Fever, fever, everywhere...

The frenzied pointlessness, utter hypocrisy and unrelenting sophistry of the media’s treatment of the Andrew Sachs affair was amply illustrated by the sight of four photographers and a camera crew chasing Sachs down his own driveway in search of “reaction” to his “horrendous treatment”.

Not forgetting the camera crew that provided the above shot, of course: the BBC’s.

Enough said.

And so to the only news item to receive more airtime and column inches this week. The US election.

“America’s moment of truth” headlined the Guardian. If only such a thing were possible. (Thanks, Richey.)

Once again, and almost without exception, the ultimate opportunity to pick seriously and deeply at the murderous fibres of the world’s supreme rogue state was politely declined by our flagship media channels – at every gushing, delusional turn.

The torrent of surface-deep, "Change!"-shrieking rhetoric was as unceasing as Obama's campaign itself. And so, as yet another gossamer-thin election broadcast piped shrilly from Radio 5 on Sunday morning, peppy presenter promising to “cut through the hype and internet hyperbole” (presumably via the insights of his guest panellists, introduced during the pre-faff as “a DJ” and “a Premier League goalkeeper”), this writer turned the corporate deluge firmly off.

One might have thought election time to be a most apposite stage on which to debate America’s grotesque foreign policy record under Bush, responsible as it is for a decade of quite unimaginable slaughter and wilful geopolitical destabilisation – via the illegal, immoral and genocidal occupation of at least two sovereign states (at the last count). Or, perhaps, to examine the deplorable procession of hawkish, expansionist Democratic presidents elected since World War II that the new incumbent is all set to join.

No danger.

Revolving tirelessly around the same microeconomic themes – the US “healing itself”, Obama’s “historic” succession – the most febrile of all election fevers sweated itself out through our radios, broadsheets and screens in yet another obscene exercise in collective myopia. A gross, perverse parade comprehensively enshrining America and its values as an upright, just, ordered, democratic state, the overwhelming majority of election “coverage” provided merely the ultimate distraction from America’s (and the UK’s) bloodthirsty role in the real world.

The establishment-consecrating bias of the mainstream reportage is ably illustrated by the broad absence of any mention of the serious fraud concerns raised during the US elections of both eight and four years ago. We might compare this remarkable omission with media coverage of, for example, a typical African state election in which fraud allegations had once been substantially reported.

As genuine engines for Change outside of the cloying indoctrination of the corporate media machine teach us eloquently, there is a heavy price to pay for allowing but a few monocular elites to decide what is "newsworthy".

Dig deeper.