Last night's election debate was lots of fun, Cameron and Brown clearly both learned a lot of tricks from Nick Clegg. Watching it, and keeping one eye on the Channel 4 poll tracker, was also very informative and backed up what I was thinking; namely that Clegg was having his star moments, but Brown was definitely controlling the debate far more powerfully; he was making the points that the other two were having to answer, and rarely vice versa. Cameron meanwhile was again very light on actual details of policies - when pressed by Nick Clegg to give a figure for the Tory's proposed cap on immigration, he consistently avoided answering - but big on rhetoric, and the whole 'vote for change'. Cameron appears to be trying to win an election on shallow soundbites, and people just aren't convinced. The Channel 4 poll ended with Clegg hovering at about 50%, Brown on around 30% and Cameron languishing at the bottom with only 17%.
But then Sky's polls came up, and Sky News started telling everyone that Cameron had won the debate. The polls were somehow showing Cameron in the lead. What the fuck? Were they even watching the same debate I was watching? Because I'm pretty sure that Cameron had his arse handed to him on a plate for most of the time, only having a real moment when he stopped Brown in his tracks over the leaflets (although the Tories accusing any other party of using appalling scaremongering made my hypocrisy meter explode). Other than that, Cameron floundered, failed to answer questions until, getting visibly annoyed and trapped by Brown's insistence that he tell people what he was planning to do with free eye tests and prescriptions for the elderly, he snapped and made up on the spot that they were going to keep them. Nobody watching that could possibly see anything other than a desperate ad lib on Cameron's part. How then were the polls so different?
Well, to be fair the Yougov polls are often referred to by Private Eye as the Anyresultyouwantguv polls, and if they were paid for by Murdoch because, y'know, Sky being his channel and all...
Let's also cover the facts of the production of Sky's coverage; Nick Clegg, noted last week for his down the lens eye contact, was consistently denied as much camera time for his eye contact as David Cameron, I noticed. Cam was allowed moment after moment to stare pleadingly down the lens, whilst Clegg was viewed from the sides, from the back, and occasionally from the front, when he was directing his attention elsewhere. The questions were also selected by Sky News, so you have to ask whether any questions got filtered out that might have made Cam look even worse than he did. The pundits afterwards seemed hell-bent on painting Cameron as the king of the debate, which made me think that either they have no idea how people actually win a debate, or they are deliberately fabricating it in order to make the sluggish minds of the majority of viewers question what they had just witnessed. Lets face it, the press do tend to view themselves as the gatekeepers of information, and this election is starting to highlight just how seriously they take that role. From the Sky News bods frothing about Cameron's 'victory' after a dismal performance, to the Daily Mail's apoplectic attacks on Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, to James Murdoch and Rebecca Wade storming the Independant's offices because the naughty Indie dared suggest that Murdoch was trying to influence the vote with his mighty army of right-wing media outlets, we've seen the press' masters role in events highlighted dramatically, possibly more dramatically than ever before. People need to know this. People need to see what goes on here. They need to be made aware that they are being played for fools by the likes of Murdoch and Dacre. The Mail's vitriolic attack on Clegg alienated some of its readers, showing that you can, indeed, go too far.
The big question is, though, will this fake reality that is being projected by Murdoch et al affect voters? Will people do as they are being told and go back to voting Tory again in the haze of media bullshit? Or are enough people seeing the vague shapes of the manipulators moving behind that haze, and not liking it? We'll see in a fortnight, I guess.
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