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Another good sign 

A late and minor straw in the wind on the BBC News at 10 tonight. After months of assuming it was an easy Bush win, their tone has changed. Matt Frei reports from the Bush camp that “the mood music isn’t good”. Gavin Hewitt with Kerry reckons the candidate “looks like a man who has just finished his final exams and is happy with the results”.

An experiment in being cut off 

I inadvertently experimented with being largely cut off from most sources of outside information this weekend. We went away to a beautiful house in the countryside, which had no telephone and no television.

So the only news I had on the last weekend before the election was the morning newspapers which we bought each day.

The Sunday papers were full of the Friday video from Osama bin Laden (which broke too late for the Saturday papers here). Both left (The Observer) and right (The Sunday Telegraph) seemed to agree that the intervention had helped Bush.

Lo and behold, when I returned to London today and logged on to my more trusted sources of news and analysis, the story was far more nuanced. I’m happy to report that I’m still feeling very happy about my election prediction that we will have a comfortable Kerry win tomorrow.

What was interesting about the weekend in this context was that in the 2000 election, beyond doubt, I would have been utterly content with newspapers to provide my information and analysis. Now they seem very thin gruel indeed. I can pass a weekend blissfully happy away from my computer, but I certainly don’t count myself adequately informed by doing it.

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