Buffalo alternative newspaper The Beast publishes their list of the Top Ten Election Campaign Hacks. My favorite: number four, James Bennet:

Take Bennet's wrap of the second debate ("In a Disguised Gym, Softballs and Political Drama," Oct. 9). Bennet's general argument in this piece was that there was a special "dynamic" to the debate that you missed if, unlike Bennet, you weren't there.

"Inside the hall, the scene was of a theater in the round," he wrote, adding that "Viewers at home were denied the peek behind the political and news media curtain that voters here received."

Bennet goes on to describe some of those elements of the "dynamic" that were invisible to TV viewers:

Those viewers did not see how the moderator, Charles Gibson of ABC, hammed it up with a colleague, Chris Wallace of Fox News, who was seated in one of the network boxes overlooking the hall.

"Hi, Chris," Mr. Gibson hallooed, before the debate began, to the delight of the assembled voters. "Hello, Charlie," Mr. Wallace called back with a grin.

In the hands of a mere mortal, this scene is written as follows: "Charlie Gibson said hi to Chris Wallace." But in Bennet's hands, this "hallooing" was a bit of "theater in the round," part of a "drama that mixed calculated stagecraft and moments of genuine improvisation," only discernible to those who were there to hear Charlie Gibson say "hi" to Chris Wallace.