It sounded like a pretty good idea last summer. I was enamored with the YouTube Presidential Debates, despite the fact that many of the Democratic candidates during that first debate attempted to side-step the questions. Last night, however, the debates devolved into some strange circus of a reality show.

The questions edited for viewing were silly, stereotypical (how many clips of southern accented, white, rifle-toting men did we really need to see during a Republican debate?), and as Micah Sifry points out on TechPresident this morning, demeaning. The questions Internet users appear to be as oblivious and vapid as sing-songy little forest elves.

The problem isn’t the American people. Rather, it’s the gatekeepers.

Sifry suggests that the YouTube debate was missing input from one or two very important constituencies: the minds working in the trenches at YouTube, living and breathing the medium, and the American people.

Micah quotes Jason Rosenbaum of TheSeminal.com, who points out “Instead of a stupid song about the candidates (that had no question, I might add), an animated cartoon of Dick Cheney, and a question about the confederate flag, we could have had a question about the drug war. Or about energy policy. Or more than one question about Iraq (and one about Iran). Or one about health care.

How do we reinvent the model?

1. Combine the upbeat, quick pace of questions during the last twenty minutes with some of the heavier, more policy-based questions scattered meagerly throughout the rest of the debate.
2. Allow the public to vote on the questions, perhaps by making them register first.
3. Nix the song and dance numbers.
4. Find a moderator(s) who isn’t afraid to interrupt the candidates.
5. Cut the attack ads some of the campaigns tried to pass off as 30-second YouTube style videos.

But can we fault CNN for wanting to craft the debates into a variety-show inspired sing along. After all, we’re talking about a medium that is relatively new and whose attributes often conflict with “what works” on broadcast television. In this case, designing a debate that grabs broadcast headlines is perhaps incompatible with the type of discussions that many consumers of and participators in online politics have grown to expect.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under 2008 Election, Citizen Media, Debates, YouTube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.