In a way it's off-topic, but your comment very much reminded my of something Tony Benn said in an interview ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lYGyIaK80&t=2h36m

In a way it's off-topic, but your comment very much reminded my of something Tony Benn said in an interview ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lYGyIaK80&t=2h36m47s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lYGyIaK80&t=2h36m47s ): "Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say is very, very hard to hear. And I think this is, in a sense, indeed quite deliberately, destroying the genuine democratic base on which people are elected."