Channel Four News anchor Jon Snow: From mea culpas over Grenfell Tower to demands for censorship
By
Chris Marsden
1 September 2017
Channel Four News anchor Jon Snow earned newspaper headlines last month when he delivered some home truths to the British media.
Snow, an urbane, left-leaning and popular figure, presented the McTaggart Lecture at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival to an audience of what he described as “the heart and soul of our industry, the creative forces, producers, directors, owners, managers, editors, employees, the elite, the life force that has even—at times—rendered what we do the envy of the world.”
After this obsequious start, some of what Snow said undoubtedly made members of his audience uncomfortable and resonated with the views of wider layers of workers and youth.
His central contention was that the media is disconnected from the “left behind”, “the disadvantaged,” “the excluded.” To reinforce his message, he listed obvious examples of how “mostly London-based media pundits, pollsters and so-called experts have got it wrong”: the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump in the US and the poor showing of the UK Conservatives in the general election.
But where his remarks were most effective was in his reference to the Grenfell Tower fire. The “disaster taught me a harrowing lesson that I thought I had already learned, but perhaps forgotten… I believe that we have, by the nature of our business, an obligation to be aware of, connect with, and understand the lives, concerns, and needs of those who are not part of the elite… I believe we are in breach of that obligation—that in increasingly fractured Britain, we are comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact, or connection with those not of…