A debate where citizen is star

Monday's YouTube event nudged the format into cyberspace, but it was no Internet breakthrough.

from the July 25, 2007 edition

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Though the moderator, Anderson Cooper, tried to force candidates to answer the questions, their delivery over pre-recorded video made some of the sharper ones easier to finesse, some analysts said.

"In some town-hall debates, people had a chance to follow up and drill and nail the candidate," says Steffen Schmidt, a political scientist at Iowa State University. "Here, people can't follow up."

In some cases, the juxtaposition of the quirky questions – some filmed with jerky handheld cameras and MTV-style editing cuts – with the candidates' sober replies seemed to highlight the gap between politicians and young Americans rather than bridge it.

Still, several experts praised CNN and YouTube for trying to engage voters in new ways. At the very least, the debate at The Citadel, a state military college here, was a milestone in the growing cross-pollination between the Internet, television, and presidential politics, they said.

It also marked a coming of age for YouTube, whose earlier influence on campaigns was mostly as an emporium of painfully unscripted moments often caught by amateur photographers: Sen. John McCain singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann; Mr. Edwards fussing over his hair to a soundtrack of "I feel pretty"; Sen. George Allen (R) of Virginia calling his opponent's campaign aide a "macaca," a comment that helped cost his reelection last fall.

CNN's role in selecting the questions Monday had drawn fire early on from bloggers who saw it as an affront to the culture of YouTube, where videos with the highest view counts and user ratings rise to the top of a screen.

"You guys have a chance to really engage with the Web audience, and you're missing out on that by playing the traditional role of gatekeeper," Joshua Levy, an associate editor at Techpresident.com, a website that monitors the Web's role in the campaigns, said of CNN.

David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief and the debate's executive producer, said screening was necessary to ensure that candidates addressed a range of issues and to filter out mischief. Among the top-three rated videos, he noted, were questions about a UFO conference and whether Arnold Schwarzenegger is a cyborg.

"We will embrace as much of the spirit of YouTube and its sort of wonderful oddness as possible," he said Friday in a phone interview. But "if our questions involve cyborgs and UFOs, it will be the last time the new media is allowed a seat at the table to select a president."

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