No one ever really truly “wins” pre-poll TV debates. Politics is too atomised these days. A candidate might win the studio audience, but lose at home. The core support could be energetically fired-up – at the expense of turning off crucial undecided voters.

But the studio lights’ intense glare can reveal essential truths. Last week’s first major TV events of the EU referendum campaign displayed in high definition the parameters of the next fraught 18 days of campaigning.

Michael Gove was introduced to a wider audience than ever before, and he is holding nothing back in his mission to win on 23 June.

David Cameron now realises he is in a battle that might not go his way. The prime ministerial deference of Sky TV’s studio audiences has been parked, as became abundantly clear from the unexpected response to a bad joke of mine about whether Brexit would first cause a global recession or world war three.

The studio audiences over two nights played their part. They warmed to Gove’s appeal to sovereignty and independence, in the face of my cantankerous and mostly futile attempt to get him to explain Brexit economics. And Cameron’s strategy of warning the nation of his fears of an epic economic and diplomatic “roll of the dice” was met with public scepticism.

In a building across from our studio, the Tory psychodrama played out. Ministers from the same party, even the same department, were spinning against each other, centimetres apart, in full view of the cameras. The pollsters say this referendum will be decided by the turnout. And so we have a competitive version of Project Fear – economics v migration?

Every little detail matters in the game of pre-poll TV specials. There isn’t yet a jury selection, but each side fixes the proportion of remain, leave and undecided voters (a third each), and even the seating plan (scattered around, not grouped). It is certainly true that the core leave support is more enthusiastic, and therefore bankable for polling day. But it is also louder in TV studios and on social media. Active Brexiters tweet two to three times more frequently than remainers.

As these on-screen meetings of politicians and public intensify, it is likely that meticulously balanced audiences will not feel that way. Anyone in Scotland in September 2014, who witnessed the sea of pro-independence saltires, might have sensed independence was far closer than it transpired.

The Scottish precedent has been considered carefully by the Stronger In campaign. In theory, the relentless message about economic risks will tilt the quiet mass of the electorate to vote with the status quo later this month. Two dozen recent referendums around the world have followed this pattern.

But in order to motivate the quiet masses to the ballot box, it is helpful to remain that it appears close right now, as it was helpful to the Scottish no campaign that some polls showed a late yes surge.

The underlying drivers of voting behaviour – economic risk – have not changed, even after leave’s week-long migration offensive. The audience members we spoke to after the Gove Q&A were still concerned about the lack of an economic plan, even as they appreciated his ability to argue his vision of UK sovereignty.

That was the other thing clearly on display in Gove’s interview: he wanted to talk about anything but economics, so naturally that’s where we focused. He wanted to talk about control, and personal anecdotes.

The leave campaign needs to muddy the waters on economic risk and focus on sovereignty and migration. Vote Leave’s top brass believe the beginning of the purdah period, the inability of No 10 to deploy the civil service, has seen Cameron “lose his star striker”.

Michael Gove wanted to talk about anything but economics during his interview on Sky. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Cameron has a battle. Gove is a formidable debater, who chose to criticise his boss’s “scaremongering”. He will stop at nothing now. He thinks he can win on turnout, now that remain have failed to carve out a lead.

The appeal for sovereign control, a split in the press, might all change that typical referendum pattern. When it comes to it, will Gove be willing to turn this into a referendum on Cameron? The lord chancellor’s appeal against scaremongering “elites” to (and at) me, suggest that he is ready to take that step.

So we face quite a fortnight. But there is another feature of the Scottish referendum that is relevant even beyond this month: post-truth politics – the elevation of strategic political lying to an art form.

In this debate we have seen evasions, exaggerations and downright verifiable untruths. And yet the repetition of false facts that do well in focus groups yields salience and eventually pollutes the political process. Deference can not unwind the committed marketer of mistruths. We see this around the world.

The “he said – she said” staple of political journalism can be a disservice to the viewer and reader, a form of fake impartiality. There is nothing partial about a verifiable truth.

Just as social media subjects journalists to the rollercoaster of politically committed “feedback” about their every utterance, politicians on all sides need to expect to be hit very hard – even harder than Sky News’s in/out programmes.

Displaying an equal degree of due disrespect – to all sides’ spurious claims – is our only defence against a bottomless pit of political nonsense. There may be a lot of it about on our TV screens in the coming days.

Faisal Islam is political editor of Sky News