So here’s how my hypothetical one-hour news show would be covering this election cycle.

Instead of hearing Chris Matthews or Anderson Cooper talk night in and night out to same pundits about the latest poll numbers or the latest gaffe on the campaign trail, we’d have a “Health Care Week.”

Each night would start with some actual reporting — a series of hard-hitting exposes about that status of health care in America (this would be a fact-driven report, not a debate). Then we’d invite experts — as in people in academia, not talking heads — to discuss possible solutions to the problem. Then we’d put those experts in a dialogue with representatives from the candidates, picking apart their plans on a substantive basis.

Next would be “Iraq War Week,” “Immigration Week,” etc. Well, you get the idea.

Crazy, huh? The personality-driven news programs that dominate the prime time landscape have found their perfect match, it seems, in personality-driven politics. The last thing they’d be looking for is substance, boring conversations about policy.

Maybe that’s true, but as Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle points out, even in a perfect storm of an election year, pure politics never trumps pop culture.

Responding to a column from New York Times reporter David Carr, in which Carr called Election 2008 a “breakaway hit” and the cure for Hollywood’s writers’ strike, Goodman points to the scoreboard:

First, let’s make something very clear: Unless Clinton and Obama stage a knife fight, “Grey’s Anatomy” - even reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” - is going to kill them in the ratings. Even something as cheap and shallow as “American Gladiators” would absolutely destroy the ratings for almost any political event.

Carr even quoted an e-mail exchange with his boss, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who said, “I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24′ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ ”

That might be true, but there’s absolutely no correlation to ratings and, thus, popularity. I love two wonks talking politics as much as the next barfly, but I hope Carr and Keller don’t think the election is more thrilling to Americans than popular culture because, well, it’s not.

Carr even quoted an e-mail exchange with his boss, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who said, “I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24′ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ ”

That might be true, but there’s absolutely no correlation to ratings and, thus, popularity. I love two wonks talking politics as much as the next barfly, but I hope Carr and Keller don’t think the election is more thrilling to Americans than popular culture because, well, it’s not.

In fact, it’s not even close. It’s one thing to get pumped on politics, but it’s another to compare that excitement with the drawing power of prime-time television series. There’s a quote in the column from Time magazine’s David Von Drehle that is so ludicrously over the top in its comparison of political figures and series television characters that I can’t even bring myself to repeat it.

As Carr notes: “Almost 3.3 million people tuned in to CNN’s prime-time election coverage last Tuesday, nearly double the number of the 2004 New Hampshire primary. Fox has a bump of its own, with 3.06 million viewers, up 60 percent from 2004. MSNBC had a more modest 1.64 million viewers, but still a 150 percent bump from the previous election cycle.” [...]

Since Carr’s column mentioned “Grey’s Anatomy” twice, here’s something to chew on. Last week’s episode drew 17.86 million viewers. They could hold a nude presidential debate and still not get those numbers. Who cares, indeed.

So what do I take from this exchange? Forget about if you can’t beat them, join them. As the news channels have tried more and more to become pop culture — tapping into well-worn narratives, rather than the truth — they think they are finding a way to survive. Really, however, they are hastening their demise, by showing how news, no matter how much you fictionalize it, is never better than the real thing.

Leave the other stuff to the novelists and do what you seemingly have forgotten is your unique mission: seek the truth.

After the New Hampshire primary results revealed the polls to be wrong, I watched as Chris Matthews tried to defend polling, saying, in essence, that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about if we didn’t have the polls.

Nothing to talk about, indeed.