In the UK, every public service broadcaster is obliged to be politically neutral. I’d say that Sky News breaks the rule about ten times a day – and Jeff Randall four or five times an hour. But I’ve decided instead to pick on Channel Four. Why? Well, because like them, I can come up with any old naff excuse to placate the regulator; and because unlike them, I’m not a public service broadcaster.

It would require an Olympic leap of faith to argue that Channel Four News is unbiased in all departments. For years, most people I know – ranging across ageing hippies, yuppies, students, nurses, Union officials, broadcasters, and even a junior Labour minister of my acquaintance – have accepted this reality in the casual way one accepts that, usually, it will be colder at midnight than it is at midday. Let’s face it, if you have a story to sell about Newscorp buying trees cut down by sweated Burmese labour, you’re going to give it to Jon Snow not Andrew Neill.

But last week, Channel Four ‘refuted absolutely’ the charge that it had picked out Zac Goldsmith’s election expenses for scrutiny on the grounds of socio-political bias. Now that really is hard to believe, given that they could have taken a larger sample of all candidates from major and minor Parties – or at least one candidate at random from each major. Quite frankly, they could’ve trotted down to Poplar & Limehouse – there to discover all the electoral fraud their hearts might desire. But instead – quite by chance and without malice aforethought – they chose Goldenballs Junior.

So in the same tradition, I’m going to pick on Jon Snow. Not because he’s a radical middle class and all-round sanctimonious git sporting his humanity in dayglo on his forehead. Not at all: I’ve chosen Jon because his name was first out of the hat. Well to be truthful, he was the only name in the hat.

In 2005, Snow told the Evening Standard “I don’t have views. I’m shaped by what I see”.

Superior being, then. Or perhaps disingenuous. This lofty bit of self-examination does not, for example, sit well with the following information.

After going to University, Jon Snow worked as a VSO teacher in northern Uganda. I know this because he mentions it in pretty much every interview he’s given on the subject of his life.

“It was my experiences there that radicalised me” he says in one early interview. So he does have views then – he’s a radical. He’s pro helping the Third World: clearly he isn’t a nasty Tory paring bits off the overseas aid budget.

Snow attended Liverpool University – my alma mater as it happens: we were there at the same time, but I don’t remember him at all. What I do know is that he was chucked out for somewhat over-enthusiastic attendance at an anti-apartheid rally. At least, that’s the story every biog of him gives.

Well, I threw eggs at Harold Wilson while studying at Liverpool (I thought him a bourgeois revisionist) and got arrested for my pains. But I didn’t get chucked out. I joined various marches for Homosexual Law Reform, and got arrested again for calling a copper a fascist bastard. But I didn’t get chucked out. We occupied the politics lab for three days, but I didn’t get chucked out.

So why was Snow rusticated? Well, our John is not as bright as you’d believe. Despite his privileged private education at Ardingley College (where, helpfully, his father was the Headmaster) he had ‘mixed success’ at passing his A-levels. He had to be crammed at Yorkshire Coast College in order to get the necessary results to study Law at Liverpool. Perhaps his departure without a degree was more a matter of ability than militancy.

Ah but ah but, I hear you say, he must be good because he’s a distinguished television journalist. Hmm. Let me explain how Jon got the job way back in 1976. He got a tip from his cousin, the arm-waving human Swingometer Peter Snow, that a job was going. A word was put in for him. The word is, I believe, nepotism.

Now you might reach the conclusion based on this piece that Jon Snow is a steaming hypocrite who only made it based on his connections, and who defends his bias by saying (quite falsely) that he has no convictions.

I think you’d probably be right, but in compiling this article, I’ve been a little selective. There are no untruths in here; it’s just that I’ve left out all the good things Jon has done in his generally ethical life. It’s really very easy, this character assassination lark. And it is something in which Channel Four specialises.

In the next episode: Jon goes predicting badly and censoring brilliantly