So far, the 2010 Election campaign has promised little, and delivered less. But the media delivery has been downright hypocritical.

There are twenty-six days to go to Election day, and perhaps two months left in which to avoid national bankruptcy. David Cameron says the Labour NI plans will cost jobs, but Tory plans to slash civil service costs by £27 billion won’t. Gordon Brown and Lord Adonis beg voters to vote Libdem, as if the Conservatives were a form of anti-matter. In the Commons on Wednesday, the Prime Minister said ‘same old Tories’ three times. This morning he accused them of ‘turning their backs on the Party’s tradition’.

The Conservatives are ‘especially’ targeting Ed Balls’s seat, presumably because they don’t like him much. This is a bit juvenile of them, but not as idiotic as Labour promising fathers a month’s paternity leave with money we don’t have. Nick Clegg called Alex Salmond ‘a two-bit player’, and both Cameron and Brown are studiously avoiding Jeremy Paxman’s invitation for each leader in turn to go on Newsnight and be interviewed by him.

It’s all a bit tacky and infantile and cowardly, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we’d expect – and that’s what we’re getting. But there are other elements that strike me as much worse…and these involve the election-watching media.

The first is the tweeting madness of Labour candidate Moray Stuart MacLennan. Here we are able to see the degree to which delusional pc really has surgically removed everyone’s right to say ‘cunt’, ‘ugly old boot’, and ‘chav’. Next it’ll be cockney, scouser and manc – but the media so happy to poke fun at pc now join in gleefully as Gordon Brown (overheard only last week calling Lord Mandelson ‘a cunt’, a year after Mandy himself called a US commentator ‘a cunt’) says he doesn’t want anyone in the Labour Party like that. Well Mr Brown, that’ll be a lot of empty benches on your side of the House, then.

The same applies to Boris Johnson, whose remark that the Citizenship Service scheme should be obligatory has been blown up by the papers into ‘a gaffe’. Next week, these same papers will be giving good sanctimony on the inability of politicians to think for themselves and have an independent opinion; ‘they’re just lobby fodder’ another smart-arsed Daily Mail hack will sneer. So far, not a single title or news programme has thought to ask how many Brits agree with Johnson. They’d be surprised by how many do.

Media coverage of the opinion polls suffers from similar double standards. Up two, down three, back one, forward two: it is a macabre waltz of death utterly irrelevant to most people, steeped in wonkery, but above all badly analysed and not explained. But before this election is over, there will be high-and-mighty opinion pieces from the letter-box shouters about ‘weak politicians obsessed by the Polls, acting like straws in the wind’. OK, The Slog looks at polls now and then; but only to point out a trend, and suggest the reason for it. And The Slog has said for years that once an election is declared, political research should be banned until an exit poll on the night of the count. Anyone seen that idea in the press yet?

The sad truth is that our media are, with one or two notable exceptions, as bereft of new thought and brave creativity as our politicians. They collude actively in this silly game of Chase the Soundbite and Serve up the Story. They are part of the cultural problem, along with the police, the Civil Service, NHS Trust managements, and all the rest of the self-serving hangers-on. And in the face of an internet that was going to destroy their business models from the moment it was born, they have done exactly what politicians do when faced with a historical inevitability: allow the urgent to overtake the important…and go bankrupt.

So if you want to know what’s wrong with our politics, read the papers. But if you’re more interested in what to do about the mess, read The Slog. You might as well: we’ve been ahead of the lot of them on several political, social, financial and business stories for months now.