From jaw-dropping anecdotes about Idi Amin to hard-to-watch footage of body-strewn war zones, this isn’t just a chronicle of the ex-news anchor. It’s also a history of our times
Early in Jon Snow: A Witness to History, a too-brief documentary mostly about the reporter and news anchor’s professional life, Snow admits that he wasn’t sure if journalism was the career for him. In 1975, he was cutting his teeth as a cub reporter for LBC Radio when he heard rumblings of an incident on Balcombe Street in London. Thanks to his famous love of cycling, he was first on the scene, breathlessly reporting the IRA siege that was unfolding, live, as it happened. “I should have been afraid, yet I was so busy reporting I didn’t get the chance,” he says.
It made him certain that journalism was indeed the career for him, and this fascinating documentary follows him through his early years as a foreign correspondent for ITN and then his 32-year stint as the anchor for Channel 4 News, a seat he only recently vacated. As he covered most of the major events of the last five decades or so, it also serves as a potted history of the late 20th and early 21st century, from the death of Diana, Princess of Wales to 9/11, then the rise of Trump and his “fake news” cacophony.
