MySpace and MTV and McCain in Manchester - 7PM Eastern

by: Bob Brigham

Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 18:20

It should be an interesting night. On one had, New Hampshire's same day registration provision allows candidates on both sides of the aisle potential for a youth surge not showing up in the polls -- which could be a substantive boost in the expectations spin. For McCain specifically, he has been bleeding market share in the MySpace friends primary. I'll be looking to the interactive perspective as it fascinates me. What do you think I should be looking for during the event?

CNN Gets it wrong wrong WRONG... again

by: alicescheshirecat

Sat Nov 17, 2007 at 12:41

So CNN reported a story that is just wrong.  Watch the video here and I wanted to go through and talk about all of the points that Carol Costello raises.

But first let me say that I am so exhausted from this kind of crap.  It is so ridiculous that today reporters won't use the valid information they can get from a simple google search.  There is no excuse for this kind of reckless journalism.  It makes me think that perhaps it isn't that they get it wrong its that they WANT to report a specific story about young people and they want to fit the research to that story.

I can see why Republicans would want to do this as much as possible because suppressing the youth vote means more success for them.  Which is why you saw it for the city elections in Georgia.

What a lot of people don't understand is that when you get stats like this wrong - it impacts campaigns, consultants, and candidates.  It makes them think that they should not be targeting young people.

When they don't target young people they don't get young people to go out and vote.. so it perpetuates the fallacy.

Further it makes candidates have to get more republicans to vote for them which influences their policy.  So basically, they have to be more conservative in their votes and the bills they push because they think that is representative of their district... when in reality... it might not be. 

These things impact us at levels that go beyond turnout and elections it goes to the very laws that we are passing and the votes cast in Congress.

So here we go:

MySpace and MTV's Innovative Election Coverage

by: Michael Connery

Thu Aug 23, 2007 at 13:27

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 truly new kind of candidate/voter forum is pretty high.  If MTV and MySpace can truly create 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 in previous events, 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.