It is still more than ten months until the US presidential election. But for some of us the obsession began last year. It is like being a fan of a reality TV show. One that is all too real.

We've got to know the candidates. Watched them rise and fall. Seen YouTube star Herman Cain take the campaign by storm, until the family man disappeared amid allegations of affairs and secret payments. And then there was Michele Bachmann, chair of the Tea Party caucus, a rising star who disappeared in Iowa, quite literally dancing from the stage.

But, while devotees of this reality show might have Electoral-Vote.com top of our bookmarks and NPR's [National Public Radio] Morning Edition on podcast, as journalists we must face the fact that our passion is not shared by the British audience.

BBC research people point out that US politics generally attracts only niche interest in the UK. Their audience measure called 'engagement' gives an all-stories average of 36%. For US politics that score is just 23%.

President Obama was an exception. When he was elected engagement jumped to 44%, but it's been declining ever since. By the US mid-term elections in November 2010 - when Obama did badly - it was down to just 12%, an all-time low.
 
Is that surprising? Even in the United States the race to become Republican nominee saw CNN viewing figures substantially down on four years ago. Fox News saw an increase in audience from last time, but that's because all of its audiences are up: the Iowa caucus was just an average night on prime time for the channel.

But this is still one of the most important elections in the world. It will see the selection of the 'leader of the free world'. Someone who commands the world's most powerful army; can order a killing in far off Pakistan and watch on TV as those orders are carried out. Or can plunge the world into recession. 

Surely our audience should care? And surely it is important to explain to them what is going on?

Time, at least, is in our favour. Just like with reality TV, as the contest reaches its conclusion audience interest will increase. The field will also narrow. With so many potential Republican candidates it's difficult to convince an audience to invest in understanding any individual when next week they could be gone.

Finally the arguments will sharpen and become clearer. We can then explain what difference one candidate might make over another. That will interest our audience - even if very few will have a chance to influence the result.

Simon Enright is the assignment editor in the BBC's World Affairs Unit. He was deputy editor of US Election in 2008.

Autumn arrives and with it the party conferences. Political pundit Lance Price considers their relevance:

It was a pleasure to speak at a BBC College of Journalism event about party conferences and how they are managed, or mismanaged. I felt I could understand both sides of the argument, having attended so many; first as a BBC political correspondent, then as a spin doctor trained in control freakery, and now as a pundit.

I pondered whether there was any justification for party conferences any longer, as they are so stage-managed and lack any real decision-making powers, except perhaps in the case of the Lib Dems.

On reflection, they clearly do. It is the one opportunity every year for politicians, activists, charities, companies, and of course journalists, to rub shoulders and get to know each other a bit better. Even if the hotel and drinks prices are outrageous.

'Managing' conference has become a lot easier over the years for the party leaderships and their media teams. This is partly because, for the most part, the membership has learned the benefits of having a serious discussion and putting on a good face for the public. But also because journalists have been forced to accept that there isn't going to be blood on the floor very often, and that they just have to deal with the fact that they are showcases rather than bun-fights.

But it is in the interests of the parties themselves to loosen up a bit. However, for them to do so, it requires a bit of responsibility on the part of the media. The public switch off if they think there's no real debate. It looks boring because it is boring. It would be healthy for democracy if more genuine debate was reintroduced. But that will only happen if journalists can break the habit of calling a disagreement between members of the same party a 'split' or a 'challenge to the leadership' when it isn't.

The BBC could probably cope with that. As for our friends in the written press, well, I doubt it. And, so long as the politicians can't trust journalists not to blow any difference of opinion up into something that sounds apocalyptic, the party managers will try to make sure those discussions take place away from the cameras and the microphones.

I've been accused of some things - but calling a duck a cabbage is one of the weirder ones.

When I published the BBC's guidance for covering the AV Referendum (downloadable document available here), it provoked the 'Yes' campaign to organise an online petition to have my advice reversed, claiming it was "ridiculous" and that "Essentially - they're saying that a duck is a cabbage." 

My note referred to the use of the word 'reform' in BBC coverage of the Referendum campaign - and made no mention of ducks or cabbages.

The reason for issuing specific guidance - both for the election and the referendum periods - is that 'due' impartiality requires the BBC to give particular consideration to the context in which voters are being asked to make their decisions.

Of course the BBC uses the term 'reform' in a number of other contexts, including government proposals for health and education.

But the AV Referendum is asking a single and very specific question: it is asking the voter to decide whether to support the status quo for Westminster elections or whether to change to a different system.

The question of whether one system is better than the other is, therefore, fundamental to the vote. 

The definition of 'reform' is very clear, both in dictionaries and in common usage: it means 'improvement' or 'to make better'. It would, therefore, not be impartial for the BBC to characterise the Referendum as being about 'reform' - in effect, that would be saying to the voter: 'Do you want to stick with the existing system, or would you like a better system?' 

That is not a balanced way to present the question. The paraphrase of the referendum question needs to be: 'Do you want to stick with the existing system - or do you want a different system?'

The political context for the Government's health and education 'reforms' is different and therefore our judgment about what constitutes 'due impartiality' is different. The question is more broadly about how to improve health and education, rather than about whether they should be improved. What's more, it is not an issue on which people are about to cast their vote. 

Opponents of the Government's plans for health and education, therefore, do not normally raise any objection to the term - indeed, they often use it themselves. That is not the case with 'electoral reform'.

There is a second issue around use of the word 'reform' in the context of electoral change. As the Electoral Commission has emphasised, the media has a particular responsibility for clarity in attempting to explain the complexities of the voting systems involved in the Referendum. 

One of the key elements which needs to be explained to our audience, for instance, is that the Alternative Vote is not a system of proportional representation. Yet, for many years, insofar as the public at large understood the term 'electoral reform', it has been closely associated with proportional voting systems. 

The aim of our guidance - as well as setting out issues of due impartiality - is to encourage staff to use more precise language in helping voters to understand what is being asked of them in this referendum.

The guidance does not - as newspaper reports suggested - "ban" the use of the word 'reform'. Obviously it is a term which campaigners will use - but it will be avoided by our own journalists "without appropriate qualification" when talking directly about this particular referendum.

Ric Bailey is the BBC's Chief Political Adviser.

It's less than two months until the royal wedding, which will no doubt also be the occasion of a less-than-harmonious match between royalty and media.

I was given a privileged insight into that relationship at one of the UK's oldest universities when, under Chatham House rules, a select group of us heard a former senior royal functionary and a former senior member of the BBC swap thoughts on matters royal and broadcasting. Without breaking the confidences I'd promised to keep, here's what they were saying:

The Windsors learned much from the death of Diana (below) in 1997. They were way out of touch with the people - 'the ultimate court of public opinion', the man from the palace called it - and had to be argued round by then Prime Minister Blair: "'The film The Queen was right. I remember talking to the writer."  

Our royal insider felt that Prince Charles was constrained in what he could do at the time by his position; and his mother was over-worried and over-protective of her grandsons William and Harry. She was also stuck in a Scottish castle.

In the end, 'the Firm', as they call it, pulled the PR rabbit out of the hat and saved the monarchy - just in time. But it still had to be dragged screaming into the public limelight and to smell the public mood.

As he put it, "If you don't control the news story, it will control you." 

Our functionary also blamed the tabloid press which, in his view, was whipping up a storm over half-mast flags at the palace to create a fog around the responsibility of the paparazzi - their paparazzi - for the death of Diana.

But the former senior BBC staffer admitted the Corporation had been surprised and wrong, too. Surprised that no obituary existed of Diana, and wrong in maintaining the narrative of 'death by paparazzi' once the blood test had shown the driver Henri Paul to have been blind drunk.

Our men at the Palace and BH also pointed up 'the Horlicks' the BBC made of the death of the Queen Mother in 2002: "We rehearsed it 27 times and, when it happened, we got it wrong!" Relations between Buck House and the BBC took some time to recover from that one.

What of 2011? The PR is much better. The tension is less - though Prince William now ensures the hacks stay in line with the help of a fierce media lawyer ("the best in London") and the Press Complaints Commission.

He's learned the lessons of how the press built his mother up only to knock her down. He seems determined it will not do the same with Katherine - as the current royal spin-doctors call her. Her path to Queen Kate will be less strewn with mines set by the media than was Diana's. They hope.

John Mair teaches journalism at Coventry University.

Yesterday's Daily Politics discussed twin directives issued to BBC journalists and civil servants about the word "reform".

According to presenter Anita Anand, in unrelated initiatives civil servants have been told not to use it because it is "too negative" while BBC journalists have been told to cut back because it is "too positive". 

On the programme, Tory MP and author Louise Bagshawe had her own bugbear: that under the previous government there had been too much use of "investment" where "spending" would have done.

Bagshawe practises what she preaches: in her latest book, Desire, (right) she uses "investment" once but "spending" four times. 

And columnist Simon Jenkins wanted less "change".

Anand put another one to them that she said "had people frothing": "Tory-led coalition". But Jenkins and Bagshawe had no objection to that.

Jenkins knocked the subject on the head with his view that "a good journalist knows how to use words. Why do you have to be told which words to use?."

Bagshawe, with her Oxford degree in Anglo-Saxon and Norse, would surely have had more to say if the item had not been squeezed in at the end of a live show.

Today's Daily Politics had Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and Treasury Minister Justine Greening discussing the economy. I didn't spot any of the offending words but there was a selection of tired economic metaphors which the language police in Whitehall and the BBC might consider for their next directives - although politicians are, I suppose, beyond the control of any higher authority. If they could be restrained, here's what we might like to hear less of:

Balls: "slam on the brakes"; "stop digging"; "too deep and too fast".

Greening: "choppy recovery" (twice); "rebalancing" (three times); "buoyant" (twice).

It wasn't all bad. I liked Balls' claim that "people are pulling in their horns because they're fearful of the future". It sounds folksy, but isn't the kind of thing you'd hear from Alan Johnson.

According to the Farlex Financial Dictionary, "pulling in horns" is a technical term for when "investors close positions or set up offsetting, hedge positions when a security has recently seen a sudden increase in price. When investors pull in their horns, they lock in the gain they made from their positions." 

And I'd give a small award for Greening's jibe at Balls for having "baked borrowing into your budget". Perhaps a fairy cake?

Expand your economic vocabulary with the BBC College of Journalism's Business Glossary.

It's many decades since the comedian George Burns remarked that: "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." But today, when transparency is a shiny new virtue, the idea that what's said in public may not be entirely sincere is hard to accept.

The Telegraph's reporters gathered and published comments which ministers believed - however foolishly - were private. If Telegraph readers felt a little uneasy about the intrusive journalism, they probably also felt the paper could, at least in part, justify what it had done by the 'hypocrisy' it had exposed: what ministers said to the fake constituents did not square with what they were saying in public.

It's a theme familiar from that other great journalistic enterprise of bringing private communications into public, Wikileaks. Is it news that secret diplomatic messages contain comments that would not have been made in public? Probably not, but their publication creates a story from the flurry of resulting reactions, apologies and explanations. 

And, again, there's a perception that something is wrong if private comments cause such problems when made public. There is a peculiarly modern reaction against any kind of communication that can be seen as 'two-faced'.

Time magazine's Person of the Year, Mark Zuckerberg, is in tune with this sensibility. His idea for Facebook, as Time points out, took the internet beyond its early days as a place where people could lead secret parallel lives (remember the famous New Yorker cartoon of two mutts in front of a computer: 'on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog'?).

Facebook was revolutionary because it was designed not to produce 'unsocialised' online personalities, free to indulge in illicit fantasies. Instead, it wanted you to be yourself and bring your friends online.

There are concerns about privacy - or should that be simply about self-revelation? - but they are part of a general process of getting used to the idea that the internet is creating a record of parts of our lives in return for the benefits it offers. In doing so, it brings together our work lives with what we used to call our private lives - and they had better fit together.

As Lev Grossman's profile of Zuckerberg puts it:

"Anonymity may allow people to reveal their true selves, but maybe our true selves aren't our best selves. Facebook makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull but civilized. The masked ball period of the internet is ending. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they lead single ones again."

But you don't have to be a geek to want to be relaxed about people knowing about the various parts of your life. The super-investor Warren Buffett has built his reputation and his fortune on his personal integrity. His advice to managers of his companies is to act in a way that would leave them comfortable if their every decision was plastered on the front page of a newspaper.

Lord Sugar has his own version of this idea when he claims in the title of his autobiography that 'What you see is what you get'.

So are the worlds of politics and diplomacy the last to recognise the new sensibility?

Arguably, politics is different, insofar as the government is a collective enterprise in which big egos have to agree to go along with many decisions they didn't really want for the sake of a greater good.

In that sense, perhaps, it is as stuck as a world in which 'keeping up appearances' will always be required, and where what you see and what you get will never be quite the same.

Which leaves journalists with a job for life, however transparent the rest of the world becomes.

Vince Cable's "wild remarks" - as the Sun calls them - raise all sorts of media issues.

Some are quite clear-cut. He was rightly removed from his quasi-judicial role in deciding whether News Corporation's bid for BSkyB should be allowed to go ahead. That job has been given to the Culture and Media Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, along with 70 civil servants responsible for communications takeover policy.

Mr Hunt has a very different view of Rupert Murdoch from Mr Cable. On his website, he reproduces a Broadcast interview in which he says: "What we should recognise is that he has probably done more to create variety and choice in British TV than any other single person because of his huge investment in setting up Sky TV."

Mr Hunt has also said that many people believe the Murdoch empire already controls BSkyB, and questions whether a full takeover would make much difference - but he was careful to add that he was not prejudging the issue, on which he'll be advised by Ofcom. 

Questions have also been raised about the behaviour of the Daily Telegraph: first in securing Cable's indiscretions, then in not printing them. Did the paper act ethically in its use of undercover reporters and recordings to expose the private views of Vince Cable and other Liberal Democrat ministers? The Sun said Cable had made his remarks "in a sad bid to impress two young women", and printed their pictures.

Under the editors' code administered by the Press Complaints Commission, secret recordings can be justified if they're in the public interest. It says this can include: 

i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety 

ii) Protecting public health and safety 

iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.

It's on the third of these that the Telegraph would seek to justify its action. On Radio 4's Today programme, newspaper columnists Peter Preston and Stephen Glover both said this was a borderline case, and there was a danger that MPs would not speak so freely to constituents if they feared they might be speaking to an undercover journalist.

Later, the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, speaking personally, said that he felt the Telegraph had crossed a line (at the end of this discussion). 

Equally questionable, in some people's minds, was the Telegraph's decision not to publish Cable's remarks yesterday. Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, who broke the story after being given the Telegraph's recording and transcript by a whistleblower, wrote on his blog: 

"You have to draw your own conclusions about why the Telegraph would choose not to publish those remarks (although following my publication of them, the Telegraph has now published them). Some will notice that when it comes to opposition to Mr Murdoch's proposed takeover of Sky, there is a convergence of the Telegraph's views and Mr Cable's views." 

The Telegraph was one of several media organisations that wrote a letter to Mr Cable seeking to block the takeover bid. The media analyst Steve Hewlett told the BBC that, unless it could show it was planning to publish the remarks later, it could be accused of putting its commercial interests ahead of editorial ones. 

On Today, Peter Preston said he preferred to give the Telegraph the benefit of the doubt, because it had a mass of material that needed to be released in an orderly way. But in the Guardian, Dan Sabbagh wrote: "So incensed was a whistleblower at the Telegraph, that he or she contacted Robert Peston, business editor for BBC News. It was Peston - a former business editor at the Sunday Telegraph - who broke the story." 

Sabbagh claims that coverage of the News Corporation/BSkyB merger has been a sensitive subject for the Daily Telegraph for some time. And he quotes a fierce denial from a Telegraph spokesman that the story was suppressed: 

"It is utter nonsense to suggest that the Daily Telegraph did not publish the comments from Vince Cable on the Rupert Murdoch takeover of BSkyB for commercial reasons. It was an editorial decision to focus this morning on Cable's comments on the coalition because they were of wider interest to our readers. We have made it clear, in the paper, online and in broadcast interviews today, that we would be publishing further comments in the forthcoming days." 

Either way, it missed the scoop that forced Vince Cable to walk away from his "war on Rupert Murdoch".

CLEGG ACCEPTS THE HIGH PRICE OF POWER (lead editorial)

CLEGG LEARNS THE LESSONS OF A BREACH OF TRUST (lead comment item, by Philip Stephens)

UNIVERSITY REFORM WILL CREATE A FAIRER BRITAIN (column by Nick Clegg)

Contradictory, or just different sides of the same story?

Clegg's piece felt like a draft for a speech knocked off by an underling:

"Our reforms of HE do not represent a retreat from the objective of boosting social mobility. Quite the opposite. Social mobility is the overriding social policy goal of this government." 

Clegg argues that increasing fees is "the only responsible answer" to avoiding having to "slash" university places, which would be "economically and socially suicidal".

The piece hints at the drama of the issue only through the violence of its metaphors.

In its editorial, the FT gives Clegg a pat on the back, agreeing that with lower government funding for universities, higher fees are "the only choice". What's more, Clegg should not be accused of wavering but was right to consult his party on tomorrow's vote.  

And the FT reminds us - something often forgotten in coverage - that the coalition agreement gives Lib Dem MPs the right to abstain. So if they do, it's not a sign that the coalition is falling apart. 

The third article, by Philip Stephens, steps back to question the politics of what is taken for granted by both the above: the inevitability of cuts in government funding for universities. Stephens' point is that "it is not self-evident that once students reach the age of 18 education ceases to be a public good":

"The cut in university funding was a political choice ... the Treasury could have made its savings by means-testing winter fuel grants and free bus passes handed out indiscriminately to pensioners. The reason it baulked? Politics. David Cameron had promised to protect the benefits. Much better that Mr Clegg renege on a pledge to students than the prime minister go back on his word to the elderly."

So is the university fees story primarily about economics or politics? It's easy for FT columnists and irate students to complain that, for all the talk about facing economic reality, 'it's really about politics'.

And the politics certainly hurts: the BBC never tires of showing a pre-election video of Nick Clegg solemnly promising to get rid of tuition fees.

For students, that makes it a story about hypocrisy: 'As soon as you've voted for them, they break their promises.'

What Clegg can't say, because it would sound sulky, is that 'if more of you had voted for us, we might have been able to do what we promised'.

His problem - one seldom touched on in the hurly-burly of daily coverage - is that government itself, of whatever kind, is built on a kind of hypocrisy. It's what keeps the show on the road.

The monarch only invites someone to form a government if they look like being able to command support in parliament for a programme of legislation. That means finding enough MPs who are prepared to go along with proposals because, whatever they may think about this or that particular measure, on balance, they support the package. 

In practice, those loyalties usually follow party lines. Coalition government simply exposes the natural strains in the system. 

Clegg and his ministerial colleagues are - for the most part - playing the game by not talking about the arguments behind the scenes. In public, members of the Government can't distinguish between parts of the programme they have argued for and those they have battled to avoid but are now having to live with. 

In that, Nick Clegg is resisting the temptation to defend himself from the charges of hypocrisy. But there's little pay-off in media or PR terms from that part of the game. 

Wikileaks is exposing the startling frankness of normally secret diplomatic language, to the possible detriment of the wheels that diplomacy oils. And political diaries are, with ever-reducing delay, doing the same for politics.

It's said that 'to govern is to choose'. It is perhaps also true that, for all the talk of the value of transparency, 'to govern is to bite your tongue'.

But, however important, a politician not saying something doesn't make much of a story - even if it's the missing piece of the jigsaw that could help explain a complicated issue like tuition fees.

It's fair to say the jury - aka the electorate - is still out on the detail of the spending review ... though it certainly knows more now than it did before the election.

Add to that uncertainty about and the way the economy will go and it's clear that the opinion polls will provide crucial reading for the political parties and journalists alike in the months ahead.

Opinion and the Review

BBC Head of Political Research, David Cowling, reflects on public opinion and the spending review.

Click to watch the slideshow

The public's view is that the deficit should come down.

But it's clear they'd rather that happened through 'efficiencies' rather than real cuts ... and certainly rather than cuts to what they and politicians call 'frontline services'.

As David Cowling, the Editor of BBC Political Research, explains in this short video guide, one of the big problems for the Government is that the electorate is split.

Reduce the deficit slowly, or go for quick, deep cuts?

Which areas should be exempt?And do people think the cuts will be fair?

And what effect will the cuts have on public opinion once they see which services will be reduced, which will be provided in different ways and which will disappear completely?

These are the issues that will be played out in the weeks and months ahead as the polls track the likely impact for voters.

There's nothing the media like more than seeing a politician wrong-footed by a voter. Think Tony Blair and Sharon Storer. Think Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy.

So when David Cameron was challenged by a senior Harrier pilot as he prepared to announce big defence cuts on Tuesday, it was no surprise that the exchange featured prominently on television, radio and in all the following day's newspapers.

Lieutenant-Commander Kris Ward asked the Prime Minister:

"I am a Harrier pilot and I have flown 140-odd missions in Afghanistan. I am now potentially facing unemployment. How am I supposed to feel about that please, sir?"

Mr Cameron is not a defence expert, and his response demonstrated a less-than-secure command of the brief.  

He said:

"The military advice is pretty clear. When we have to make difficult decisions, it is right to keep the Typhoon as our principal ground-attack aircraft working in Afghanistan at the moment and it's right to retire the Harrier."

Doubtless he'd been well briefed and well prepared for questions just like this, in readiness for his statement in the Commons a couple of hours later. Unfortunately for him, he got it wrong.

The Typhoon is not our principal ground-attack aircraft in Afghanistan at the moment. The Typhoon wasn't even designed for ground attack and is only now being fitted out for that role. And the RAF has never deployed it in Afghanistan. 

It might have been excused as a slip of the tongue on any other day. But when you're about to announce the details of a wide-ranging defence review, it was surely a bit more serious than that. It was a potential gift to anyone who didn't like what he had to say - and there were plenty of those.

Yet the Prime Minister got away with it. There were no hoots or snorts of derision from his hosts - members of the military, many of whom must have spotted the lapse but were presumably too polite to mention it. Nothing either from any of his critics in the Commons - sitting behind him as well as opposite - who could easily have used it as a stick to beat him.   

And although almost every newspaper featured the exchange in some detail, only one - the Times - noticed the slip. It reported:

"Mr Cameron ... added insult to injury by referring to the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet rather than the Tornado GR4 as the ground attack aircraft that would be retained."

Mr Cameron still came in for plenty of ridicule when he announced the building of aircraft carriers that would not be carrying aircraft. But the clanger that might easily have caused him greater discomfiture had it been turned on him was allowed to pass unnoticed.  

But if you're going to slash the armed forces one day and half a million public sector jobs the next, you probably need all the luck you can get.

It's a well-argued case for the impossibility of the job. Purdum vividly describes the unmanageable confluence of pressures: the daily briefing from 16 government intelligence agencies; the fallout from party politicians intent on doing the other side down; the workload generated by the hundred-plus presidential advisers; and the impact of the $3.5 billion (£2.3 billion) spent annually by 11,000 official lobbyists (a gross underestimate of the true figure, apparently).

But Purdum gets into his stride when he describes "one of the most perverse rituals of the modern White House" - the daily press briefing. 

Obama faces "the most hyperkinetic, souped-up, tricked-out, trivialized, and combative media environment any president has ever experienced". And the output of these briefings? "Coverage of the presidency and politics as pure sport."

Part of Purdum's beef against news organisations is that they "put themselves at the centre of the story". As evidence, he cites the New York Times videoing its own daily editorial conference. As Purdum acknowledges, this initiative has been dropped. (Not interesting enough, according to our report.)

He complains about the lack of experience and trivial questions of today's White House correspondents. And he reports, with sympathy, that when the White House tries to say it's done for the day, it's often impossible to make the resolution stick: "If Sarah Palin updates her Facebook page with an attack on the president, the White House will be deluged with requests for comment."

As a piece of considered journalism in a US magazine, it'll be a welcome relief in the White House after Rolling Stone was given time by General McChrystal and his team. Indeed, this is one that White House staff will want to frame: at last, someone understands what they're up against:

"They all work punishing hours, because the entire executive branch funnels through the White House. They tolerate, cultivate, and accommodate special interests of all kinds - at once using and being used. They handle congressional prima donnas of every conceivable shade, and make backroom deals they're not proud of. They manage the press - or try to, in the shortsighted way that the press itself demands - and thus contribute to the spiral of triviality. They acknowledge all of this frankly and, by and large, without whining, as if these are simply things that must be done, and, yes, it's all worse than ever, and that's life."

So is this a White House that's punch-drunk under the pressures? Well, apparently not. Purdum says Obama is determined to ignore the media, and to have faith that sticking to what he intended to do will, in the end, win him credit with electors: "Obama's gamble is that, if you look after the doing of the presidency, the selling of the presidency will look after itself."

Of course, this is the oldest defence of the beleaguered politician. But Purdam's well-sourced account of Obama's unflustered style ("the one part of the evening that is sacrosanct, if the president is in town, is dinner with his wife and daughters") builds a convincing case that he is keeping his head when all about him are losing theirs and blaming it on him.

Not all of Purdam's readers are as impressed: in a neat double-edged swipe, one comment left beneath the online version of the article concludes: "Obama is the true Vanity Fair President - glossy, empty and soon to be discarded."

Is political reporting trivialising politics? Chris Addison, the stand-up comedian who plays Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, claims it's not satire that has degraded politics but politicians and the news media.

Writing in this week's New Statesman, he says journalists and politicians should "leave the jokes to the comedians". And he singles out the BBC's Political Editor, Nick Robinson, for criticism, saying his reporting style "makes me want to bite chunks out of my television".

Here are some extracts:

"Even if The Thick of It were as entirely cynical as is sometimes supposed, even if it kept no light at all in its store of darkness, would it be fair to lay the blame at its feet for the negative way we view politics? It is, after all, a satire and satire's role is to prick the hot-air-filled bubbles above the mouths of politicians ... The issue is not that satire is becoming harsher; rather, it is that what is sitting on the other end of the balance is becoming lighter ...

"There are two main culprits here. The first is the politicians themselves ... I, for one, don't particularly want to see politicians on TV panel shows or otherwise attempting to show us their 'lighter side', not least because, with notable exceptions, they are so bad at it ...

"The second, and to my mind far more blame-worthy, party is the news media. The reporting of politics on television and radio in this country is itself turning into a joke. It doesn't help that most TV bulletins give the impression that those involved have misunderstood The Day Today and taken it to be some sort of training video. The reporting is overlaid with a patina of knowing, matey awfulness, and every report seems to start from the standpoint that all the politicians involved are foolish and the reporter could have told them it would end up this way.

"The chief, but by no means only, suspect is the BBC's Nick Robinson - a man whose style of failing to tell the news straight makes me want to bite chunks out of my television in despair. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,' he began one report, 'what a week it's been for Gordon Brown.' Do bear in mind, as he seems unwilling to do so, that he is not the sketch-writer for a sixth-form paper, but the BBC's political editor."

The BBC is not the only guilty party; Addison writes:

"I have seen Channel 4 News, that last hope of decent TV bulletins, run a report on a politician with speeded-up pictures and comedy piano music. I'm not joking. Sadly, Channel 4 is. These news bulletins are our first port of call for politics. They have a role in setting the tone and shaping the way we perceive our MPs and the processes in which they are involved.

"With its wink-wink approach, the news itself is presenting us with reports that appear watermarked with the notion that politicians are self-serving, laughable idiots. And this, not satire, is where people come by their cynicism."

Doth the comedian protest too much - or does he have a point?

Addison's piece.

The phrase was used again by Matthew Parris in the Times on Saturday. Parris argued that defeat for British and US forces is inevitable; it's just a question of how it's finessed:

"Negotiation with the enemy will begin to be presented, not as surrender, but as a refinement of our war aims. And a pitiful spectacle will start - has started already: a desperate talking-up of the prospects of whatever puppet government we will leave behind before we scuttle." 

If Parris is right, the dismissal of Karzai's as a "puppet government" will become more common. 

Watch out for the expression in Western media as an index of falling confidence about the war. 

It's not the first time the phrase has been used in this context, but it comes from some rather particular places. 

Thanks to the wonders of Lexis-Nexus' newspaper search tool (admittedly not comprehensive in its coverage), I was able to trace its use over the past five years. 

I came across 28 references in British newspapers to "puppet government" in relation to Afghanistan: 

The largest group - nine references - were in the ultra-left Morning Star. 

The next biggest group - eight references - were in stroppy letters from readers to the editors of regional papers. 

The phrase was used six times in quotes from the spokesmen of the Taliban or Afghan warlords: it's how they describe the Karzai government.

That left only five references over five years (excluding the two mentioned above) in news or comment written by British journalists, all from regional papers.

If what was once the political analysis of the Taliban and the Morning Star becomes conventional wisdom, Parris will surely have been proved right.