The Snow perspective

It may seem wacky to present the UK evening news from India, but for Jon Snow, the charismatic presenter of Channel 4 News, it makes perfect journalistic sense, as he explains to Louise Jury

Jon Snow is almost as exuberant as his arm-waving, election-mad cousin Peter when it comes to explaining why he is presenting Channel 4 News from India this week. The much-abridged version of his enthusiastic explanation is that it is the world's largest democratic country, that it has lots happening, and that huge numbers of people who live in the UK have family connections there.

"It is part of the warp and weft of our culture," he says. "This trip has been somewhere in my ambitions all my working life, to look at the world in a completely different way."

Ironically, it is cricket that secured the go-ahead, because Channel 4 is broadcasting the England-India test series and executives decided to create a whole "Indian Summer" season of programmes, including music from Nitin Sawhney and Bollywood films. Yet broadcasting from a different perspective is, he says, what the channel is about. "Channel 4 is a bit wacky and Channel 4 News a bit quirky," he says.

But it isn't just offbeat. Part of Snow's appeal – and that of his programme – is that he appears to uphold standards of intelligence and integrity that might be slipping elsewhere. He admits to being an idealist and worries about viewers who write in thinking that he may be able to solve their problems. He does some work for a homeless centre in his spare time and is a National Gallery trustee. He is a member of the great and the good with a resoundingly liberal perspective on life. Yet he cycles to work not because he is green, but because doing so is quick. And he is conservative in his antipathy to change.

"I'm optimistic and naive, always ready to believe the best, but also in search of the worst," he concludes. "I'm obviously constantly disappointed."

He speaks with despair of meeting someone at a party who worked for the BBC's Six O'Clock News. She told him that her mass-market programme could not tackle news in the way Channel 4 News could for its more select audience of one million. He thinks that is rubbish. "People talk about dumbing down, but it isn't about dumbing down, it's about underestimating the intelligence of the people watching."

He berates the way BBC news correspondents now stand in front of a video screen and produce "factoids that I think verge on the patronising and use up all the time that could be used in making a thoroughly intelligent film".

He is more disappointed with the BBC than ITN because BBC is a public-service broadcaster, while ITN is a commercial enterprise. "There is absolutely no reason why the BBC shouldn't be able to rise to the occasion. But the gamble they have taken is that the public is even more stupid than any of us imagined. I want them to take a gamble that the public is as bright as they are."

He concedes, however, that there is a problem these days with how you cover politics, a staple of the news agenda. Broadcasters, like most MPs, are still caught up with the old adversarial style of politics, but the public doesn't like confrontation and seems more interested in single issues such as the countryside or Third World debt. The Prime Minister's recent press conferences may be a sign, Snow believes, that politicians are waking up to the problem.

Interestingly, despite the opprobrium generally poured upon the press, Snow thinks standards of journalism are higher than ever. He is dismissive, for instance, of the fuss surrounding the employment of attractive female presenters, citing Mary Nightingale and his Channel 4 colleague Samira Ahmed as "operators" with real news brains. "There are seriously bright people working in the media. I'm amazed by the quality of the people who come in. But standards of editorial leadership, with the notable exception of Channel 4 News and a few other bastions of excellence, are in serious trouble. Decision-making is founded on completely anecdotal evidence of what 'consumers' want," he says.

None the less, he believes there are plenty of ways in which TV news coverage is much better than it was. "Business and financial news are covered far better," he says. "And the technology and equipment and information flow far outstrip anything we were able to get hold of 30 years ago."

He has one reservation about the benefits of technology, fearing that it means reporters are not being sent out to investigate stories properly. "Because technology offers us picture postcards of events around the world for almost no cost, we post the postcards instead of sending somebody out there to find out what's going on. We've lost sight of the human beings."

But he does think that the future for TV news is rosy because it is a way to be distinctive in a fragmenting, multi-channel universe. "What is in most need is content, and I think, oddly enough, people will tumble the reality that we news people are serious content-providers and that the better the content, the stronger our impact."

Jon Snow started his career in commercial radio in 1973, joining ITN three years later. He has been at Channel 4, whose news is made by ITN, since Peter Sissons suddenly departed to the BBC in 1989. He was once asked to do the BBC lunchtime news, and was offered the editorship of The Observer on another occasion, but has never been seriously tempted to leave. "I have a freedom that I would never get at the BBC. They have to be a 'paper of record'. I like being a bigger fish in a smaller pond."

After three decades in the business, Snow, 54, still considers every day a new excitement and a privilege. He loves the fact that his job means he can spend 90 minutes discussing development issues with the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen as preparation for going to India, for example. Although he is not on air until 7pm, he attends the morning's editorial meeting and is around most of the day because, he says, you have to know how a story has been developing. It is vital if anything goes wrong. "When someone says in your ear that there's nothing to go to, talking for four minutes is a complete lifetime."

Snow thinks he has the best job in broadcasting. "Who else gets a daily opportunity to play a small role in shaping what people understand about what's going on around them?" John Humphrys on Radio 4's Today programme perhaps? He laughs. "I don't envy his hours."