http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=90346

The questions were relevant, probing, and at times even moving, but the answers were exactly the same. The YouTube debates and their various spin-offs will never be anything more than a novelty until there is developed some equally democratic mechanism for the “You”’s to hold these people accountable for the answers they give (I say this under the assumption that the MSM won’t be filling that one loophole anytime soon).

The real problem lies in the actual reason they remain unshakably on script. And that has nothing to do with the nature of the questions, who is asking them, or what format they’re delivered in. It is because the politicians know who they are talking to — a nation which is, by and large, filled with citizen slackers.

Civic apathy, and the civic ignorance that flows from it, is rampant in America. For just one out of hundred recent pieces of empirical evidence, take a look at the recent Pew study on “Public Knowledge of Current Affairs.”
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319

And the dismal results reported there were just for civics 101 questions, like asking people if they could name all 3 branches of government (42% could not!). Imagine the results if asked about the nuances of competing health care plans or foreign policy strategies.

I constantly beg my blogging friends to stick their heads outside the bubble once in awhile and remember they don’t (yet) speak for/represent the mass of Americans any more than pols and pundits who arrogantly proclaim what the great “American People” want or don’t want, think or don’t think about this issue or that.

I’m not saying that the new forms of political activism on the internet aren’t fantastic — they are. But even though bloggers and net activists have the tools to do so, and the ear of the MSM and the political machine, they make next to no effort to reach out to 99% of their fellow countrymen who are not part of their “conversation.” And until they do, the netroots is just another collection of special interest groups. Groups of folks with an agenda that they want to see implemented, regardless of what the rest of the country thinks.

True, they have revolutionary new tools to do it with, and those tools and their own creativity makes them effective and potentially powerful. But the big picture goals remain mired in pre-Politics 1.0.

So what to do? Think big. And broad. And long term.

America faces multiple existential crises, and and an endless array of other crises and challenges. They cannot be fixed by any president or party acting in a sea of civic ignorance. Yet the painful reality is that the vast majority of the American people refuse to take their jobs as citizens seriously. Unless that changes, pols will always evade and pander.

You can tinker with debate formats all you want, but until and unless candidates are asked, over and over, in all forums of all kinds, who among them has the courage to channel JFK and challenge the average apathetic American — to ask us to “ask not” — but instead to truly measure up to our obligations as citizens, by fully informing ourselves and engaging in a real way in self-governance — until that happens, absolutely nothing substantive will ever change for the good — not in debates, not in journalism, and most critically, not in public policy.

Bloggers and net activists are our last best hope to raise the curtain.

Any takers?

Jeffrey Abelson
http://apathybusters.blogspot.com

p.s. This is a modified version of an exchange that started at TechPresident.com

What we all need is the knowledgeable, fearless moderator who challenges the respondent—through the follow-up question, the request for clarification, the noting of inconsistency, the pointing out of facts that conflict with the offered statement. “Big media” should be able to provide such an individual, and allow them the time to “cross-examine.”

How to wield the power of crowdsourcing to accomplish this same thing, the online equivalent to someone standing before the House of Commons and taking the heat? You can almost picture a candidate making her or his statements, then everyone, including the moderator, watching questions/comments/follow up roll across a giant screen, the moderator selecting choice ones for the candidate to respond to.

Kevin is certainly right to say that in the UK we have a tradition of involving viewers and listeners-although we should acknowledge that talk radio has an honourable tradition in the USA too (well, a tradition, anyway).

But while BBC’s Question Time is a model of participation in many respects, there are still some barriers to getting your voice heard. And let’s face it, QT and other programmes have hardly arrested the decline in journalistic standards (if you agree withTony Blair) or the decline of poiltical integrity (if you agree with Jeremy Paxman-a leading UK rottweiler/pundit).

We have to find a way to show them they can’t get away with spin and as Robert says above,´’bobbing and weaving’. A mass public rejection of this is probably the only way. Using home polling technology through the Internet or cable TV (eg Sky TV’s red button) to follow up debates is one way of doing this.

I think we ‘ll see a successful meeting of old/new, big/citizen in the next year or two-I’ve tried to analyse how this might happen in my blog:

http://yooskonline.blogspot.com/2007/07/youtube-debate-first-user-powered.html

Jeff, fancy agreeing to answering some crowd sourced questions? I’m using the definition 2´s company 3 is a crowd at the moment but the site has just launched and it is very early days!

http://www.yoosk.co.uk/celebrity/70/Jeff_Jarvis.aspx
http://www.yoosk.co.uk/celebrity/69/JD_Lasica.aspx
http://www.yoosk.co.uk/celebrity/68/Dan_Gillmor.aspx

TRY to catch a candidate actually speaking his mind, for real, unrehearsed and unprompted. The best place is going to be either on camera during an interview with Charlie Rose, or one someone’s cellphone camera outside a restroom and uploaded to YouTube. Outside of that, it’s all teleprompters and rehearsed lines…the usual swill politicians, not statesmen, serve up in this nation-wide beauty-pageant we call election season.

This is why people have so much trouble distingishing stand-outs from a field of mediocrity - they’re ALL THE SAME. Occasionally the mavericks tell the handlers to shut-up, luckily for us, and we get a McCain, who’s deservedly going down the tubes for sticking to his guns…regardless of the fact that the barrel is stuck up his NOSE. This enables us to indentify people whose beliefs we don’t agree with, or do agree with, and to cast our votes accordingly. The rest of it is just playing with Barbie Colorforms sets - paste on this hat for conservatives, or that pants-suit for liberals, and plan a PICNIC…

No matter what the format, they will continue to bob and weave.

When you get someone who is outspoken they become a phenomena. Look at George Galloway in the UK - suspended from parliament. Or Ken Livingston (called by his enemies Red Ken).

The public likes pols to be direct, their political handler’s don’t. In the US right now discourse is being driven by the handlers.

I hope I made it clear – big journalism’s monopoly is over; good. But that doesn’t mean a)YouTubed political media are ipso facto Good Things or b) ‘citizen media’ has supplanted or can supplant ‘big media’.

I accept that you and I share the same anxieties over the Macaca-isation of political CM – but where you’re an optimist, I’m a pessimist.

You misrepresent me, too; I pointedly never accused you of having a personal value system ascribing high worth to Macaca moments – I’m sure you don’t. What I did say was that ascribing a high value to Macaca-moments lies behind social networking sites … whether you and I like that or not. In fact, ‘citizen media’ are no better than ‘big media’ when it comes to over-valuing the scalp.

But if you want an example of what I mean by this unwritten value system, you only need to take a look at your own interview with Joe Trippi on PrezVid back in April when he joined the Edwards camp.
http://prezvid.com/2007/04/20/prezvid-show-trippi-speaks/

I’ll remind you of what he said – apologies if my transcription skills aren’t up to snuff:
“I think we’re going to look back at 2008 and see … that there was a YouTube moment when whoa … that really gave that guy or that woman some momentum. I also think we’re going to be looking back at the end of 2008 and saying ‘whoa …that person was doing really well until someone caught them with that cellphone camera and they didn’t really know how to explain it; they got caught in an off-guard … unguarded moment and that took down their campaign”.

In short, I don’t think I’m projecting my view on you of what I want to think you said – I think I’m summarising what happens when social networking meets the political conversation.

But back to the fusion – where we seem to agree. Context is everything … and as I think is clear from the comments on my original blog, the UK context is utterly different from the US. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/07/fusing_big_and_citizen_media.html

UK ‘big media’ has a long and continuing tradition of bringing ‘the people’ into the political conversation – and not just at election time. Over thirty years ago, one of the biggest ever ‘big media’ beasts, Sir Robin Day, hosted a radio show called ‘It’s your line …’ – where the likes of me and you called to put our questions in our voices to political figures. Another radio show – one of the oldest on the BBC – ‘Any Questions’ has a high audience and high-reputation because of its format; again, we the people put our questions in our voices to a panel of public figures. The format also runs on TV under the title ‘Question Time’. And UK local and regional radio’s staple is the phone-in – again, often involving we the people questioning in our voices local leaders.

I appreciate the US context is different – and I suspect had CNN taken more lessons from the UK media (or, indeed, if there was more of a tradition of the format in the US) it might have avoided many of your own criticisms. But it didn’t – and that’s why I think the fusion failed.

My main point, though, was that we shouldn’t let our enthusiasm – and I am an enthusiast, for citizen media – persuade us that ‘big media’ has lost all legitimacy and/or that ‘citizen media’ can replace traditional journalism or anything that traditional journalism does. CNN may have messed up on this attempt at fusion – but that doesn’t mean that if CNN had succeeded, it would have been conniving in its own decline.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/24/MNG0QR5P171.DTL&hw=youtube&sn=004&sc=427