The media have pored over the strategies of the parties, analysed the election broadcasts and reported the latest poll findings.  The focus is very much on the race and the party tactics.  There is much evaluation of the latest spin from the parties and attempts to make a big deal of the vanishingly small differences between the parties.  It usually takes an outsider to the media and political elite to point this out.  It took David Baddiel, the comedian, not known as a great political sage to say on Question Time that the race is so dull because of the minimal differences between Labour and the Tories. 

Ever since Margaret Thatcher brought Saatchi and Saatchi in to market her policies 'like cornflakes' we have been on a steep upward trajectory towards American style elections.  More money, more media, more spin. Since the late 1980s, this has narrowed the distance between the biggest parties and led to less people voting.  In the current election both Labour and the Tories have imported the latest election management techniques employing political consultants from the US and Australia.  The Australian approach to attack politics was learnt in the 1990s from the Americans and is being employed by the Tories especially in relation to asylum.

The effects of this on the media are to increasingly trivialise coverage, particularly on television.  The obsession with how the parties are doing, rather than with the serious political issues that face us (war, climate change, poverty, health, privatisation) is reaching new heights in this election. ITN has a 'ballot box jury' of 12 floating voters constituted as a focus group to discuss how they are feeling about the campaign.  This replicates the parties obsession with the perhaps 800,000 voters who will decide the election, but gives little chance of a broad range of views.  The focus is very much on how the parties are doing.  The decline in turnout at the last election (to the lowest since universal suffrage was introduced) has meant broadcasters attempting to interest the public more in the election.  But instead of returning to real political debate - something which all the evidence shows is welcomed by the public -  they move in the direction of trivialised reality TV type programming.  On ITV News we can even see the psychologist from the first series of Big Brother opining on the body language of the party leaders wives.  Is this really likely to fire up the forty or so percent of the population who will not vote?

ITN does have a running segment called ' unspun' to help tell the 'truth from the spin'.  When confined to campaign issues television can demonstrate some scepticism, as in the occasional reference to the fact that the Labour Election Broadcast failed to mention the war (in Iraq) at all.  The Labour strategy of Brown and Blair appearing in tandem has been fairly widely satirised on the news with Brown being referred to as Blair's 'human shield'.  But some of the spin is no danger of being deconstructed on the TV news.  The greatest scandal of the week has been the reporting of the so called 'ricin' affair, used by both the Tories and Labour for electoral advantage.  In the acres of coverage, the fact that no Ricin was found and there were no links to Al Qaida, has not been the target of TV news scepticism.  This more than anything in the past week has been a real issue of successful government spin on a par with the non existent WMD, which most of the broadcasting media have ducked.