Jon Snow | Life Lessons
Thu 20 Apr 2023 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Unfortunately due to personal reasons Jon Snow has had to withdraw from the festival.
The face of Channel 4 News for 30 years, Jon Snow is one of our most respected and highly regarded journalists and broadcasters. Over the years, there has been huge media curiosity about Jon’s politics.
In The State of Us, Jon issues a manifesto for tackling inequality, fighting injustice, diversifying politics and the media, recovering our sense of community and, above all, empowering the news media to tell the truth about the state of our world.
Jon Snow traces how the life of the nation has changed across his five-decade career, from getting thrown out of university for protesting apartheid to interviewing every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. In doing so, he shows how the greatest problems at home and abroad so often come down to inequality and an unwillingness to confront it.
Despite the challenges, Jon has witnessed profound social progress. In this passionate rallying cry, he argues that at its best, journalism reflects not just who we are now, but who we can be. We’ve had enough of division; the future is for us.
In conversation with broadcast journalist Sian Kevill.
Venue: TTP stage (Cambridge Union)
Duration: 1hr
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Author biography
Jon Snow was the face of Channel 4 News from 1989 to 2021. In that time, he reported from dozens of countries, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Barack Obama’s inauguration, and interviewed countless world leaders including Ronald Reagan, Idi Amin, Tony Blair, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Nelson Mandela, as well as cultural icons from Malala Yousafzai to Marcus Rashford.
His many awards include a BAFTA fellowship, the Richard Dimbleby BAFTA award for Best Factual Contribution to Television (2005), and Royal Television Society awards for Journalist of the Year (2005 & 2006) and Presenter of the Year (2009 & 2010 and 2012). He collected the BAFTA award for news coverage for the 2011 Channel 4 News’ coverage of the Japanese tsunami, and delivered the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh’s International Television Festival in 2017. He is the author of two books, Shooting History and The State of Us.
Chair biography
Sian Kevill runs her own independent production company MAKE World Media, after a successful career in the field of television news and current affairs. She is currently working on several projects funded by Governments, NGOs, Foundations and commercial companies as well as traditional broadcasters. Most recently she had overall editorial responsibility for BBC World News, the internationally available 24-hour news channel. Before this, Sian had a prestigious editorial career including being the only ever female editor of the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme where she won two BAFTA and two RTS awards, a Silver Nymph at Monte Carlo; documentary nomination at Banff Film Festival, and a One World and a Race in Media award.
