Shooting History: A Personal Journey

Jon Snow's account of his life as a reporter is an intoxicating read. Jon retraces his steps through the maelstrom of world events that have occurred in the past three decades. Situated on the cusp of each wave of history as it breaks Jon has had the enviable opportunity of bearing witness to cataclysmic episodes in time. Geographically we are taken from Chile to Washington, Rome to Uganda, and Afghanistan to Vietnam. Politically, we gain insights into the manoeuvrings within the Vatican, the Iron Lady's motivations behind her firm hand on the Falklands, the freeze and thaw of US Soviet relations, and its horrific and disturbing fallout in countries as far apart as Grenada and Somalia, and as complicated as Iran, Iraq and Israel. Personally, Jon describes audiences with key historical figures who had their hand in the shaping the "new world order"; an order we get the impression he perhaps wishes he had had more of a hand in moulding himself. Jon's writing is fresh, lucid and honest. He is inquisitive, confident and energetic, something of a rogue, a little reckless. At times he is unpolished and lacks tact but this makes his writing more generous. Jon honestly recounts facts and observations, understating his own bravery and making little of the sacrifices he made with regards to his family in favour of his job. However, the book is far from dispassionate, and this is evident when it comes to world events. Naturally, as a voyager on the cutting edge of history Jon sees the links and connections, with the benefit of hindsight he sees time fold and simply repeat itself as if, as he profoundly says, history is shooting itself in the foot.

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 we