Presidential Debates Fueling Interest through a Popular Online Outlet
July 23rd, 2007, JRoyTonight in South Carolina a groundbreaking event in American Politics will take place: American’s voices will be seen and heard. A few weeks ago it was announced that CNN and YouTube would be teaming up to allow the American voter a visible way to get their questions answered by the Presidential candidates. People have been and are being allowed to submit a question through video via YouTube to possibly be answered by a Presidential candidate. CNN will select a group of the videos to be broadcast during the presidential debates and the candidates will be answering them on the spot. This is part of the YouTube YouChoose 08 campaign. YouTube is the #4 searched site on the entire internet falling only behind the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN.) This means that YouTube sees an incredibly large amount of traffic and they feel that they are the perfect outlet to get voters interested in the election. The debate that will take place this evening is between the Democratic candidates that are vying for their parties nomination. On September 17th, the Republican candidates will have their YouTube infused debate covering many of the same issues, but with their specified video submitted questions. Regardless of your political affiliation it has been stated that the creation of this campaign was done in hopes to support the founding grounds of Democracy. Some people are challenging this and stating that this is taking all control out of the candidates hands, while others are praising it in succeeding in its goal.
What are your thoughts? How do you feel about CNN choosing the questions that will be asked?
Update:
After I made this post, I noticed (through the power of Technorati) that another blogger made a very similar post within minutes of mine. It is pretty amazing that personal publishing can connect similar thoughts in this manner
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I’ve seen this being hyped on CNN all weekend.
What would be interesting is if all the questions weren’t pre-screened by CNN, and they really let people ask the questions that they wanted. Rather than hand picking a few that CNN thinks relevant.
Though that would leave room for a lot of idiots to disrupt the process.
I guess the novelty of having ones video chosen is motivation enough to get young people involved in politics … which I hope is more successful than P-Diddy’s vote or die campaign from last time around.
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:44 pm
CNN is claiming that they are going through a very selective screening process to insure that the most thought provoking questions/videos are chosen. It also seems that there were some concerns with the politically correct nature of some of the questions being asked. I understand the need for this but similar to Michael, I think it would be more interesting to let the candidates simply answer the questions that were asked.
I also hope that this is a more successful way to get young people involved in politics. Asking them to pose a question to a candidate promotes education on hot topics and each candidates stance on them. The “Vote or Die” campaign missed the mark on educating youth and filled that with t-shirts spouting its logo. Paris Hilton is a prime example of this, she was featured in a national commercial for the campaign and was photographed in the t-shirt multiple times and did not actually vote in the election. CNN/YouTube seem to be working to truly get young people involved and give them a voice. However, that is a difficult thing to predict, so we may not know until we see the debates and the demographics of who watches them.