Jon Snow

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2011

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist Jon Snow.

For the past 21 years he's been the face of Channel Four's nightly bulletins where, along with his patent enthusiasm and vigour for dissecting the day's stories, he's noted for his natty line in neckties and socks.

He's a highly experienced foreign correspondent too - he's reported from Haiti, New Orleans, Washington and East Africa among many locations. However it was in El Salvador that he found his name on the list of people who might be targeted by death squads. It was, he says, something of a 'badge of honour'. "I cry on location", he says, "and it's a good thing, because otherwise you bottle it up and come home bonkers."

Record: Petite Messe Solennelle Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin Luxury: A set of watercolours and an endless supply of paper

Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My cousin My cast away this week is the newsman John Snow. For the past 21 years he's
0:39.4	been the face of Channel 4's nightly bulletins. Along with his patent enthusiasm and
0:44.3	vigor for dissecting the day's stories he's noted for his natty line in neckties
0:48.7	and socks. Prior to the cozy certainties of the TV studio, he was a correspondent in East Africa, Rome and Washington.
0:57.0	In his time, he's been thrown into a stinking Malaysian jail for aiding illegal immigration,
1:02.0	has made it behind guerrilla lines in El Salvador,
1:04.4	and interviewed everyone from the Pope to Monica Lewinsky. Not bad going for the son of a
1:09.4	Bishop. I do have quite a strong sense of justice and injustice, he says, and I think it's forged by being a privileged boy,
1:17.8	colliding with the harsh realities of the outside world.
1:20.8	So John Snow, even after so many years in the job, do you think you still have
1:24.1	quite a sharp sense of injustice?
1:26.5	I'm afraid I think I do and it's often the villain of the piece. It's a difficult thing to
1:31.1	keep sorted.
1:33.0	And what about being objective and neutral?
1:35.8	Do you think, are they the same thing as being objective and neutral?
1:38.8	No, I don't think any human being is neutral.
1:41.0	I think it's impossible to be neutral about anything, but I think you can attempt to be
1:45.9	balanced. But I think one of the things you have to accept is that you can look at something and you will take a view on it and that is the natural human
1:53.5	condition and I suffer from it.
	...

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