The New York Times
Wednesday 13 June 2007
The quadrennial ritual of presidential debates has long followed a tried and true format.
A guy in a suit asks mostly predictable questions of other suits. The voter is a fixture in the audience, motionless until he or she gets to address the candidate, briefly and respectfully. Everything is choreographed.
Now imagine a kid in jeans and a T-shirt asking a question, less reverentially, more pointedly and using powerful visual images to underscore the point. Maybe he or she will ask about the war in Iraq - and show clips from a soldier's funeral. Or a mushroom cloud. If global warming is the issue, the videographer might photoshop himself or herself onto a melting glacier. The question might come in the form of a rap song or through spliced images of a candidate's contradictory statements.
The presidential debates are about to enter the world of YouTube, the anything-goes home-video-sharing Web site that puts the power in the hands of the camera holder. YouTube, which is owned by Google, and CNN are co-sponsoring a debate among the eight Democratic presidential candidates on July 23 in South Carolina, an event that could define the next phase of what has already been called the YouTube election, a visual realm beyond Web sites and blogs.
The candidates are to assemble on a stage in Charleston, S.C., at the Citadel (yes, the Citadel, the military school criticized by some Democrats a decade ago before it began admitting women). The questions will come via video submitted by ordinary people through YouTube. Moderating between the viewer and the candidates will be Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor.
The video format opens the door for originality and spontaneity - elements usually foreign to the controlled environment of presidential image-making. Because visual images can be more powerful than words, the videos have the potential to elicit emotional responses from the candidates and frame the election in new ways.
"It's one of the biggest innovations we've seen in politics," said Mike Gehrke, director of research for the Democratic National Committee, which has sanctioned the YouTube/CNN event as the first of six official Democratic debates this year (which means the party has coordinated them).
User-generated video, he said, is changing the balance in campaigns. "It used to be a one-way street," he said. "It would cost a lot of money for a campaign to put together a good TV ad, then you had to buy time, put it on the air and later on Web sites. Now it goes the other way too, and you have people talking to each other and to the campaigns."
Just ask former Senator George Allen from Virginia, the Republican who lost his bid for re-election last year after an amateur video circulated all over the Web and broke through to the mainstream media showing him using the word "macaca" to describe a Democratic campaign worker of Indian descent.
On CNN, Mr. Cooper's signature style is personal and informal, but the selection of him as moderator, as opposed to someone less established or more associated with the Web, suggests that the event will retain a mainstream air. CNN and YouTube are to release details soon on how they will choose the videos and other parameters.
Mr. Cooper has already made an appeal on CNN to viewers to be "creative" in their videos. No one knows quite what to expect.
The videos are likely to reflect the irreverence inherent on YouTube. But how far will CNN go in airing the site's often-subversive attitude, like the "1984" video portraying Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Sister? If the videos shown are too bland, there could be a revolt on YouTube, where users are likely to post their videos anyway, whether they make it on the air or not.
More than 100 million video clips are viewed every day on YouTube. Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of the nonpartisan Web site techPresident.com, which tracks the candidates' use of technology and how much, or little, they are achieving online, said Internet video was changing the political landscape.
"We're moving to a society that is video-based from one that is text-based, whether we like it or not," he said. "Candidates are starting to recognize that the only way to fight the potential of the tsunami of voter-generated video is to produce lots of video themselves," he said. "The Internet culture recognizes that Internet video is more authentic, more granular, less scripted than television, and it is an antidote to sound-bite politics."
Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, who specializes in online political advertising and is not affiliated with any campaign, noted that YouTube offers an "exponentially greater opportunity to reach a young, active, passionate audience," one that is far bigger than the combined audiences of the nightly newscasts and the five debates that have been shown on television so far this season. For those five debates, the majority of viewers were older than 55.
"The impact of the YouTube debate can't be over-estimated," Mr. Bassik said.
The political videos on YouTube, especially those offered by the campaigns themselves, are almost always less popular than random clips. The most popular video of all time, which has been up on YouTube for a year, is one about the evolution of dance, viewed more than 50 million times. One of the most-watched political videos, the "1984" anti-Clinton clip, which has been up for three months, has been watched about 3.4 million times.
But the ones on the debate may get more attention.
The footage will be available on the Web for anyone to mash up and create new videos. Through the viral nature of the Web, highlights from the debate are likely to get deep penetration in cyberspace. And videos being aired during this debate will likely magnify the audience because some of them will be picked up, linked to, replayed and commented upon by the mainstream media. (The debate will also be simulcast on CNN en Español.)
Mr. Bassik said one downside for the candidates would be if a negative video about them were tagged to show up when someone searches for a campaign's own video. But, he said, "the campaigns are so risk-averse, they would be reluctant to engage in a YouTube debate if it weren't perceived over all as a positive experience."
Most of the presidential campaigns are now fully engaged with video. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic candidate whose campaign is perceived as being more advanced than most in using the Internet, views the YouTube debate as a chance to "extend the online dialogue," his spokesman, Bill Burton, said.
The effect of video in a debate, Mr. Burton said, would be "like when the 'talkies' married the moving image with sound in the 1920s."
Matt Lewis, director of operations at townhall.com, a large online source of conservative news and views, said he would recommend that the Republicans participate in a YouTube debate.
"Yes, there's definitely opportunities for abuse here, for things to be shown out of context," Mr. Lewis said. "But then you come back with your own video and show the full thing. Technology will happen, and the question is whether it will happen for you or to you."
The huge popularity of YouTube is likely to translate into big ratings for the debate on CNN. So far, the 2.8 million people who tuned into the Democratic debate in New Hampshire on June 3 made up the highest number of people to have watched any of the five televised debates.
Whether the YouTube debate translates into a bigger turnout by the under-30 crowd at the polls next November is a different question.
In the last presidential election in 2004, about 49 percent of people aged 18 to 29 voted, according to Michael McDonald, an associate professor of government at George Mason University and an expert in voter statistics. That was up from the 40 percent of the under-30s who voted in 2000, but it was lower than the population at large. (In 2004, a relatively high 63.8 percent of all citizens over 18 voted, according to a survey by the United States Census Bureau. That was up from 59.5 percent in 2000.)
Still, Mr. McDonald noted, the under-30 crowd is accounting for an increasing share of the electorate - 16 percent in 2004, he said, up from 14 percent in 2000. (The Boston Globe recently examined the growing interest of young people in voting. The Times's Janet Elder wrote an analysis of the voting patterns of 18-24 year olds today.)
Mr. McDonald said he expected a high turnout in 2008 among both voters over all and younger voters because they are often motivated to the polls by big issues like war.
In trying to reach them, the candidates may be moved to do unusual things. Perhaps some will show up at the YouTube debate in something other than a dark suit. Some may even bring their own videos.
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