Shooting History by Jon Snow

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There has been endless chatter, since Marshall McLuhan, about television turning the world into a global village. The science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke, who first described the possibility of satellites bringing instant reports from trouble spots, argued that the immediacy of such broadcasts would expose the folly of, and thus prevent, wars, famine and violence.

We know better now. Far from unhorsing the four riders of the apocalypse, television news may encourage their evil. Media terrorists now seek to impose what Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, described recently to an LSE audience as the "new totalitarianism", by kidnapping people and having them beg for their life on our screens.

As a television journalist, Jon Snow is a rare exception to the culture of allowing images, those most beguiling and treacherous of news commodities, to overwhelm understanding of the "whys" rather than the "whats" and "whos" of international affairs. He had two lucky breaks. The son of a bishop who taught the scions of the British establishment at Eton, Snow had the self-confidence and charm of the radical, liberal branch of the English upper middle-class. Every news-gathering problem he turned into an opportunity, whizzing with his bike through crowds of minders to get to the story.

Second, he never trained as a newspaper journalist - thus avoiding the genetic modification of cynicism that devours so many journalists who start with high hopes of telling the truth and end as production-line operatives for the ideologies and obsessions of their proprietors.

Snow is the closest we have to a modern-day George Orwell, also the product of the public-school establishment, who carried an NUJ card and wrote great journalism without ever being shaped by the classic newsroom factories. Like Orwell, Snow is a reporter, a note-taker, a describer. Snow has managed to combine a moral commitment to criticising the powerful with a scrupulous care not to bend the facts. Schoolteachers who want to give pupils a vivid, accurate, honest guide to the key world events from 1975 should recommend this book.

Snow has been a witness to the high moments of drama in recent history. But history is made up of connections that the TV journalist cannot show. In Central America, Snow recalls the plight of the guerrillas fighting to take power. But he did not report Daniel Ortega acting as an altar boy in Berlin in 1985 at a high mass of Stalinist reaction, where the Sandinista endorsed the repression of Solidarity in Poland. The world's then most fashionable anti-American icon said no to Somoza's rule over Nicaraguan campesinos but si to Communist dictatorship over Polish workers.

Only now are we uncovering Saddam's mass graves and torture chambers. Yet most of the Channel 4 discussion of Iraq for the last two years has been a debate between British politicians, none of whom speaks Arabic, knows Iraq, or has ever talked to an Iraqi victim of Saddam's rule. The voices of Iraqi trade unionists, women, journalists and others grateful that Saddam has been ousted are rarely heard. Instead of understanding the needs of the Iraqi people, we have to listen to the vapourings of self-important Brits denouncing the US.

Snow, by contrast, confesses an unreserved love affair with America, its people and the great causes that American democracy strives for. Newsweek's fine London bureau chief, Stryker McGuire, wrote in the New Statesman recently that he feels Europeans now believe "Nous sommes tous anti-Americains" , to re-write the famous Le Monde headline after 11 September.

Snow understands that the US is the world's greatest self-correcting democracy. He recalls that in 1986, two-thirds of the British believed that the US was a greater threat to the world than the Soviet Union. Anti-Americanism is the latter-day socialism of fools, just as anti-Europeanism is the contemporary conservatism of idiots. Snow carries a barge-pole on his bike to ward off both dead-end ideologies.

Now he presents Channel 4 news, the thinking person's Newsnight. The rainbow ties, the stiff collars, the undimmed boyish enthusiasm for great stories and important causes, the trouser bottoms stuffed in socks as he gets ready to ride home to his beloved partner and children, have turned Snow into a national treasure, whose pastoral interventions have more impact than those of most bishops. But after three decades of brilliant reporting, one senses Snow asking himself an awful question. "I have reported the world. But have I made it a better place to live in?" Therein lies the existential dilemma of all engaged television reporters. Like philosophers, they offer an interpretation of the world. Snow, one suspects, would prefer to have changed it.

Denis MacShane is Minister for Europe and Labour MP for Rotherham

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