I recommend reading Amusing Ourselves to Death. The Lincoln-Douglas debates consisted of a series of hour+ long speeches by each candidate, all in a single sitting, and people went to them and listened.
Lincoln and Douglass were another thing entirely.
I can't say I've heard any in this specific election (mind you, I'm not even American), but I frankly find it easier to keep my attention reading the Lincoln-Douglass speeches than the platitude-filled drivel of many of today's political speeches.
I can only take so much of that before I click away.
I first got on the Internet in 1993.
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet.
Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground name calling.
Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging.
We're going from a literate society to one that uses digital technology to get by on being sub-literate. This is double plus ungood.
The existence of mass media doesn't mean there isn't niche media. The fact that you don't visibly see people participating in respectful debate doesn't mean it's not happening. I think the solution to people who make this complaint isn't to rant about the degeneracy of their fellow man, but to go look harder for some of the many good things, if not always well-advertised things, that exist out there.