Have you ever been door- to-door canvassing? Not to sell encyclopedias or anything, just as part of an election campaign. Well, I have. Quite a bit, actually, despite harbouring a strong suspicion that it doesn't make much of a difference to the result.

Anyway, canvassing isn't quite what you'd think. People are amazingly polite, even when you interrupt Coronation Street or dinner. Sometimes they even complain that you only knock on their door when there's an election on. (My brother responded to one startled voter: of course I only knock on your door when there's an election on. I've got a job. And a family. Do you expect me to be wandering up and down your road all the time, knocking on doors at random for fun?)

And when you've done it for a while, a terrible thought begins to cross your mind. Is it really a good idea to put these people in charge? Many of them don't seem - how shall I put this - strikingly well informed. There are quite a lot of people with odd hobbyhorses. It doesn't take too many roads before you begin to wonder if this democracy lark hasn't been oversold.

Then, when you've pounded a few more pavements, you have second thoughts. People aren't that bothered with politics, it's true. But they know what they think, they understand their own experiences and they have a good feel for what's in their own interests and those of their neighbours. You realise that your first view was arrogant. You understand that a system that learns from the huge variety of people's experiences and instincts is better than some ideology you made up in your head after reading a load of books.

There is a big intellectual debate about all this, of course. James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds argues that the collective view of a huge number of independent individuals is much to be preferred to the guidance of a small group of experts. But Bryan Caplan, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, responds that voters are not independent and make systematic errors. Expert economists can demonstrate the value of free trade, but voters as a group just don't get it.

This debate is interesting, but even without it most of us share the same instinct. We voters are flawed, we make systematic errors and we follow the crowd, thus reducing its wisdom. But we are still the best game in town. On the whole, relying on a democratic consensus produces a more prosperous, peaceful and stable nation. Democracy is messy, but messy is still best.

This democratic instinct is strong. So, while following the row over the BBC's refusal to screen the Gaza appeal, I have been wondering why it has deserted us.

To me, a battle between the BBC and Oxfam over impartial coverage of the Middle East is a little like the Iran-Iraq War. As Henry Kissinger put it, can't they both lose? And on the question itself I go back and forward. Yes, people are suffering and it is right to help them. Full stop. You can donate without taking a view on whose fault it was. On the other hand, for the charities involved there is a strong political motivation and an anti-Israel agenda. This appeal is not just humanitarian, it is political. Yes, no, I can go on like this for ages.

The thing is, I shouldn't have to.

It is impossible to determine whether the appeal is impartial because so much is in the eye of the beholder. The classic study in this field was conducted by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril. In their paper They Saw a Game they followed a 1951 football match between the Princeton Tigers and the Dartmouth Indians. Watching the same game and the same commentary, two sets of fans had wildly different interpretations of what they had seen. The Princeton students almost all believed that violence had been instigated by Dartmouth and that their own players had been guilty of only minor infractions. Dartmouth fans blamed Princeton.

In the 1980s Robert Vallone and his colleagues repeated this work. This time they used television coverage of the Middle East conflict. And guess what? Partisans of the Israelis thought the coverage was biased against them, while pro-Arab viewers thought they had suffered from bias. And both were more likely to recall negative references to their own side.

No one, therefore, is ever going to agree about the content of the appeal. What seems objective to one viewer will seem biased to another. So my solution is simple - just let people disagree. It should be possible to pay for political advertisements on television. Let them say what they want about Gaza. Freedom. It's messy, but messy is still best.

I understand why we all worry about American-style advertising of causes. It means that money becomes a much bigger part of the political equation. And it allows people to make tendentious negative adverts and reach voters without any filter. So of course there are disadvantages.

Yet from the cacophony, from the riding of the absurd hobbyhorses, from the promotion of ill-informed opinion will emerge a better politics. We understand this to be true with democracy, with allowing people to vote. We see that pooling opinion - wild, uncensored opinion - is better than the dictatorship of experts. So why not with this? Why do we think we need to be protected from free speech by someone deciding whether a point is acceptable?

Voters often worry that politicians speak disproportionately to each other and the Westminster media. One reason why this happens is that getting the Westminster media to cover a story may be the only way anybody will ever hear of it.

Anybody who has got anything they want to say about Gaza should be free to say it. And they should be able to buy airtime to do so. If they were, I suspect we wouldn't be having this row about what the BBC should do.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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