I'm back from a snow-bound, blizzard wracked New York City. And wonderful - as always - it was, too.

The first piece I read on my return was Alice Miles' in today's Times, and I couldn't have chosen better. It's a real must-read, on the cynicism of the media. I've tried to extract it, but it needs to be read at length:

THERE IS a shocking tendency, and I’m sorry to say that it seems to be led by the Today programme, to be more interested in the failure of elections in Iraq than in their success.

...Ed Stourton, Today’s man in Baghdad, lingered long and lovingly in the course of an interview with the British Ambassador yesterday upon the illegitimacy of any election result. “It’s quite difficult, isn’t it, to see how people can vote intelligently in some areas of the country when there isn’t the sort of campaign we would recognise,” he even suggested. Poor, stupid Iraqis.

I find this astonishing. Regardless of one’s view of the US-UK attack on Iraq — and I speak as one sceptical about it, at best — surely one should wish the elections on Sunday to be a success. And I don’t mean just want them to be, but will them to be, and certainly not help those seeking to disrupt and undermine them.

People will risk their lives going to the polls in areas of Iraq this weekend, and some parts of the media — in other countries as well as in ours, I assume — have already written off those efforts as worthless, the elections as fatally flawed. What blinkered arrogance. Who needs Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to shoot down a nascent democracy when they have some of Britain’s best-loved and respected voices? Perhaps thousands will be killed voting. Perhaps turnout will shrink to levels which render the result illegitimate. At that point, then, discuss the validity of the result. But not before the poll has even occurred. I have yet to hear a broadcaster deliver a factual report about these elections, one which seeks to raise its sights beyond the suicide bombers and the British political angle (will it help Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?).

One hundred and eleven parties standing in the first election in half a century in a country of 25 million people of whom more than 80 per cent of the electorate say they want to vote. This is a great and exciting exercise in democracy. Iraqis are not voting at the barrel of an American gun or under the heel of a British soldier. The main Sunni political party, the Islamic Party, said yesterday that it will participate in drafting the country’s constitution and might even accept some appointments in government, even though it is boycotting the poll itself. Now surely that is grounds for optimism about the future of the country? Or if not, perhaps the BBC with all its expertise could explain why. Not on a late-night discussion programme on News 24, but on prime time.

I was thinking of writing on this for the weekend, but Alice Miles has said everything I wanted to say. The thought of this weekend's coverage, and the doom-laden analysis which is sure to follow, fills me with ennui. We can all write the scripts already: failure, boycott, disaster, imperialism, occupying force. And nothing about the fact of democracy, and the removal of one of the worst dictators in history.