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YouTube Debates: Just How Innovative Are They?
By K. Daniel Glover
Reprinted from Monday's PM Edition of Technology Daily
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Old media stalwart CNN and new media upstart YouTube will break new politics and technology ground here Monday evening by hosting an Internet and voter-driven presidential debate. But before the first video question is put to the Democratic candidates on the stage, observers are asking their own questions about the process behind the debate.
The organizers of the debate -- and another one like it for Republican candidates on Sept. 17 in Florida -- bill it as a "history-making" event. The CNN/YouTube debates take to a new level the "town hall" concept introduced to presidential debates in 1992.
Since June 14, anyone with access to a computer and a webcam has been able to submit videotaped questions to the candidates via YouTube's Internet file-sharing service. By Sunday's deadline, 2,989 questions were submitted. CNN journalists screened the questions and decided which ones to ask when the cable network airs the debate live at 7 p.m.
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, called the approach "a logical evolution of the marriage of new media and old media" that has been occurring in recent years. He added that it has made the Internet the "center focus" of politics just 11 years after its "coming-out moment" in the 1996 presidential race.
"This solidifies the notion that the Internet is a prime marketplace [of ideas], the commons of politics," he said.
People in the online politics world agree -- but they said they were hoping for more of a revolution than the evolution Rainie described.
Blogger Jeff Jarvis, who tracks the role of video in the presidential campaigns at PrezVid, lauded CNN and YouTube, which is owned by Google, for moving beyond the "Twinkie, dutiful and dull" questions of past debates. But he added that citizens should have been given more input about what will transpire on the air.
"They should have let go of the controls here and let us pick at least some of the questions," Jarvis said.
Colin Delany, who blogs at e.politics, said the problem with CNN picking all of the questions is that the debate could reflect the same conventional wisdom as traditional media-organized sessions. "I would like to see more so-called stupid questions" instead of the same tired questions repeated on journalism shows like NBC's "Meet The Press," he said.
At a luncheon with reporters in Charleston on Monday, a Google official said CNN made the call on not allowing Internet users to pick the questions the candidates will be asked and held out the possibility that future debates could evolve in that direction. Steve Grove, the news and politics editor at YouTube, added: "We would never say that's a bad idea. ... It's just not the direction we chose to go with this time."
Andrew Keen, author of a new book called "Cult Of The Amateur" that decries the Internet's impact on culture, criticized the CNN/YouTube debates for different reasons. He praised the involvement of CNN as a "formal gatekeeper" that acts as a "talent scout." But he said the "older, wiser, more traditional, authoritative" network should have done the debate alone.
Keen lambasted YouTube as a "self-interested," non-journalistic company whose only goal is to make money by driving traffic to its Web site. He said YouTube is "using the concept of the public interest to pursue its private interests."
"These are not responsible people," Keen said. "They're not the people I want to trust politics with."
Posted by Andrew on July 23, 2007 04:15 PM | Permalink
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