[Editor Note -- The following study was undertaken by Alex Lamballe, a junior varsity debater at Wake Forest University. His study examines the questions used in two CNN/YouTube debates. He assesses if the purportedly democratic format fulfilled it purpose.]
Democracy should be about more than great television. And it doesn't end with our ability to ask more vibrant and compelling questions. It also includes strengthening our ability to get real answers. (Sifry 2007)
The CNN/YouTube debates produced a great deal of political excitement from the day that they were announced. Most of the excitement was focused on the idea that the inclusion of YouTube video questions in the debate would make the presidential debate process more democratic and deliberative by bridging the gap between the general public and the candidates for the 2008 presidential election.
Unfortunately, the excitement over the potential of the new debate format to produce democratic change noticeably dulled just after the first of the two debates. Many people did not find the debate to be as revolutionary as they believed it would be and were generally disappointed with the inability of the CNN/YouTube debate to produce a discussion much different than that heard in past debates.
Indeed, the trend carried over into the second CNN/YouTube debate, which similarly failed to produce a dramatically innovative debate. The current controversy surrounding the debates frequently centers on the concern that CNN chose the questions for the debates. Indeed, much of the failure of the CNN/YouTube debates to produce a more educational and deliberative political discussion can be explained by CNN's role in selecting the questions for the debates.
Political debates utilizing the YouTube format are occurring in other countries following the CNN/YouTube model established in the 2007 primary season. My search has not been systematic but the globalization of the format came to our attention when Georgios Stasinopoulos (Athens) had two of three questions he prepared selected and asked during the Greek national telecast.
Georgios is an alumni of Ben Franklin Transatlantic Initiative, a State Department program hosted at Wake Forest University. The students prepared questions for the Democratic and Republican YouTube debates this past summer. (Examples)
In this question he asks about the integration of immigrants in Greek society.
My prejudice is that the CNN-YouTube debates were poorly orchestrated affairs, and have said so on record (Minnesota Public Radio) . This project is a more systematic examination of the questions selected by CNN. After viewing the questions preferred by Anderson Cooper and others I expected to find the following:
Entertainment bias in selection
Gotcha Questions
Themes aimed at Party (GOP) hypocrisy
Issues selection tilted toward conflict/drama rather than consequence
When I examined the individual questions my inquiry took an unexpected turn. Certainly, many of the questions could be viewed through the above lens, but the variety of questions was much richer than their generalized duplicity. Damning the questions as double-dealing alone fails to answer how the questions worked. What were their specific sins?
techPresident has just pointed out that YouTube has invited feedback following the CNN debacle GOP debate. They interpret that call as YouTube "responding to the CNN blowback." OK, but why? CNN made the choice from thousands of questions, selected the rotations, and delighted in the "you're a hypocrite" framing. The offending party is not YouTube.
The jury is in and it is nearly unanimous: CNN's selection process produced entertainment, not light. Even the Save-the-Debate-Coalition condemned the process. The voice was less that of voters and more of CNN's "crack political team." Save-the-Debate writes:
Unfortunately, CNN's flawed editorial process in choosing the questions asked of the candidates marred an otherwise lively debate and betrayed the trust of the Republican candidates and the YouTube user community.
Not to mention voters who are left to assess crazy questions eliciting equally undignified answers.
Writing after the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, historian Henry Steele Commager lamented that televised debates "submit the greatest elective office in the world to the chances of arbitrary and miscellaneous questions put forward not to elicit information or to illuminate problems, but to provide sensations." Commager, of course, was bemoaning the tendencies of reporter panelists to use a television debate not to enlighten voters on important topics but to produce headlines or make journalistic capital. Yesterday's Republican You Tube Debate certainly did little to demonstrate that questions from "real people" are any less vulnerable to those urges. With an array of potentially provocative questions at their disposal, journalists apparently gain new license for putting candidates on the spot and for testing who's glib under fire.
Unless Anderson Cooper or one of the candidates wedges them into the debate as a segue or follow up, we probably will not hear questions about the breaking news of questionable travel expenses using tax money to help Rudy conduct adulterous visits, news that broke just hours ago at Politico.
CNN can discuss little else in the hour leading up to the debate and their reporters say that's the main buzz they are discussing.
But the questions were submitted by citizens who knew none of this. In fact, most of the questions will also pre-date the tiff between Rudy and Romney about Romney's crime record as Massachusetts governor as well as questions about Romney's having ruled out inclusion of Muslims in his cabinet.
These are the kinds of questions journalist questioners would love to raise. But they also do not make for very good debate. What facts and arguments could be brought, really?
My guess is that tonight's debate will stick to broader themes of experience and policy, the kinds of questions citizens tend to favor. The format has a certain rigidity that does not lend itself to last minute improvisation.
If not, the CNN crew must be hard at work picking out some last minute YouTube questions that would serve as good springboards to the questions the media really wants answered.
To get ready for tonight's GOP CNN/YouTube presidential primary debate (8pm EST on CNN and streamed at CNN.com) I read the blogs and the papers so you wouldn't have to. If you want to check my work or read more, I bookmarked everything for you at del.icio.us.
To find the best of the web on tonight's debate just go to del.icio.us and insert the following (no quote marks, no commas) into the search box there: GOP youtube debatescoop. To narrow the search to articles focused on the questions add the word questions. To narrow to pieces previewing and predicting add the word preview.
After the debate you can do the same search but add winners/losers to find items discussing how the debate turned out.
But for now, you can simply click on "read more" to find my synthesis of the news and my own take aways from it. . . .
Tonight's GOP YouTube debate provides an exciting opportunity for members of the American public to ask the candidates questions to which they really want answers. Members of the public will not only have the opportunity to write questions for candidates, but they will also be able to ask their questions of the candidates in their own way via YouTube videos. This system creates a valuable opportunity to study the structure and delivery of the debate's questions and the impact those questions have on the debate itself.
The kinds of questions asked in presidential debates, as well as how those questions are asked, bear significant implications for how candidates answer the questions and how the voting public perceives the answers to those questions. Ben-Porath, in his piece, "Framing the Candidates" (Paper presented at the annual Conference of the International Communication Association, 2005), identifies three important characteristics of questions that can affect the candidate's response and how the voting public perceives that response.
This morning DebateScoop and the Huffington Post "Off the Bus" project are teaming up to produce unique coverage of and data from the Democratic debate on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos held at Derake University in Des Moines, Iowa (check your local listings and look for a web stream (not live) later today at ABC).
We have two researcher/correspondents with press passes who will ask follow up questions and report from the spin room after the debate, Jane Munksgaard and Paul Johnson. Jane and Paul were debate partners at Pitt (2001-2005) and are now both in the doctoral program in rhetoric at the University of Iowa.
During and after the debate a team of debaters, coaches, and debate scholars will be communicating with one another and Jane and Paul via a chat room. We will be discussing what the best follow up questions might be for the spin room and discussing which of the arguments of the should be subjected to an "argument check" (like a fact check, but testing the strength of the argument, not just a fact).
Jane and Paul will upload the digital audio they gather to a site and our group will transcribe the Q and A. That audio and the transcript will be posted here and the audio will be able to be embedded in any blog or web page.
[editor's note, by Ross Smith]Cross posted at Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" site.
If the YouTube debate taught nothing else it was that the questions and the questioners matter. So I sat down for a brief interview with each of the questioners for today's YearlyKos Presidential Forum to ask them what is uppermost in their minds as they prepare their questions. New York Times Magazine journalist Matt Bai, Daily Kos "front pager," Joan McCarter a.k.a. mcjoan, and Daily Kos diarist and Frameshop blogger, Jeffrey Feldman, play the roles as questioners that are crucial to the success of the forum. They have help from the blogosphere at large which is already sharing the credit for attracting the field of candidates that includes every Democrat except Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich, but blame will not likely be so easily shared.
Many a question that is submitted to the YouTube debates is silly, and some that make it onto the debate program itself are criticized from a number of perspectives.
[editor's note, by Ross Smith]David Thomas's contribution below contains a rich set of questions for people interested in pursuing the study of what makes a good debate question. Our exercise earlier this week was meant to raise the question of questions and to serve as a demonstration project for educators. If more people pick up where we left off and take up David Thomas's challenges, numerous fruitful projects will be undertaken.
This is my second contribution.
Here I comment on the research project in which Youtube Debate questions are rank ordered by a set of criteria.
Cross posted at Huffington Post's Off the Bus pages (but this DebateScoop has new info unavailable earlier).
Jack Muse reported that Monday's first YouTube debate "has been widely praised in all corners of the media" because of the one respect in which it really differed from previous debates, the use of citizen generated video questions.
But what is a good question? Which of the questions in Monday's debate were better and which worse? Our students and faculty at the Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative and the Wake Forest University Debate program set out to answer just that question and we have some interesting, albeit preliminary, answers.
