Doubtless the extra pixels will give their swingometer unrivalled accuracy, but it’s unlikely to do much elsewhere. Polling stations – invariably primary schools, Baptist churches and village halls – rarely prove cinematic in front of a hasty-put-together piece to camera, while vote-counting runs through dreary hours in a thousand strip-lit municipal centres. These places do not need HD.

Nor do our politicians, to whom it should be denied. We may suspect many of being self-interested, mildly corrupt, out of touch, high-handed, ignorant, duplicitous and even mendacious, but we know for a fact that there are no lookers among them.

I, for one, wouldn’t cyber-stalk the corridors of power.

As long as the meeting points between politicians and the public are run by PR people, we have a problem. Brown will likely lose – more because he can’t play the comfortable everyman than for anything else. Cameron talks a nice line in it, having apparently met everyone the other day. Clegg seemingly hopes that not being either of them will be enough.

And perhaps it will. “Vote for change” must have sounded like a great slogan a few months back, but I hope the Tories are regretting it come 7 May. We’re warned off a hung parliament, but what if it brings electoral reform – and with it an end to these meaningless politics of presentation, gesture and the party line?

So, no; we don’t need to see democracy in high definition. And in the days before we vote we don’t even need to see it.

We should just be listening, and thinking.

IMAGES by cole007, based on the transcript of the second leaders’ debate (on Sky).

And then there are the days you have.

Earlier in the week we noticed a News Distribution Service release that seemed distinctly familiar. In essence: England and Ireland link driving disqualifications, comes into force in February 2010.

I knew I’d covered it before. Sure enough I found my November 2008 Admiral News story and the release that it was based on. In essence: England and Ireland link driving disqualifications, comes into force in spring 2009.

Eleven months and two road safety ministers seperate the two releases, but all credit to Jim Fitzpatrick’s handover notes: Paul Clark manages to supply the same quote.

The paper’s got a story based on a press release from Diamond, a car insurance company that specialises in insuring women. At the time of writing, the article’s standfirst reads:

“Nearly half a million road accidents a year are caused by women drivers applying make-up behind the wheel, a new survey discloses.”

There are three problems with that single paragraph.

First, about 4,000 drivers were polled. There are clearly many more female drivers in the country, so the UK-wide figure is a significant extrapolation. As such, the survey only ‘suggests’, not ‘discloses’ it.

Next is the half a million figure – which is in the paper but not in the version of the press release I have. I think it’s calculated by multiplying an insurance industry figure provided in the release (15 million women drivers in the UK) by the ‘more than 3%’ of respondents who said they had crashed their car as a result of applying lipstick, to arrive at 450,000+. Hardly a robust calculation, based on what roughly 120 women said in a survey.

The final, most significant problem is the time frame. At no point does the original release say ‘per year’ – it’s talking about whether women drivers have ever applied make-up at the wheel.

In 2008, police recorded 170,591 road accidents where someone was killed or injured. You could reasonably guess that, with 30 million-odd vehicles on the roads there’s maybe a million or two accidents in total each year, very roughly half of which will be the fault of a woman.

I’ve applied an advanced journalistic technique to help me conclude that, whatever the Telegraph tells you, make-up is unlikely to account for 50-100% of all the annual accidents involving women motorists: it’s called common sense.

DISCLAIMER - Diamond are part of the Admiral group, an iCrossing client. I have a pre-final copy of the press release which contains none of the errors. The Mirror has the story all wrong, too, suggesting a newswire may be responsible for ‘half million per year’.

I like the way it tells you how many news sources have included the same quote – kind of shows up the news recycling process/reliance on PR.

Although rather than fiddle about with features like this, it might be better if Google News kicked out press release and spam news outlets.

But I suspect that the union is selling its campaign very short with this sorry press release.

Apparently the union has launched “a virtual and actual campaign”. I beg your pardon? But hang on – it gets worse.

Unite Joint General Secretary, Tony Woodley says,”We are using virtual reality to highlight the actual reality for workers producing M&S meat and poultry.”

To be clear, he wasn’t talking about putting people in headsets and walking them through a digitised 3D horror of exploitative labour practices.

No, he was talking about a pay-per-click ad campaign, that was quickly snuffed out by Google because it breached well-established guidelines about advertising on the back of others’ trademarks.

And, perhaps, he was referring to a mailshot sent to over 100,000 UK email addresses and “thousands around the world”.

Amazingly, the cyber warfare strategy (no, really) managed to garner a fair bit of coverage in the mainstream media, meaning that the Unite press office will claim some success.

But I reckon they were lucky on this one. The notion that this kind of online campaign – revolving around a short-lived sponsored link campaign and some spam – represents a radical new frontier in industrial disputes totally fails to grasp the magnitude of what’s happening on the internet.

And by now the press really ought to know that.