You pays your money...

The newspaper reaction to the Leaders' Debate can be summed up by Alexander Pope's couplet in his Essay on Criticism:

'Tis with our judgment as our watches, none
Go just alike, but each believes his own.

So the Sun and the Mail thought Cameron had come out on top, the Mirror Gordon Brown and the dear old Guardian Clegg. The Sun's verdict on Cameron is doubly worrying (even trebly worrying, if there is such a word) in that, although their own opinion poll showed Clegg the "winner" by a huge margin, they managed not to mention him in most of their reportage, and, of course, were Murdoch still supporting Labour, there is no doubt that Brown would have been declared the victor.

So we all of us (including me as a Guardian reader going right back to the days when it was the Manchester Guardian and you got it a day late if you lived in London) rely on our newspapers to re-enforce our prejudices.

Thank goodness then for the BBC, which can still be relied upon for relatively unbiased news and views. And if there were no other issues, here is the reason for not voting for the Conservatives. It would be naive to suppose that Murdoch's change of heart has not been gained by a Tory promise to chip away at the BBC and add further power to the Murdoch empire, thus further diminishing the quality of our democracy.