The nit-picking idiocy of 24-hour news TV

Is Barack Obama elitist? Will his middle name harm his campaign? Are voters turned off by his lack of bowling prowess? Did he give Hillary the finger during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina? When he picks his nose, which digit does he use? And what does that say about him? This is the nit-picking idiocy of 24-hour news TV says Charlie Brooker.

The first four questions were genuinely posed by US TV news over the past few weeks. The nose-picking question wasn't. But it's no more puerile and pointless than the ones that were. The answers to the real questions, incidentally, run roughly as follows:

1. Is Obama elitist? Of course he is. He's running for president. It doesn't get much more elitist than that. Still, in terms of privilege, he'd have to go a long way to beat the ding-dong incumbent. Bush hails from a family of oil barons, billionaires, CEOs, former presidents, Scrooge McDuck and Daddy Warbucks. He's slept in a gigantic rustling money nest every night since the day he was born. And he's got an uncle made of gold. But since he also looks like Alfred E Neuman and talks like he's ordering ribs, he's viewed as a straight-talkin', down-home regular Joe, albeit one with so much blood on his hands it's surely in danger of caking and congealing and turning his fists into heavy balls of scab, each one the size of a cabbage, good for thumping against desks and doors but not much else. Although even if that did happen, even if Bush called a press conference on the White House lawn and stood there demonically beating out a funeral march with his scabby orbs on a nightmarish drum fashioned from human bones and skin - even under those circumstances, you sense he'd somehow get away with it. Because that aw-shucks grin looks good on camera.

2. Will Obama's middle name - Hussein - harm his campaign? Depends how often and how insidiously you pose the question, really.

3. Are voters turned off by Obama's lack of bowling prowess? Hard to say. While campaigning in Pennsylvania, he took part in a photo opportunity at a bowling alley. It didn't go so well. He bowled a miserable 37; half his balls sailed into the gutter. In summary, he looked like a dick. The clip immediately entered heavy rotation on the TV news channels, becoming one of those modern snatches of footage that instantly take on iconic status by sheer dint of repetition; looping hypnotically, repeating ad nauseum against a soothing background of dull pundit birdsong, permanently stitching themselves into the fabric of your mind's eye. And the hosts ask whether this makes him look elitist, and the pundits umm and ahh over whether it does, and the word "elitist" is bandied about again and again over the image of Obama looking like a dick, an elitist dick, an elitist can't-bowl dick, and it all starts to feel like brainwashing, albeit inadvertently, albeit only because they've got a simple, juicy clip and 10 billion hours of airtime to fill. So yes, voters might be turned off by Obama's lack of bowling prowess, because it's been shoved in their faces and smushed around like an oily rag.

4. Did Obama give Hillary the finger during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina? This one's easy. The answer is no. Of course he didn't. While discussing his opponent during a campaign speech, Obama momentarily scratched his face using his middle finger. That's all. But hang on: we've still got a lot of airtime to fill, so let's loop it again and again while we try to work out if it might've been a deliberate gesture, or a subconscious giveaway, or nothing at all. Was it nothing at all? This. Look at this. Was this nothing at all? Here it is again. What about this time? And this time? And this?

When you stand at a distance and survey this level of nitpicking idiocy, taking in the full landscape of stupidity and meaningless analysis, it's hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project. The focus on conjecture and analysis has reached such an insane degree that pundits are chasing some kind of meaning in the way a presidential candidate scratches his face. This is what lunatics do when they think people on television are sending them personalised messages. Where the rest of us see Vernon Kay hosting a gameshow, they see evidence of a conspiracy, and they scan every wink, nod, and eyebrow twitch for veiled threats or coded instructions. Except the lunatics have an excuse: they're lunatics. Lunacy is what they do. It's in their job description. News networks are supposed to offer news. Instead they serve little but loops and chatter. They may as well show footage of passing clouds and invite their pundits to speculate on which one looks most like a kettle and which one looks most like a pony and let the race for the presidency be settled by a bowling match.