|
|
10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
'TOO GRAPHIC: PLEASE STICK TO FACTS', 26 Sep 2005
My principal tie with Jon Snow is one of his brightly-striped and very expensive-looking silk ties that I won in a competition for a political caption organised by the Channel 4 news programme that he fronts each weeknight. However there are much more important aspects of his approach as a journalist that I empathise with strongly. Jon Snow was born in 1947, the son of a Church of England clergyman who advanced to the episcopate. His upbringing, conventionally religious, conservative and patriotic, was one that he tells us near the start of the book 'radicalised' him, and it seems to me that this expression needs to be treated with caution. He was indeed a fairly conventional 'student radical' according to the fashion of that time, getting into trouble with his university authorities for protesting against apartheid. However the long-term outcome of his early mental awakening is not radicalism as I would understand the term, but simply sceptical rationality. I detect no burning desire to overthrow capitalism or to do battle with any establishment, for instance, nor any great theoretical basis to his politics. What I do sense on every page of this enthralling volume is a shining mental honesty that takes him to the conclusions and beliefs that the evidence of his own eyes warrants, and that is what I like about him.These days he is mainly a presenter and interviewer, but that is just how his career has turned out. He thinks of himself as a reporter basically, and he has been around and many states and kingdoms seen, not by and large goodly ones. He has never had any connexion with the BBC, making his first appearance on its airwaves only a few months ago as a guest on a late-night political discussion. I had rather hoped he might have gone into the theoretical issue of independence, bias and impartiality in reporting, but in the event the book only skirts it, and that was all I should really have expected. These reports are the records of a thinking man certainly, and he doesn't need in every case to spell out his thinking for it to be quite obvious what it is, but they are not analysis, only reportage with some editorial comment. What he has always done is to be perfectly open about his own general stance, and I imagine he would prefer to be thought of as 'left' rather than as positioned elsewhere, much as I would myself. How, in the last resort, this colours his reporting and comment is hard to say. Not only is no reporter a tabula rasa with political attitudes that are 100% neutral, no listener or viewer is one of those either, so I don't know either whose word we take for it when allegations of bias are made, as they routinely are when any subject of any sensitivity is reported on by anyone at all. Snow was at one time seconded to ABC, and he tells us how his on-the-spot accounts were always checked against versions emanating from the State Department, the latter frequently diverging from his own. It was difficult, he tells us, to get any weight attached to the fact that he was an eyewitness and the State Department were not, and for me also this raises the familiar and incomprehensible issue of how people manage to think in this way. On what basis, or at least on what rational basis, is it possible to prefer the State Department version in these instances? None apparently, but there's no doubt that people think this way and will in all confused sincerity find bias in the only account that has any credible basis. Where the allegations are not sincere the case is really simpler. Snow has a fascinating tale to tell of an anonymous phone call he received that gave him just enough information to identify the source as being the office of HRH the Prince of Wales. This call related to the funeral arrangements for Princess Diana, concerning which a dispute at the very pinnacle of royalty was alleged. Snow duly reported what he had been told, and was refuted by one of the tabloids purporting to speak for Her Britannic Majesty personally. That's the way things are sometimes done. He has missed some stories, notably Tienanmen Square, and he puts this down to his instinctively greater interest in America, Europe and Africa, another inevitable source of bias, albeit innocent and unintended bias. The patent honesty of the man's mind shines through his memorable account of the buffoonish Idi Amin, and it would be impossible to detect any adornment in the story of how he and his crew nearly lost their lives in Kosovo. I have to conclude that there is no such thing as total impartiality in reporting, and that if there were none of us could recognise it. For myself, I'm inclined to place more confidence in Jon Snow than in most of his occasional detractors, something that of course may say more about me than about any of them. He offers opinions in a candid way, such as that Jimmy Carter was too intellectual to be decisive, but he never seems to preach or to sell a point of view. Just as a narrative, this book is not only gripping but a priceless historical record of some of the most important events in all history. Another issue that affects any reporting is, of course, what is left out. This is the more difficult to assess as I don't necessarily know what most of that was, but among the brief glimpses he lets us have of his personal life I note that there is no mention of his brief engagement to the queenly Anna Ford who now presents the BBC's lunchtime news. The final story is the Iraq war, where he candidly shares my own view that it's displacement activity to divert attention from the real terrorist threat and the failure to counter it. Looking back he traces a pattern of incomprehension and continuing failure to learn, due in large part to seeing issues through the prism of the interests of Israel. Does that make him biased? It seems obvious to me, so does that make me biased as well? If so, who are the paragons of impartiality who will put us right?
|
by Andrew Marr
by John Simpson
by John Sergeant
by Michael Buerk
