MySpace and MTV Try to Reinvent Candidate Forums

The details of the much blogged about MySpace/MTV candidate forums were released today, and the potential is huge. Much as we all love to loathe Rupert Murdoch, and bash MTV for crappy political coverage, the two look set to hit a couple home runs this fall.

Taking criticisms of both the traditional debates (nothing but 60 second sound-byte marathons) and even the much heralded YouTube debate (too much of a filter between candidates and questioners, no follow-ups, mostly sound-bytes), MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums.

Starting on September 27th and running through December (with John Edwards as the inaugural guinea pig in this new experiment), the two companies will host individual candidate forums. Running one hour in length, the forums will potentially provide viewers with a substantive glimpse into the positions and qualifications of the many candidates for both parties' nominations. Trumping even YouTube in interactivity, the forums will be held town-hall style in front of a live audience on yet-to-be-determined college campuses. Questions will be submitted live via IM, text messaging, and email. Most intererestingly, the event will employ continuous live polling, allowing the audience to rate candidates' responses (and allowing a competent moderator to properly follow up when candidates dodge, obfuscate, or just plain don't answer the question). At the end of the event - which will be broadcast on MTV, MTVu, MTV.com and MySpaceTV - all footage will be available for remix and reuse.

While this still leaves open the question of who actually gets to select which questions are presented to the candidates, the potential here for a new kind of candidate/voter forum is pretty high. If MTV and MySpace can establish a working feedback loop in which voter-generated questions are presented to the candidates, the audience rates the answers, a competent moderator incorporates that feedback into a follow-up question, and the audience itself is then led to ask different questions based on the candidate's response, we might actually find ourselves in the midst of a national, truly participatory, debate.

As a format that would be both informative and empowering for voters, it would stand in stark contrast to our current debates, which are disempowering in the passivity they enforce on the audience and the maddening way in which they actually make the electorate dumber by allowing candidates to obfuscate their positions and filibuster their time with non-responses. The national press corps has let us down in their role as moderators, abdicating their responsibility to pin down the candidates in the name of time constraints. If MTV/MySpace's forum runs properly, there will be nowhere to hide. After that, being able to remix the video content is just gravy.

This comes just as MTV announced it would hire 50 vloggers (video bloggers) - one in each state - to cover the 2008 election. I've criticized the Choose or Loose campaign in the past for being nothing more than an ineffective broadcast media campaign, but MTV truly looks to be innovating in the field of election coverage this year. It's going to be exciting to watch all of this roll out.