CNN / YouTube Debate Tonight

CNN promising a "revolutionary" format

By Sean Conners aka SConn1 Posted July 23, 2007 16:36:09

Tonight, it will be the democrats that will clash on the debate stage. This time, from South Carolina. This is where CNN is holding their joint venture with Youtube in an effort to change the debates and how they work.

Tonight, all the questions will be from people who submitted their questions via the web. I'm not sure that in itself will be revolutionary, although it is a nice change of pace.

Of course, it is possible for the 2 media outlets to simply choose the questions some hired moderator would have asked anyway. Kind of like a top 40 radio station does with requests. If you request a song that isn't on their playlist, even if that is the most requested song of the day, they won't play it. But if 1 person asks for something that is...it gets played. And the impression given by the station is always that this pop number is "what everyone wants."

Same here. With the multitude of submissions, odds are , whereas some will ask interesting and thoughtful questions, others will ask mundane ones. And it will be up to the 2 media outlets to choose what makes the show. I, for one, hope that they stick to the interesting side of things. I'd like to see them somehow pick some "random" questions, but I doubt that such a thing would happen in today's tightly controlled media world. A random question might make a candidate think...and no one on that stage wants that, lol.

So, we shall see shortly just how "revolutionary" this debate will be. At the very least, I hope they do better than the coverage they gave in June. The CNN debates were 100% inferior to both Fox's and MSNBC's efforts by a country mile.

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