Nigel Andrews, FT's chief Film and Television critic, offers some of the same arguments as he tuned in to watch the presidential election coverage. Not available online yet. Some salient points:

1. The Democratic contender won all three debates and lost the campaign. The programming of the half-dozen main TV news channels, whatever their overt political sympathies (Fox is the only crudely partisan network) is so relentlessly cut up by the ad breaks and so blatantly pressured by the need to capture viewers during *other* channels' ad breaks that they subscribe without shame to the soundbyte/sightbite culture that keeps a George W. Bush on his political ventilator. Honourable exceptions such as the C-Span channel only highlight the tyranny of the trend.

2. This would be a scandal if it were not, by now, just an everyday truth of "Infotainment USA". More shocking, at least to a visiting limey, is the failure of America's TV interviewers to go after
America's politicians as Britain's do. There is no equivalent of Britain's Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys to probe a fallible candidate's credibility, to shine the laser light of logic on the tired catchphrases of whistle-stop populism or makeweightmanifestos.

3. Even on CNN or CNBC, much of the airtime is franchised out totriviality - did you know that Bush supporters like mustard while Kerry voters prefer ketchup ? - when it is not hammering the same headline over and over, rolling around each hour, on the hour.

4. Nuance ? It does not come under "news". Nor does a patient exploration of the complexities and possibly plural perspectives, underlying bullet-point political issues. Nor does the questioning of the use and meaning of phrases such as "moral values" from a president who sends hundreds to their deaths in war but cannot abide the notion of gay marriages. Television in America is not a solution to, or even a proper commentary on, the crisis that is US democracy today. It is part of the problem. It may even be the main problem.

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As an aside...

TV frontpersons hector, joke, gossip, pontificate. They wear beards, braces or stern looks if men, and cheerleader smiles and fashion-statement hairdos if women. At election nights they try to make s long night seem entertaining, but there is a frightening sense of fear that history will outpace them even as it is being made, fear that the rivals are getting the big new first.Meanwhile they flash up tickertape statistics remorselessly and stroboscopically.

In the US, democracy - or the freedom to choose democratically at voting time - is wasted on the free.

Bush : a cuddly uncle sprinkling quips and cornball wisdoms when not incarnating a tongue-tied, just-one-of-us folksiness.
Kerry: resembles a waxwork effigy of Abraham Lincoln, greyed up, de-bearded and wheeled in to do set stump speeches or peddle word-perfect speeches that unfortunately need a brain-perfect audience.