Democratic CNN YouTube Debate Tonight

Posted on July 23, 2007

The Democratic party is holding a unique debate tonight on CNN. In the debate all the questions will come via videos submitted by YouTube users. A WebWare post says that CNN's Senior VP David Bohrman says there are some questions there that the mainstream media would "would never think to ask in the presidential debate."

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee at CNN that is in charge of selecting the questions. David Bohrman, Senior VP for CNN and a member of the selection committee said, "There are questions that we, the journalists, we, the mainstream media, would never think to ask in the presidential debate."
The fact that this debate is even happening just goes to show the enormous impact that user generated-content has had on society. Ten, even five years ago, something like this would have had no chance of happening. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out and hopefully this type of debate becomes more typical in the future.

It should be interesting to see what questions are used. Over a thousand questions have already been entered for the CNN YouTube debates. The Democratic YouTube Debate is tonight on CNN tonight at 7pm ET. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is hosting. The Republican YouTube Debate will be held on September, 17th in Florida. You will also be able to watch the debates on youtube.com/debates.

YouTube also has a political video blog called Citizen Tube that contains some citizen questions and a tour of the set. There is also a YouTube interview there with candidate Ron Paul who has been popular on YouTube and other social media sites. This blog also has a subscriptions page that has links to some of the candidate's YouTube sites.

You can find a transcript from the debate on CNN.