Vox Populi
I didn’t see the latest Democratic presidential debates, which I regret, although I have seen several clips since, and intend to watch the whole thing later. These were unusual, in that the questions came directly from the public, in the form of short videos recorded to YouTube. Well, not quite directly—but hold that thought; I’ll come back to it.
The results were pretty neat.
According to CNN, which hosted the debate, the candidates were rather nervous about the new format. I don’t blame them. Questions from the general public are less polished, less predictable than questions from, say, Tom Brokaw. The questions can get downright off-the-wall, as any politician could tell you after shaking hands in small-town diners and churches. As the surprise factor of the questions rise, so to do the chances of a career-ending goof. But the questions didn’t prove too weird, and the candidates, no doubt hardened by their experiences in small crowds, proved up to the challenge. The atmosphere was relaxed, direct, and as honest as you can expect from political speeches. The same CNN reporter who commented on the candidates’ initial trepidation went on to say they quickly warmed to the experience, and were as pleased by the atmosphere as the audience was.
So it was a good experience for everyone, combining a sense of intimate contact with a mass medium. I expect to see a proliferation of similar events.
But the little cynical voice on my other shoulder has a reservation. I said the questions weren’t quite directly from citizen to candidates. While the questions themselves were direct, CNN selected them from a large pool of submissions, essentially selecting the questions it felt most worth hearing. This filtering process is unavoidable; grossly inappropriate questions, like vulgarity from Beavis and Butthead look-alikes, incomprehensible gibberish from the people you hear on call-in radio, or rants from the American Nazis. Nor is there time to ask all the questions, even if we restrict ourselves to the meaningful ones. So someone has to select a tiny sample. That someone may as well be CNN, and my sense was that they’d done a good job. But still, as necessary as it is, as benign as it may have been, that filter was there.
As the practice of taking questions directly from the internet-enabled public expands, we’ll see other moderators, who may not be as fair-minded, or as interested in questions grounded in sober reflection, seeking instead the controversy that sells, hoping to embarrass candidates for the sake of embarrassing them, or (God help us) employed by Fox news. It wouldn’t be hard to skew the questions, and even to claim to be fair afterwards, because so many factors go into selecting the “best” ones. Do you go for topicality? Profundity? Frequency with which a question appears in the submissions? And once the hosts begin cherry-picking the questions they’d want to ask themselves, we’ll see the candidates squeezing for concessions, refusing to participate until reassured that the most dangerous questions—that is, the ones we most need to see answered—aren’t asked, just as they do for the more standard panel-oriented debates.
What we saw last night was good, healthy politics. Enjoy the innocence while you can.