It’s amazing how easy it is to manipulate the television pontificators.

On the day after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, you would think CNN and MSNBC and their ilk would be awash in information that newly-attentive voters need to know in order to make sense of this remarkable historic event.

Information such as: Who exactly is this man? What is his background? What does he believe in? Where does he plan to take the country if he wins? And how on earth did he manage to create a campaign that defeated the powerful Clinton political machine?

But no. All day long it was Hillary-Hillary-Hillary, the one who lost, the one who refused to concede, the one who may or may not want to be vice-president, as though the matter of vice-president was more significant than the character of the man who would be president.

If it was a calculated manipulation by Hillary Clinton to take the spotlight off the victor, the herd sure fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

I searched and searched for repeats of sections of Obama’s speech the night before or what he said at the AIPAC conference that morning. After all, this was the guy who was at the top of the ticket and we desperately needed to see more, not less of him. Brian Williams at NBC did have a brief interview with Obama, but where was the film with voice over that might shed light on his political life? It’s as though the media was caught napping, unprepared for the final moment. Or was it simply a failure to give the real news its proper due?

It was only by turning to the New York Times, which offered a perceptive profile of the candidate, written by Michael Powell, that I could find some meat to put on my plate. The sad thing is that fewer and fewer voters are turning to newspapers for their political information nowadays, while television, which ought to be informing on matters of significance, too often falls down on the job.