relation to the war in Afghanistan.

JS – Very big. And we’ve said the war is partly about oil, and the proposed pipeline. Again, there is a huge Saudi Arabia connection here, but that is a country which is very difficult to get any information about.

We really have no idea about bin Laden’s relationship with the Saudis. The ordinary Saudi on the Riyadh omnibus is not a creature we have access to. But if it were possible, we would be happy to pay good money for it. We did recently have an independent out of Riyadh, who gave us a very graphic account of how people in Saudi Arabia feel, but that was shot illicitly at great personal risk.

Susan Richards – I think this issue about Islamic countries not being prepared to let the west in to scrutinise them is a tremendously important one which obviously needs to be addressed at a political as well as a journalistic level.

JS – Yes. I am devoting a whole day on Monday to going to an immensely tedious roundtable on Saudi matters, because I may get a chance of running into influential Saudis who could help me in that direction. But actually the Saudi government is vigorous and aggressive about using the criminal law to prevent you covering these things. There is no instance of people having free rein in Saudi Arabia to go and make a documentary. That means, of course, that they don’t get an opportunity to put their own side of the story. Things have not changed in this respect since the furore over the documentary Death of a Princess in 1979…

SR – Which was regarded by the Foreign Office as having set back British-Saudi relations by years…

JS – So it must have been a plus in that dimension at least.

Trusting the image

CM – Is there any way of explaining all this without access? To the average viewer it must be very confusing that the Saudi government is clearly supported by the American government, yet in no way is it an ideological ally or at all open or democratic?

JS – That is something we have been trying to explore very extensively. But then Channel 4 News is a very luxury number. We’ve got an hour to play with, and in broadcasting news, time is a huge issue. If you have sixteen minutes as News at Ten does nowadays, you are far more restricted – even if you are interested in serious issues…

CM – Given those restrictions, to what extent can the audience trust the news as a relatively objective view of what is happening in the world?

JS – I don’t think they can. I think they have to view the news as an inevitably selective view of the world, and they create a relationship with the people from whom they get their news – be it Trevor MacDonald (ITV) or Michael Buerk (BBC), or Peter Jennings (ABC) – based partly on their perception of the channel, partly on the familiar daily individual. This is the basis on which people make decisions in life. I look at you and I have to make a decision on a very superficial basis, as to whether I want to listen to what you have to tell me. All we are doing on the television is making an extremely artificial version of that.

CM – But do you think the audience knows this? Surely there is no point in a news broadcast where you say: “the opinions expressed here are just the editorial choice of Channel 4 News, they do not necessarily represent the most important stories?"

JS – How many health warnings can you put out? If people don’t understand what television is, it’s very sad. I think that television is an extremely manipulating provision, but at the same time I don’t think there is a conspiracy to manipulate.

What makes a good journalist?

CM – In another interview, you rejected arguments about the corporate manipulation of the news and suggest instead that the culprit is lazy journalism. How does this happen, are lazy journalists promoted? Is there no quality control?

JS – You are suggesting that lazy journalism is necessarily the action of the journalist. There are very many time and money constraints that make it cheaper and quicker to cut corners. Spoon-feeding is cheap.

CM – How does one avoid this?

JS – By constantly being prepared to counter what is offered to you with something else, which is what I’ve done all my reporting life. If you are asked to go and do a story you don’t believe in, you come back at them and offer an alternative story that they might be interested in, or simply go out on that story and do it properly.

CM – Are journalists being trained to do that?

JS – I don’t believe you can train journalists. I think the best journalists are instinctive and independent-minded.

CM – What are the essential characteristics of the untrained, instinctive journalist?

JS – Inquisitiveness, anger, humour, get-up-and-go, self-motivation. I think anybody who can turn on the radio in the morning, and not get angry or laugh within the first twenty-five seconds is not tailor-made for journalism.

Looking for the best

SR – It seems that a lot of young Muslims in the UK are watching Al-Jazeera, and getting a completely different media education.

JS – I think they are watching both it and us. They are in a fantastic maelstrom of different influences. Look at the young Muslims – many of them are beautifully turned out in really snazzy jeans and sweatshirts, and yet they are also burning passionately inside about their faith and what’s happening to their people.

SR – Is this just an expression of an age and hormones process we all go through?

JS – No, it’s more profound than that. I think it’s a soul thing, and I think that it just shows that western decadence and materialism doesn’t easily burn out those core elements of the soul.

CM – Do you think the Internet is an effective alternative to TV news reporting?

JS – No, I regard it as an adjunct. It’s another way of doing things. Sometimes it’s a stand-alone, it provides all you need, at other times it’s a taster for something else. For example, I don’t particularly want to sit down in front of my computer screen to watch moving pictures. I know that a lot of people in China and New Zealand watch Channel 4 News, because I get responses from there to my Snowmail.

CM – Are there both advantages and dangers to the lack of editorial control on the net, as opposed to the TV – evident in the way that conspiracy theories flourish online?

JS – I’m not worried about that. There is so much stuff out there that the possibility of brainwashing anyone is pretty limited. The only problem is for authority.

CM – Which is a good thing?

JS – Of course. But the Internet is not a problem for Channel 4 News. We have doubled our viewers in a year at a time when we are supposed to be losing them. Our domestic figures have gone from 800,000 to 1.6 million. They have been going up gradually, but most steeply since 11 September.

CM – Are people going to stay with the news?

JS – It’s clear that people want information, analysis, and depth, because the other news audiences haven’t moved, except Newsnight to some extent.

CM – Is there a degree of rivalry between Channel 4 News and Newsnight – or a shared sense of purpose?

JS – No, there is no rivalry, only rarely are we competing for stories. I am interested in the best story, the most holistic, the most informative, the one that asks the most questions of people, not the exclusive necessarily.

CM – What degree of choice do you get, as the presenter, are you in a unique position with the degree of editorial control you wield?

JS – Not unique, no. That’s how all the big American anchors operate, they are all editorial managers, or associate editors. They are the talent, yes, but they are also at the editorial meeting in the morning shaping what the programme is going to look like. If you read Peter Jennings’ ABC mail you will see he is very engaged in the product, as I am. I’m here from 9.30 in the morning hammering away trying to get stuff right…

And with that, Snow, scourge of double-talkers and spin-doctors and tireless champion of charities, dons helmet, jacket and fluorescent bicycle clips, and makes for the door. He’s off to appear as one of the three kings on an Amnesty International Christmas card, once again putting his media profile to worthy use, a wise man on a pushbike.