Channel 4 has a duty to be impartial. So how can it employ such a bigot as Jon ‘F*** the Tories’ Snow?
WHICH grizzled TV news anchor, just two years ago, said he was ‘politically motivated, but not party politically’, adding: ‘I want to see a better world’?
And which same television news anchor, aged 69, was at Glastonbury Festival last weekend where, after bopping around and taking countless selfies, he joined a group of youngsters in adolescent screams of ‘f*** the Tories!’?
The old fool in question was Jon Snow, that public school- educated beanpole who, since 1989, has presented Channel 4 News.
You know Snow: he’s the one who takes such a high moral tone about our politics and culture, the one forever trying to spear Tory ministers and the one whose programme fancies itself a cut above the rest of the journalistic throng.
Sanctimony
Saint Jon Snow. Or should we now say Saint Jon ‘F*** the Tories’ Snow? And this from the son of a former Church of England bishop.
You would never have mistaken Snow for a Rightwinger, but this soiling episode surely puts paid to claims that he is non-partisan when it comes to party politics.
Sorry, but you cannot claim to be even-handed politically while at the same time yelling out your guts like a student Corbynista, slagging off the political party that just won the biggest number of parliamentary seats and the biggest share of the national vote at the General Election.
Snow is plainly, stinkingly party political — and foulmouthed, to boot.
That might not matter were we talking about a junior reporter or occasional studio pundit, but this is a so-called doyen of British broadcast journalism, who, five nights a week, presents the main news bulletin on one of our terrestrial TV channels.
Snow has not yet conceded that he shouted ‘ f*** the Tories’, but he is not denying it, either. When asked, he replied: ‘ After a day at Glastonbury, I can honestly say I have no recollection of what was chanted, sung or who I took over 1,000 selfies with.’
Ah, the old ‘no recollection’ gambit. Any politician who tried to use that in front of Snow during one of his sharp-elbowed interviews would soon be ripped to shreds.
Snow would lean forward, eyes blazing with sanctimony, and he would say: ‘Come off it, minister, you claim you have “no recollection” as to whether or not, at a public event of a markedly political nature, you shouted insults at our country’s governing party, using the F- word and generally behaving like an agit-prop revolutionary?
‘Are we really to believe that, minister? Or are you simply wriggling? Can you not just tell us the truth?’
Attempts to elicit further explanation from Snow have met with Soviet- like ‘ no comments’ from Channel 4. His bosses plainly sense a problem here. A big problem.
Confronted about the issue by a guest live on Channel 4 News last night, Snow retorted that it was ‘ very unpleasant’ to bring it up.
Glastonbury has an odd effect on otherwise mature people. Political grandees well into middle-age think they can behave like kids there, luxuriating in a zoned- out atmosphere of Leftyish lovejuice, baby.
This was the same Glastonbury at which Jeremy Corbyn was treated like a conquering emperor (point of information: he came a distant second in the election) and at which Labour’s Treasury spokesman, John McDonnell, made the outrageous claim that the poor people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire had been ‘murdered’.
Whoop, whoop, whoop went some members of the crowd. Maybe Snow was among those whoopers, you never know.
Indeed, just days earlier, Snow had steered his programme’s coverage of the inferno towards a discussion about ‘inequality’ — asking a Tory MP: ‘ Can you ever see albeit a minority government devoting major segments of time to reviewing how we should be structuring our support for the poorer sections of our communities.’
The weather at Glastonbury was hot. Plenty of cider (and possibly other substances) was consumed. In such a setting, hotheads can lose their last vestiges of self-control.
But a news presenter is meant to be above such excess. Their prime attribute must be cool scepticism. Any U.S. TV anchor who behaved like Snow did at Glastonbury would be sacked instantly.
Channel 4, which was launched back in 1982, is a publicly owned, commercially funded public service broadcaster, which supports itself through advertising.
It is accountable to Ofcom and guidelines for producers state that ‘ any personal interest of a reporter or presenter, which would call into question the due impartiality of a programme, must be made clear to the audience’.
Contentious
Will Channel 4 News viewers henceforth be told, before every interview Snow conducts with a Conservative politician, that the presenter holds such a low view of Tories?
The guidelines also say presenters ‘generally should be particularly careful about comments on political issues and politicians’.
They add: ‘Due impartiality on political issues is a fundamental standard . . . This means for example, that news and current affairs journalists working on this output do not as a rule agree or disagree with a political party or politician, or take a fixed stance on politically contentious issues.’
Furthermore, Channel 4 employees ‘ should avoid making statements that could be perceived as taking a position on a political issue of the day’ on social media.
Looking at Snow’s Twitter feed, it is not difficult to see him frequently ignoring this guidance. On the day after the election, he tweeted: ‘Mrs May calls an election the UK didn’t need: Loses it, and stays in power: just politics? Or snubbing the democratic will of the people?’
Vocal
Snow has also been vocal on the subject of Grenfell Tower. On June 18, he wrote: ‘ Five days on, Government finally recognises Kensington/ Chelsea Borough total failure re Grenfell fire and drafts civil servants in: Why so late?’
He ‘ retweeted’ Labour MP David Lammy’s tweet: ‘Grenfell Tower: Have we learnt nothing from Hillsborough? The rich and the powerful will do all they can to obfuscate, delay and cover up.’
Last week, Snow also retweeted a message by the author Robert Harris, who said: ‘The British electorate is in an unprecedentedly volatile mood. When it turns out there’s no £350m per week for NHS, Brexit could be next.’
It is no good Channel 4 hiding behind the argument, please, that private views are private and have no bearing on one’s public position.
Remember, during the General Election, Channel 4 News hounded the Lib Dems’ then leader Tim Farron over his innermost evangelical-Christian beliefs about homosexuality. The damage this did to the Lib Dems was a great help to Labour. Well, well, how convenient.
When Snow screamed those words at Glastonbury, incidentally, did he mean Tory ministers, Tory MPs, Tory activists and members, or the millions of people who voted for Conservatives in the
general Election? When a major news presenter so plainly despises, in four-letter words, our biggest party in the Commons, what does it say about him and his programme? in a 2015 interview with the guardian — where else? — Snow claimed that he was ‘the most anti- Establishment person i know’.
this demonstrates a sad lack of self-knowledge.
Snow may not have completed his undergraduate degree at Liverpool University (he was kicked out for taking part in a 1970 anti-apartheid socialist protest), but he is not stupid.
Can he really not see that he and fellow baby-boomers, with their right-on proclamations on everything from human rights to the EU and their anguish about foreign aid, are very much the liberal Establishment that really runs Britain these days?
the truth is that it is currently the Brexiteers, the smallstaters, the personal freedom advocates, who are the outsiders. if those kids begging Snow for selfies at glastonbury had thought about it, they might have seen that the sort of high government spending demanded by Snow’s Labour friends will actually end up having to be paid by their generation, not his.
the Corbyns and Snows, far from being friends of younger voters, represent a deadly serious financial threat to their futures by encouraging a catastrophically irresponsible borrowing binge.
the miracle of last year’s EU referendum was not only that it was ever held — something Snow’s Establishment friends had long been trying to prevent — but also that it was won in the face of a prolonged propaganda bombardment by the political elite.
And what, in the battlecry of ‘f*** the tories!’, constitutes a ‘better world’ that Snow says he wants to see? is it enlightened to give voice to such hatred? how can Snow ever again introduce a news segment about hate speech or violence against politicians?
for that matter, how can he ever again conduct a studio discussion that involves anyone who represents the tory Party (provided they would want to send anyone along)?
Personally, i have always rather liked Jon Snow. We bump into each other at political speeches and policy launches, and he is a genial cove. he also has a quick-witted manner onscreen and a good voice and, at 69, retains enviable energy.
But his horrible behaviour at glastonbury changes all that.
the ‘genial cove’ plainly boils inside with something rather darker and more stupid.
At a time of a hung parliament, a public service broadcaster is under ever greater pressure to present the national news in a dispassionate, trustworthy manner.
‘Dispassionate’ and ‘ trustworthy’ are surely no longer words that can be applied to Jon ‘f*** the tories’ Snow.