LONDON: Too much media coverage of the American election for you? It wasn’t always this way. Sometimes the complaints went in the opposite direction. Doing some homework for a speech to an Alistair Cooke centenary event this week, I came across a letter from the then editor of the Guardian Alastair Hetherington to the newspaper’s Washington correspondent Max Freedman.

The letter was written from Manchester, northern England, on November 7 1960. Note the date. It was the eve of election day in the John Kennedy-Richard Nixon presidential contest – in the view of many good judges the most interesting, innovative and exciting White House race until the current one. By any reasonable standards, the letter was written at a climactic moment in a resonant political contest.

“I was delighted to see the cable from you last night after the long silence,” Hetherington wrote to Freedman that day. Then he continued: “I hope I’m not being unreasonable when I say that a silence of three weeks by one of our two staff correspondents [Cooke was the other] in the United States at the height of a presidential election – and without any explanation – is a bit troubling.” A bit troubling, eh? I never knew Hetherington well enough to know if he was the grandmaster of ironic understatement that this implies or merely old school courteous under even the most severe of provocations. Either way, the past is indeed another country. They did journalism differently there. Today, a correspondent who went awol for three days in mid-campaign – let alone three weeks – would be dicing with dismissal. Fortunately for the readers, the Guardian still had Cooke on the books. He was in fertile and colourful form throughout the campaign, not least when he reported from New York on September 27 on one of the great innovations of the 1960 campaign, the first-ever televised debate between the two contenders – “two bloodhounds done up in party frocks” as Cooke put it.

Four decades later, Cooke observed in a Letter From America for the BBC that everyone who saw that first debate in 1960 remembered one thing about it above all – the contrasting physical appearance of the candidates: Kennedy a tanned and bright-eyed prodigy, Nixon pasty-faced, haggard and apparently unshaven. At the time, though, his report highlighted something less visually memorable but in many ways more prescient for later elections: “The most an objective reporter can do,” Cooke wrote, “is to say that he saw it, in the company of other more or less attentive people, and that nothing happening on the screen converted the personal preference of any one of them.”

Those remarks have stood the test of time well. Voters mostly see what they want to see in the debates. Yet as Barack Obama and John McCain left their party conventions at the start of September and set off at last on the business end of the 2008 campaign trail it became common to say – and I said it myself – that the presidential debates would hold the key to the outcome.

After watching all three of them, as well as the Biden-Palin debate, it is clear that this was just a journalistic cliché. We were wrong. The debates didn’t hold the key. They merely confirmed people in the views they had already formed, much as Cooke said in 1960.

All the 2008 debates have been circumspect and highly professional affairs. They have not been dull, although the second debate came close and the formats ought to be looked at afresh. But journalists have been wrong to frame the televised debates as sporting contests. It means we spend our time looking for the wrong things.

There was a classic example of this in the first debate. Most political writers thought the first half-hour of the on-off-on debate in Jackson on September 26, when the candidates talked about the swirling financial crisis, was about as energising as a bedtime mug of cocoa. This overlooked a real difference in approach between the two candidates. While Obama talked about ordinary families, their housing costs, jobs, pensions and savings, McCain did his usual riff about the vices of the Washington special interests and their influence over federal programmes – a subject that was, at best, marginal to the problem and to how it was perceived in middle America. My view that night was that Obama had the presidency pretty much in the bag in that first 30 minutes.

Yet after each contest, after the candidates had debated in the small hours in America, we in Britain have woken up and switched on the radio to learn that no one landed a knockout blow – another cliché that misses the point. Too many observers wait for someone to say something either utterly brilliant or staggeringly stupid. But that’s not what the debates are about. The real point of the debates is that they are opportunities to test the presidential timber of the candidate the viewers are probably going to vote for anyway. Obama grasps this, even if not many others seem to.

The other strikingly shaming thing about all three debates is that much of the press seem to have misread each one of them. The default press view of the first debate was that McCain was the winner; the viewers, however, gave it to Obama by 51 per cent-38 per cent. Two weeks on, the press called the second debate as a tie; meanwhile the viewers said Obama took it by an even greater margin, 54 per cent-30 per cent.

This week the same thing happened a third time. McCain was said to have come out swinging and to be landing blows – don’t we just love those manly boxing metaphors? – and was again adjudged by the media to have had the better of the exchanges. The viewers, meanwhile, quietly awarded the debate to Obama by 58 per cent-31 per cent. The percentage of viewers with a favourable view of Obama went from 63 per cent at the start of Wednesday’s debate to 66 per cent at the end; those with a favourable view of McCain went from 51 per cent to 49 per cent.

I don’t say that Obama can’t now lose this race, or that it may not get tighter as November 4 nears – though there is no sign of either yet. Nor that half a century of televised debates has been a better way of testing and judging the candidates. But I do say that Americans have looked long and hard at the candidates this past month and are now minded to conclude, in the fine phrase used by Garrison Keillor of a speech he heard the young Kennedy give long ago, that Obama just has more keys on his piano than the other guy.—Dawn/Guardian News Service