Ewan Crawford: When it comes to an election campaign it's the old guard that voters prefer to hear from

FEW people could predict with any confidence the outcome of the current Scottish Parliament election. But there are, in the wise words of Donald Rumsfeld, a few known knowns.

Among the things we can be fairly certain of is that at some stage someone is going to say this will be a new media election. And something else we can be sure of: that person will be wrong. This is not going to be the twitter election or the facebook election, and certainly not the bloggers election – but the old-time broadcasting and papers election.

There is good evidence that political blogs in Scotland and across the UK are in retreat. Prominent bloggers such as Iain Dale (from the right) and Tom Harris (the Glasgow Labour MP) have packed it in.

Both the Dale and Harris blogs demonstrated the danger, not least to them, of this method of communicating. To be interesting (and therefore to reach a decent audience) blogs must be written by someone with insight or influence, but cannot simply parrot the party line. Dale was not frightened of criticising Tory policy when he thought it was wrong: something that may have played a part in his failure to be selected as a Conservative candidate at the last UK election.

Tom Harris wrote an amusing (if painfully uber-Blair) blog which it seems fair to say probably didn't massively improve his career chances under Gordon Brown.

I doubt a single vote was won for either the Tories or Labour by these blogs but both would have been scanned daily by journalists looking for stories and opponents looking for trouble.

The rise of the internet prompted hope among some commentators that the nature of political campaigning would change. In particular the idea seemed to be that we would move to an environment close to the ideal of a deliberative democracy, in which ideas were discussed freely in a rational manner and in which there was a sense of equality among participants.

Sadly, much political discourse on the internet simply confirms the general coarsening of society. Participation is not for the faint-hearted.

Despite the multi-channel age STV and the BBC are enjoying very healthy viewing figures for their news bulletins. The commercial channel says STV News attracts 1.7m viewers across a week, across all its bulletins, while latest figures from the BBC show around 650,000 people are tuning in daily to the early evening edition of Reporting Scotland alone. That is an awful lot of potential voters.

Given the importance of television during the campaign, the BBC's evening news hour should be produced from Scotland – allowing a mix of national and international stories but with enough time to let election coverage breath.

Political parties of all shades in Scotland should not therefore be seduced by those who emphasise only the importance of new media. What we need is some more of the old.