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.

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dude

remember when we were talking about things we'd like to see in the RTV debate? Doesn't it sound a lot like some of the stuff we discussed? I think MTV needs to put you on staff

Similarities

There are similarities, but they seem to have hit on an elegant solution (at least on paper). We'll see how it rolls out.

yeah, really

when I saw the headline for this story, "MySpace, MTV team on politics," I cringed, but it doesn't sound that bad. actually, it's a great idea. more accessibility, yeahhhhhhhh! I'll be curious to see how much extra interest it generates. I wonder what kind of people will take part --- people who already support the featured candidate? Undecideds? More importantly, will the viewers/participants mostly be folks who already vote? Either way, a step in the right direction.

Exciting

I agree. I rarely, if ever, watch MTV. (Shows you what kind of "young person" I am.) But I am genuinely interested in their coverage of 2008. Who knows, with Jon Stewart producing better "news broadcasts" in the form of satire than the cable news networks, MTV might have a refreshing angle on presidential politics.

www.mattortega.com

Whoa

Two exciting pieces of news about real programs from the youth media space in two days.

A trend? Let's hope so. Anyway, I think we should organize up on this piece.

Sorta Like Whoa.

These could be the ingredients for a new kind of truly democratic debate where candidates will refrain from going on talking-point tangents filled with nonspeak. But I’m still a bit skeptical that the MTV/MySpace debates will be able to succeed where the YouTube debate fell flat. No candidates really had their feet held to the fire in the YouTube debate because CNN editors chose what questions were used rather than, say, letting viewers vote on which question they’d like to see asked. How will the MySpace debates be any different if MTV editors are simply letting young people submit questions and then letting candidates have a go at the ones they want answered?

I cited you in my post on [[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zach-marks/the-mtvmyspace-debates-b61612.html|Huffpo]], Mike.

It's all in the moderator

Zach

I totally agree. For me, it's all in the moderator and how free a hand he's given. If the moderator isn't a traditional journalist, but rather a hard-hitter who isn't scared of the candidates, and who works to close that feedback loop I described, then we've got something interesting on our hands.

I'm excited by the possibility, and since I've seen some other interesting stuff from them lately, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, if MySpace/MTV (and their moderator) let the candidates run the show, it'll be business as usual in Web 2.0 drag.

Thanks for the shout-out.

Both parties are keen for eachother

The way i look at some aspects of the deal, i see that both parties are keen to take each other's support since both are big players in their own niche & who would not like to see their company touching the stars. I even heard that myspace has released an exclusive myspace layout generator in association with MTV. However there are dozens of free layout generators for myspace which are already occupring a large market share.