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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David Colarusso, a high school physics teacher from Lexington, Mass., tried an end-run around CNN's role with a website, CommunityCounts.us, that let users cast votes for questions they most wanted candidates to answer. The top vote-getter was about whether to impeach President Bush. "I felt there should be a way for the community to leverage their voice and say, 'We'd like you to answer this question," Mr. Colarusso said.

The effort appeared to have little effect on CNN's choices Monday night.

What did Americans ask?

Most of the 2,989 questions uploaded to YouTube from June 14 to July 22 featured earnest-looking people in some cluttered corner of their homes posing familiar questions about healthcare, education, and the environment.

But there were some twists. A question Monday about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan came from a couple posing with African children at a refugee camp near Darfur. A Long Island breast cancer survivor doffed a wig to reveal a bald head and said she had "gone for years without health insurance that would have allowed me to take preventative medicine."

YouTube users who submitted questions seemed to find the exercise empowering, whether or not they made prime time.

Anthony Amabile, a disabled artist from New Castle, Pa., said he paid little attention to the campaigns before recording a question about health insurance. He said that even if his video isn't selected – it wasn't – "my voice is out there and somebody will hear it."

It is hard to argue that the debate ushered the YouTube generation into a colloquy with its political leaders. On a website where users upload hundreds of thousands of videos each day, the number of debate questions – fewer than 3,000 over more than five weeks despite heavy coverage in the media and blogosphere – suggest that the chance to query a presidential hopeful ranks somewhere below the first reason Americans go online.

Nor was the new media format immune to old-school lobbying. Interest groups from the AARP to Planned Parenthood pressed members to upload multiple videos of the same questions, said Steve Grove, YouTube's news and politics editor. One Democratic candidate, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, even posted a script for an Iraq war question on his website and urged supporters to recite it in their YouTube submissions.

CNN deemed the Biden and interest-group videos an effort to "stuff the ballot box" and rejected them. "It's 21st-century political activism," Mr. Grove acknowledged in an interview. "Spam the YouTube inbox with your question."

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