Originally published @ 5:07 pm, Sun 27th Dec 2009
If we were to have interesting set piece events, we needed better ideas that TV debates moderated by David Dimbleby, Alistair Stewart and even Adam Boulton. Alistair Stewart is very stuffy, and Dimbleby is arguably past it (he was given coverage of the Obama election and missed the significance of the Pennsylvania declaration).
All three presenters are schooled in the notion that what’s interesting is catching people out on points of detail rather than developing a notion of ambition for the country, drawn from values.
The suspicion remains that the campaign for such debates was only ever to make the media seem more important and rather than campaigns about vision and policy being allowed to develop, we now may be consigned to the talk being of election debates that “will be decisive”, and then the discussion in the run-up to the events of tactics, followed by dare I say it, a disappointment that the debates weren’t that interesting really. (However, the notion that there was a dramatic drop-off in audiences after the first Obama-McCain debate is wrong.)
Very few of the American debates have been that interesting, so much so that The West Wing turned its mock presidential debates between Santos and Vinick into un-moderated events, where the actors/politicians moderated themselves.
Now that would have been interesting – Gordon Brown and David Cameron talking things through, together (sorry, I shouldn’t be barbarous, but I’m well past thinking Nick Clegg might have anything interesting to say), with no journalist (with a reputation to defend) seeking to intervene.