From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This is it.

OTM's last hour of campaign coverage.

Our long national nightmare is nearly at an end.

Reporters will disembark the campaign buses and planes.

Talking heads will cease blathering about the horse race and start blathering about exit polls.

TV stations will be without the campaign ads that have kept the troubled industry briefly in Clover,

and cable news will soon be without dueling soundbites to parse.

Which means, watch out. We're about to hear a lot more about missing blondes and the war on Christmas.

Yep, after two solid years of posturing and pandering, smearing and smiling punditry and palaver, we get to choose a president.

Luckily, the news media have been with us every step of the way, so there isn't a single thing,

not one single detail about these candidates that we as an electorate haven't had a chance to sort out.

Journalism has done itself proud. Except for a couple of things

that wasn't quite able to nail down. Oh, William Ayers in the Bridge to Nowhere, and the

Reverend Wright and totally cute lobbyists, that's all been nailed left, right, and center.

But there are a few items that have slipped between the cracks, which has something to do

with journalistic failure and something to do with what they call politics as usual. After

eight years of maybe the most opaque presidency ever, the two supposed candidates of change

haven't been so utterly forthcoming. According to Kenneth Vogel, who rounded up some unanswered questions this week for Politico.com,

when it comes to transparency, the times aren't necessarily a change in.

...