Jon Snow in the Varsity officeCallum Hale-Thomson

“Handsome guy”, remarks Jon Snow as he enters the Varsity offices. He’s surveying a framed photo of former Newsnight host Jeremy Paxman from 1972. Snow is Channel 4’s longest serving presenter, and along with Paxman, had the market for hard-hitting journalism sewn up for years. Now Paxman is gone and Snow is alone with a cohort of younger, fresher faces. But while both men strike fear into the heart of any PR spinner or political apparatchik, Snow seems driven by very different forces.

Paxman’s recent autobiography seemed to confirm what many had already said of him: that his brash, cutting journalism was rooted in a nihilistic disregard for sacred cows of any kind. Snow, on the other hand, brims with a righteous energy that leads back all the way to his days as a student. In 1970, he was rusticated from the University of Liverpool for his part in an anti-apartheid socialist protest. Looking back, Snow notes that the event truly changed his life, suggesting that he would otherwise have gone on to be “a very poor lawyer”. But such an eventuality is hard to imagine for Snow, who seems to revel in performance from the moment he steps into the room. Before the interview begins, he does mock adverts for Varsity to camera – much to the delight of our editors.

Though his student days are long behind him, his activist streak has clearly not left him. At the first opportunity he indulges in his most recent rage against the machine. He slams The Sun newspaper for their crusade against Channel 4 News reporter Fatima Manji, who wore a hijab in her coverage of the Nice attacks. He complains that “the press regulator refused to condemn The Sun, because they’re financed by News International”, but Snow nonetheless sees the debacle as proof that “the Murdochs don’t have the influence they had 10 years ago” – his optimism is another defining trait.

This axe-grinding demeanour has earned him plaudits among many liberals who see him as an antidote to a supposedly toothless BBC. Indeed, he appears drawn like a magnet to contentious issues. When I ask him about his experience as a Washington correspondent for ITN in the 1980s, he hovers momentarily on his experience interviewing Reagan, before launching into a fresh diatribe about the “eery parallels” between the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

“Both of them are riddled with lies”, says Snow, “and instead of quite simply deconstructing the lies and setting them out for the reader or viewer, the journalists have tended to say ‘Trump said this’”. His proposed solution is characteristically to the point while remarkably polite. “Whoever tells lies, you say: ‘I’m terribly sorry, although he said that, it’s not true’”.

“The most grotesque thing was that commitment to spend what they claimed to be what we pay for Europe, which was also a lie, that they were going to spend it on the NHS. Well, pigs will fly!”

I put it to him that this era of ‘post-truth’ politics has been partially brought on by the advent of social media, where confirmation biases and filter bubbles run amok, but on this too he is relentlessly optimistic. “We on Channel 4 News might reach one million people a night on television, but, my God, from January 1st this year to today, 1.3 billion hits on Facebook.”

“But what are we doing on Facebook?” he asks rhetorically, pitching with the smooth delivery of a finalist on The Apprentice.  “We are getting mobile telephony”, he says, taking out his lime green encased phone – a perfect match for his tie and socks – “we are cutting up Channel 4 News into gobbits of two, two and a half minutes – Syria, NHS, whatever it is. Captions because nobody ever listens to it, they’re just watching it”.

He is unconvinced by my suggestion that such measures trivialise news journalism. I point to recent facebook posts from Newsnight which reduce lengthy exchanges to a simple ‘he-said-she-said’ narrative, and he retorts “Well we could also argue that in the past nobody saw Newsnight in any number”.

For Snow, the good judgement of the news consumer seems to be an article of faith, and points out that “The BBC last month got 167 million hits on Facebook, that’s a lot of people looking for quality journalism online”.

Indeed, perhaps the reason that he has been able to keep pace with the host of younger presenters in broadcast journalism is this enthusiasm for the future and eager adoption of Twitter and Facebook. “I think this is the golden age of journalism,” he proclaims, as if wondering how anybody could consider otherwise.

He sees reputation as key for future journalists, but formal education as secondary. “People are going to brands, and they’re going to brands they trust,” he says on the one hand, while dismissing formalised journalism degrees on the other. “You can learn everything there is to know about journalism in three weeks,” he says, “there is no degree to be had”.

I ask him finally who he sees as the future of the profession, who he thinks can carry the torch. Perhaps tellingly, his list reads like a millenial liberal-leftists’ internet history: “the brands that are attracting people are things like Vice; The Huffington Post is doing well with former conventional journalists, and The Guardian has great pull online”.

And with that he was off to his next performance, where hundreds waited for him to speak on the topic, ‘how to do good in journalism’. Again he entertained a welcoming crowd with anecdotes and rallying cry for optimism. More of a Paxman-esque nihilist, I remain unconvinced. Ultimately, Snow’s optimism stems from a belief that there are people with the ‘right ideas’ to pass the torch onto, and a wealth of readers to address. The crowd that greeted him proved the latter of those two points, but his faith in social media ignores the deep divisions emerging in news consumption. Snow may reach millions with every tweet, but if these are not the same millions who believe the lies that so enrage him, then his confidence is surely misplaced.