Inform (FAIL). Educate (FAIL). Entertain (FAIL).

The 'public service' broadcasters could not deal with the Daniel Hannan speech in terms of the man or his arguments, for a number of reasons.

• Hannan is a likeable, well-liked and fluent Conservative. Who could have known that such a thing existed?
• He is outside the ProgCon, to put it mildly and so impossible to embroil in Wark-ish tangential 'debate' on non-issues. Unreliable in the studio.
• He is well-informed and his strong suit is substance. He takes questions at face value and answers them as they are put. See above.
• He is relaxed and does not take offence easily, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour. Impossible to bait. Even Paxo would have a job being rude to him and even if he could, Hannan would not bite so that Paxo would end up smiling at him. Must not happen - Hannan is a right wing Tory.
• He relies on his arguments for votes, not on any kind of circus and is outstandingly successful in so doing. Does TV have any interviewers up to dealing with political substance at his level?

Them: Daniel Hannan would not make good television in traditional television's own terms. He does not conform to their categories in political or performance terms.

Us: He makes excellent television in the audience's terms - self-evidently and to the mystified amazement of classical television makers.

Unlike Internet news media (blogs/independents) and print newspapers except the Guardian, UK television and radio is an hermetically-sealed and narrow-minded world. Their take on the Hannan event was neither Hannan himself nor his attack on Brown, but their own surprise at the Hannan event. They classified the story under 'Internet' rather than as popular (yes, popular) politics.

This week, the broadcasters and especially the BBC have demonstrated, far more effectively than their critics' most extravagant assertions, their incomprehension of their audience, of politics and current affairs, and - most of all - of their own decay, obsolescence and historic failure.

Andrew Neil, one of the world's most experience and most political editors, was the first to show the Hannan clip (part of it, and not even the most sensational part) on mainstream TV, on a programme watched only by politics nerds. In that forum, that editor asked, 'Who is Hannan? Who has ever heard of him?'

Hannan's attack in a major international forum on a half-dead Prime Minister, contemporaneously breaking all records for a political Internet TV clip, was no more than an aside in a discussion between the UK's most popular political anger-blogger and an alarmingly weird and unphotogenic newcomer to blogging who hates the first man but aches to emulate him in gaining popular following for a widely-disregarded Labour effort.

Channel 4 News handled Hannan the same way, even mysteriously bringing in the same unpleasant freak to oppose Hannan himself, which he conspicuously failed to do, to the irritation of the news anchor who told him, as Andrew Neil had done earlier, to shut up.

Here's a thing. Why these invitations for Draper, on two publicly funded TV channels? He annoys the presenters and only ever parrots off-topic and untruthful speak-your-weight partisan abuse. Are the ProgCon producers trying to draw some sort of equivalence between the intelligent, serious, articulate and successful Hannan (Oxford First) and the thick, ridiculous, inarticulate and failed Draper (expelled-from-shrink-college)?

BBC Radio covered Hannan in the same way, briefly and once only, as a mystifying 'You Tube phenomenon', rather than as political news.

So what do we learn from all this?

1. That TV, and the BBC in particular, has lost the plot in political news coverage.
2. That they are now so inward-looking and derelict that they cannot see how the British Prime Minister being torn apart in the European Parliament is political news.
3. That they have no comprehension whatever of the reasons for the worldwide popularity of the Hannan news clip. I said 'news clip'.
4. That they are totally perplexed by the Internet and have vastly underestimated (a) the extent to which, as a news medium, it has overtaken them, and (b) the rate at which their own irrelevance is increasing.
5. That they have, for no ascertainable reason, categorised Derek Draper as a credible political voice and an authority on blogging.

Sorry, chaps. There is no hope for you. None. You have dug your own grave and you have dug it deep.

Can I stop paying for you now?