Walking into the brilliantly white reception of the New Statesman’s Blackfriars office was like entering a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. An entire wall was covered by TV and computer monitors, displaying an array of news channels. New media technology is definitely upon us. Jon Bernstein, former Multimedia Editor at Channel 4 News and deputy editor of New Statesman, agrees.

With the onset of the political leaders’ TV debates in the UK, I wondered if all this ‘new media’ lark really mattered in politics. Will the televised debates simply be like watching another inconsequential episode of X-Factor where, to extend the comparison, each leader is singing the same old uninspired tune?

“It’s entirely possible”, says Jon. “There’s always the danger that after about half an hour of the first one, people will literally switch off, never to switch back on. In fact, the only time they do switch back on is if someone alerts them to an enormous gaffe.”

He explains that because the politicians are acutely aware that it’s just as likely that a gaffe will be the main headline as some winning argument around a piece of policy, it engenders a sense of conservatism about what the politicians say. “What starts out as something that is potentially quite heavy going and turgid turns into something that is incredibly turgid and boring because no one wants to make a mistake.”

The 2008 US presidential TV debates: ‘The low point of the whole year’

Jon argues that the debates between John McCain and Barak Obama in 2008 are an example of this. “The low point of the whole year was those debates. There was a bit of churlishness from McCain, and plenty of wonkery from Obama, but it wasn’t a great watch for anybody but the really political aficionados.”

So is there something fundamentally wrong with TV as a podium for political debate? As Jon sees it, “there’s nothing inherent in TV that makes it a dull platform. If you witness some of the best TV interviews that Jon Snow does on Channel 4 News or Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight – that is really compelling politics on the TV. Why? Because it is confrontational in nature; that makes interesting TV, and that makes politicians honest”.

The problem with these debates is that there are incredibly complex guide lines which foster very little real interaction between the politicians. “Whether it’s Alistair Stuart for ITV, Adam Boulton for Sky, or David Dimbleby for the BBC – these guys aren’t going to be really confrontational as they could be”.

“TV can do it”, Jon reassures me. It’s just the setup of the leaders debates is not the way to go about it.

Even so, in an age of ‘freedom of speech’, the selective coverage of only the three main parties doesn’t really seem fair. However, Jon highlights the counter-argument. “Maybe it should just be between David Cameron and Gordon Brown because Nick Clegg doesn’t stand a chance of becoming the leader. You could say, actually, it should be less, not more.”

‘A lot of what happens on Twitter and Facebook is preaching to the converted’

I asked Jon whether he thinks that the internet is, instead, the main platform for providing marginal parties with exposure. “The mistake people make about new media”, he clarifies, “is seeing it in mass broadcasting terms; the one-to-many communication. In fact, the internet is about many-to-many conversations between like minded people. So a lot of what happens on Twitter and Facebook is, if you like, preaching to the converted.”

As I learn, most people get their politics mediated through the telly and newspapers. “The internet isn’t going to harm the electoral chances of these smaller parties. But I’m not convinced it’s going to increase their chances either.”

‘Politicians absolutely should bother with the internet’

Jon also thinks that the “people who use new media more creatively are the insurgents: the people that don’t have the power.” In the Bush years, it was the left that led the way in new media with sites like MoveOn.org. “The people first to the blogosphere in UK politics”, such as Paul Stains and Tim Montgomery, “were all right-of-centre – in a sense, they were the insurgents”.

An interesting twist on this, however, is that the broader left has now got its act together. This is because, having been behind in the polls, “now they feel like the underdog.”

E-petitions, pioneered by Number 10 a few years ago, were an “interesting experiment”, Jon tells me. “But the stuff that really caught light was things like Jeremy Clarkson for PM. It’s fun, but doesn’t necessarily deliver on engagement and transparency.”

As for the promised data deluge of online government statistics: “are they going to pick and choose what they make available? Of course they are.” While Jon recognises that the direction of travel is positive, and that politicians “absolutely should bother with the internet”, he’s not convinced it’s a revolution in the way politics works.

In Space Odyssey, Dr. Bowman bravely pulls the plug on ship’s defective on-board computer HAL 9000. Fanaticising a little, I wondered what difference it would make to the election if you pulled the plug on the internet. Referring back to his previous point, Jon tells me that it would be political organisation, rather than broadcasting, that would suffer. “But then again, in the 2014 election we’ll probably look back and think people were getting excited about some pretty trivial things.”

The televised debates are 90 minutes each, aired on ITV, SKY and the BBC, at 8.30pm – 10.00pm on Thursdays April 15 and 22, and Wednesday April 29. They are themed: covering domestic, foreign, and economic policy respectively.

I’m starting to believe that the Papacy is actually being run by Richard Dawkins. No other explanation for the succession of public relations disasters surrounding the current Catholic leadership seems to make sense.

I’ve been scouring Google for previous Popes with a worse idea of public relations than Pope Benedict XVI. I was very disappointed to find that the stories I had never looked up for fear that they were false were indeed so; unfortunately, neither a horse, nor a pregnant woman, has (probably) ever been Pope, although it serves me right for getting my historical information from Blackadder. It’s also probably not true that the Pope had to expose his balls to Cardinals; and not once was the expression “Testiculos habet et bene pendentes” (“He has testicles, and they hang well”) uttered. I feel like a kid who’s just been told Santa’s not real.

It appears that, historically, in order to become Pope, you had to be about the most corrupt person they could find. This is unsurprising, given the amount of grisly stuff the job often involved. Sergius III is a particular favourite. His corrupt actions include: having two of his papal predecessors strangled to death, and knocking up a prominent noblewoman with the future Pope John XI.

‘Historically, in order to become Pope, you had to be about the most corrupt person they could find’

However, in a time when TV subscriptions weren’t high, he could perhaps get away with a bit more than he would now. Pope Benedict, however, doesn’t seem to understand that the media, and ideas about responsibility of authority have changed. While he is nowhere near as bad as most historical Popes, he appears to be out of touch with the expectations of religious leaders in the modern world.

There is a hitherto unwritten list of things not to be accused of when leader in any capacity of anything ever. It reads like this: Things Not To Be Accused Of, And To Take Really Bloody Seriously If You Are (in reverse order): Paedophilia, Nazi Paedophilia, and Unrepentant Nazi Paedophilia.

While I don’t for a second believe the Pope is a paedophile or a Nazi, his belittling of accusations of paedophilia as ‘petty gossip’, and his preacher’s comparison of anger at the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism, play into the hands of those who wish to see the news in black and white.

The accusations of the Pope’s own inaction over the abuse of several deaf children by Rev. Lawrence Murphy in America are damaging, and need to be dealt with in some way. That way is not to blame the press, who have finally exposed the abuses that for so long went unpunished. It is certainly also not to dismiss such accusations as unimportant. Doing so has merely further highlighted something they wanted to quickly move on from.

The anti-Semitism comparison was not itself anti-Semitic, although it was tactless. The problem is that it brings to public attention a string of PR disasters that could very easily be perceived as being so. The push to beatify Pope Pius XII, accused of indirect complicity by not speaking out against the Nazis as Pope during the Second World War, and the decision to lift the ex-communication of holocaust-denier Richard Williamson were politically unwise, and morally dubious, moves.

‘A Nazi Pope is just a James Bond villain/Dan Brown book waiting to happen’

In addition to this, Pope Benedict appointed as Bishop of Linz, in Austria, a man who claimed that Hurricane Katrina was punishment from God for tolerance of homosexuality, and famously made enemies within the Islamic faith by publicly quoting a Byzantine emperor, accusing Islam of being “evil and inhuman”.

All of this will be worsened in the eyes of the public by the Pope’s obligatory membership of Hitler Youth as a German child during World War Two. While all evidence shows that he didn’t particularly enjoy the ‘Hitler Youth’ experience, a Nazi Pope is just a James Bond villain/Dan Brown book waiting to happen, and the public always prefers a good story to reality.

All of this together suggests to me that there must be some underhanded play going on. You would think the leaders of the Catholic Church would be a smart bunch; they wouldn’t needlessly insult other religions, then bring these insults back into focus when dealing with other problems; they would want to minimise any risk of accusations of papal anti-Semitism given Benedict’s Hitler Youth past; they would never belittle accusations of paedophilia, and in apology would be humble and clear in their condemnation of paedophilia and those who cover for it.

Yet none of these obvious actions has been taken. Rather, they have gone out of their way to insult other religions, and to ostentatiously defend their own to the point of dismissing accusations of sexual abuse as gossip.

Only one man so boldly described religion as what the Catholic Church appears to be advertising itself as. Only one man painted religion so crudely and unilaterally as abusive, tribal groups fighting it out between each other, protecting their own and abusing others unrepentantly: a man who has disappeared from public view recently, and who has been oddly quiet about the whole debacle; a man who, I wager, has never been seen in the same room as the Pope.

So watch out for Dawkins’ new bestseller All Religious Leaders Are Unrepentant Nazi Paedophiles. You heard it here first.