"Three debates and the lifeblood was drained from the rest of the campaign. You used to have spontaneous press conferences (…) but [in 2010] in terms of actually putting out their stalls in which policies are aired in a structured way over three weeks, there was none of it. There were three men everywhere you went," the broadcaster told the Westminster Media Forum event, 'The Future of News Media'.
The debates had a negative knock-on effect on other areas of the media too, said Snow: "The tabloids had a dreadful election because there was nothing to report. All there was to report was the TV debates, they had to hook into TV (…) When the viewer had thought that somebody had won they were then told by the media, the tabloids, they were wrong."
Just as there is political fusion in our new coalition government there is fusion underway between new and old media, Snow said.
"What is happening now is that we’re in the midst of fusion. It has proved to be about content, content, content; and the generators of various aspects of this content have not died, we're still out there cutting the mustard and new media is more dependent on what we do today that it ever has been. It is the old media who are generating the content and the new media who are spreading the word," he said.
Reiterating a speech he gave at the Association of Journalism Education's annual conference in 2009, Snow said that there had never been a more exciting time to be a journalist.
The economic challenges faced by traditional media and the rise of the citizen journalist, blogger and online media will ultimately result in a move away from the stereotyped hack and news journalist of the past, said Snow: "Most of the time they were drunk, most of the time they were fiddling expenses, most of them were in it to get rich. Now it’s sod getting rich, let's get it right."
The news media are trying to find a tightrope between the old and new worlds, he added: "I think the tightrope will be our shared excellence. The fact that our product will be better than anything the citizen competitor can do. We will become part of an integrated media scene where both we and they make enough money to eat to live and to not drink to excess."
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