Jon Snow
03 Feb 02
Jon Snow on Channel 4 News.
My name is Jon Snow and I present Channel 4 News most weekday nights, sometimes at weekends, we're seven nights a week and I suppose that's not a bad place to start, when you're thinking about news and current affairs in Britain as compared with other countries. I thin we rank pretty well, but I think at the end of the day it's here on Channel 4 that we have the best, we are the only one hour news and current affairs programme, and I think it shows, because we are able to cover things in greater depth. I think particularly since September 11th we have provided analysis and background which has resulted in many more people actually watching it, and I think that the figures indicate too that the shorter more superficial news bulletins if you like, have actually not put on that number of viewers. Compared with the United States for example, they have a very polished product, they do news brilliantly, the only trouble is they are rather myopic. If you tune across all the channels in the United States you tend to get exactly the same news being covered in the same order right across the channels. Here at least you do get different lead stores on different channels and you get a different approach. I think you get the best approach here at Channel 4 News, but then I would say that wouldn't I. Tune in, turn on, speak out at channel4.com/thinktv

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Jon Snow
03 Feb 02
Is the news biased?
Well it's easy to say that bias is in the eye of the beholder, but in truth I think that everybody is biased, there's no such thing as absolute neutrality. Certainly on Channel 4 News what we struggle for is to be fair and to be as objective as we can. But you know, I'm a man you may be a woman, I'm a gentile you may be Jewish, I was born Christian you may be born Muslim, that means we're going to start from different positions we're going to start with different perspectives and that's inevitable, that's the way life is. I suppose what we do try to have is as eclectic a mix of people making the decisions about the we handle the day's news, and try to ensure that way that we get as objective an account of the day as is possible, but we're all human and we fail frequently.

You can watch a video of Jon's comments here. You will need Realplayer.