The State of Us: The good news and the bad news about our society

Description

Jon Snow, national treasure and the last of the 'big beasts' of TV news, finally gives vent to his feelings on the state of the nation, from inequality and out of touch elites to the vital work of journalism in the social media age. We are living through a time of tremendous upheaval. Society is growing ever more unequal, and elites increasingly detached, with the Honourable Members ensconced in their Upper and Lower Houses. Jon Snow's own wake up call was the Grenfell Tower fire when, gazing up at the smoke still pouring from the building in the early hours, he felt the weight of the obligation as a journalist to understand what had happened. Tracing key moments in his incredible career, from getting thrown out of university for protesting apartheid to his reporting on major global developments everywhere from America to Iran, Snow argues that the greatest problems at home and abroad so often come down to inequality and an unwillingness to confront it. One of the few ways that we can challenge unfairness is by getting the news out, but traditional media have been facing their own battles recently, with local news collapsing and big tech companies decimating revenues. We can do better- the time in which we live is undeniably full of challenges, but it is also full of potential. If we begin by telling the truth about our situation and then do something about it, the coming years have the potential to be a new golden age.

One of the nation's pre-eminent broadcasters, Jon Snow was the face of Channel 4 News from 1989 to 2021. In that time, he has reported in dozens of countries, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Barack Obama's inauguration, interviewing 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.

A call to arms from one of the great television journalists of his generation -- Robert McCrum