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A packed Town Hall in Cheltenham listened intently as he provided some telling insights into his life as a well-travelled journalist. He's witnessed some of the decisive moments of world history during his career thus far and reported from savage battlefronts in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan to Nicaragua, and Angola.

He's met some of the key figures in the world from the Pope and Nelson Mandela to Mikhail Gorbachev. He's seen the changing flow of contemporary world history from the end of the Cold War to the disorder of the global war on terror after 9/11.

By his vast journalistic experience, he is a man well qualified to comment of the state of the nation, not least the World.

Narrowing horizons

Snow spoke about the dangers of narrowing our horizons with the advent of modern technology. His great worry is that as technology empowers us with ever faster, more selective ways of getting to information the danger will be that we will begin to filter out what we don't want to hear or see. We have control of our personal finances, health and education but the wider picture of global news seems to be getting lost. Why is that dangerous? Snow explains:

"The technology is with us now where we can filter out what we don't want and I'm afraid that as our horizons narrow, those who have very little, their horizons are actually widening and they're learning much more about what we have and what they don't have. That is a dangerous state of affairs that if we don't address quite rapidly, if we don't say 'we should be talking together, we can bridge these gulfs', we'll be in big trouble."

The digital age that we are now in is painting us into a corner - we're selective about what we want to hear in terms of the news and that is to the detriment of the wider global picture. Snow believes this is the case, as he explains:

"I think the nice thing about old technology was that it produced a newspaper on floor, or a television programme that was a reasonable holistic take on what's going on in the world around us. I'm afraid that what the net and everything around us is giving us is, it's given us some wonderful things but it's also helping us to filter out a lot of things we may not be interested in."

War on terror

As presenter of the Channel 4 News, Snow is well placed to comment on 9/11 and the fallout from the terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York. Having lived and worked in America for many years during 1980s, he never thought the attack on the towers would deal the country such a detrimental blow. He says:

"Because I've lived in the States I thought that America would handle 9/11, they would take it in their stride, they were big enough to cope. Actually I was quite wrong. It was a most searing and devastating blow, completely shaking America up in a most extraordinary way.

I worry that we didn't look at the other aspects of 9/11. Many, many places in the dispossessed parts of the world didn't find it so shocking. They thought, to some extent, that it was something which America had coming to it.

If we don't really address these inequalities, it won't be that they'll visit us in a second world war kind of way but that they'll visit us with the pinpricks that destabilise our every day way of life. Look at what's happening to us without any pinpricks at all - we're taking draconian measures that are really affecting the way we live our lives and that seems to me to be a great pity.

I'm not sure the great global threat is yet as bad as they're painting it. They'd be much better investing in trying to prevent it becoming a major threat than these taking defensive measures."

The phrase 'War on Terror' also makes Jon angry because he thinks it's a ridiculous concept. He says:

"I think it's utterly fatuous to have a war on a noun, to be honest. What is victory in a war on terrorism? I cannot understand it. The twin towers were brought down by Saudis who trained in Afghanistan. War on Afghanistan? Absolutely right. Very few people really query the war that removed the Taliban. Very few people query the hunt for Bin Laden.

Donald Rumsfeld has told us, quite correctly, that there is no connection with Al Qaeda in Iraq. So why in God's name have they decided to go off on this diversion when the position of Afghanistan is very, very far from stable."

In fact, Snow goes as far as to question any need for the war in Iraq at all. He explained:

"I think the oddest thing of all is that we could be discussing one of the most successful containment of a bad dictator in recent history.

Twelve years during which courageous RAF pilots, who never got mentioned, criss-crossed that country night after night, US airmen night after night, photographing, surveying, bombing anything that looked remotely threatening - they had that country better mapped than at any time in history. What went wrong was some of the targeting of the sanctions but this was a brilliant period of containment.

Every day we get a new revelation that tells us just how effective international action on Iraq actually was. It did remove weapons of mass destruction, it did manage to contain a stupid old dictator and I can tell you that when I went there before the war, he was on his back. You really felt it amongst the people that Saddam was down and not yet out of it but, boy, was he in trouble.

I think that the patience and continued surveillance was working."

Seeds of distrust

Snow points to an incident in the 1950s as an example of why the Middle East views the West with suspicion and distrust. It centres on the the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq and it was all to do with oil. Snow explains:

"Part of the whole chip between Iran and America was about the overthrow of Mosaddeq. Mosaddeq was a nationalist prime minister, democratically elected in 1952. He took exception to the idea that western oil companies were taking oil out of Iran - for every hundred pounds of oil they were taking out, Iran only got six pounds. Now Mosaddeq thought that that wasn't a good idea and he nationalised the oil company. The western oil companies were rather upset about it.

Truman [American president] was asked by Churchill whether he would help overthrow this man. Truman said no then Eisenhower was elected and he said yes, and they overthrew Mosaddeq. To this day ordinary Iranians talk to you about Mosaddeq, they do not like the fact that we decided to go in and remove the democratically elected prime minister. I think they may have some justification for that.

That is why, when we look at events like Iraq now and the new burgeoning worry about Iran. Unless we are able to try and understand how they see us, how they read history, we can't get anywhere. We have to understand that was a very bad thing to do and it has upset a lot of people. It's taught in school, it's part of their history and it would be part of our history if someone had come in and removed Margaret Thatcher. There are people who might have wanted to removed Margaret Thatcher but it wouldn't have been a good idea for some foreigner to come and do it.

This is not an anti-American diatribe, it's a plea to try and understand history. Do the people who make the decisions now have a real sense of history? Or are they doing it for other reasons."

Neutrality

Can a journalist ever be neutral with a story? Snow doesn't think it's possible, he says:

"Neutrality. That's a very dangerous word because none of us is neutral. I think everything from sexual orientation, to ethnicity, to religion - they all affect where we're coming from. What is the neutral point between us? We're not neutral.

We hacks need to know where we're coming from. Then we need to be balanced and try to include and represent the views that we don't necessarily share or have. We're citizens first and hacks second."

Common sense

Jon Snow is a very interesting character and he has some interesting points of view. The insights he gave a Cheltenham on his career as a journalist were a fascinating revelation about what it is to be at the leading edge of world news.

Beneath the exuberant ties lies a committed journalist who's as passionate about world affairs as he was when he first started his career. He certainly contributes to a balanced view of the news in this country and is to be applauded for that.

Jon Snow was interviewed on stage at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature on Tuesday 12th October 2004.

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