Snow says papers can wreck careers

TV NEWS presenter Jon Snow lashed out at “pernicious and sometimes mendacious” elements of the popular press for what he said was a deliberate agenda of wrecking people’s careers.

The veteran Channel 4 News journalist half-joked that newspapers that printed stories about private scandal as if it was news should be sold “in a brown paper bag under the counter”.

In an impassioned evidence session at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards he suggested a fear of being targeted may have prevented people speaking out about the influence of the Murdoch media on politics.

He also suggested claims of deals between media bosses and politicians showed the UK was now guilty of engaging in the sort of corruption previously associated by people in this country with Italy.

In a wide-ranging grilling, Mr Snow became particularly exercised when he was asked about the need for stricter regulation of the press – pointing out that he had been the subject of a story about his private life.

While the Mail on Sunday had accepted the five-page story was false, he told the inquiry, the subsequent apology had been a “pathetic” column on page two on which he had to fight even to have a picture included.

Adding his voice to calls for corrections to be given similar prominence as the original article, he said: “The way forward has to be that a newspaper suffers when it gets things wrong.”

He added: “It would do editors no harm to know that they were going to be questioned about what they had done.”

The news anchor directed the bulk of his anger towards Associated Newspapers – publisher of the Daily Mail and its Sunday sister – which he said was more guilty of such behaviour than News International tabloids.

“There is something more insidious about Associated Newspapers,” he said