The General Election Debates: Its Back to the BoobTube.

Image courtesy Bettman/CorbisThe highly anticipated general election debates that kick off between the two presidential candidates next Friday will feature none of the voter-centric innovations pioneered during the primaries. Not one YouTube video, not one instant message.

Instead, the debates will stick to the scripted, one-way broadcast television format of old.

"What they're offering us here is little more than live video streaming, which is like, so, year 2000," says Micah Sifry co-founder of TechPresident.com and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City.

The presidential hopefuls have made a great hullabaloo over "reforming Washington" and making the government more accountable by using the internet. But in the run-up to Election Day, the most important series of debates are ditching all of the technological innovations to include voters – all pioneered during the primaries.

“These are, by far, the most influential political events that we have," says George Farah, executive director of Open Debates, a group that wants to replace the current organization running the general election debates. "It’s the only time that tens of millions of voters are watching the candidates on the same stage, at the same time.”

Each debate is expected to be watched by more than 60 million people worldwide, according to MySpace, which has partnered with the Commission on Presidential Debates to engage voters online. Just under 40 million people watched each of the two presidential contenders' nomination-acceptance speeches at the conventions.

Last summer, the internet pioneered several important new ways of connecting voters with candidates. CNN partnered with YouTube to host two debates driven by voters' video questions submitted via YouTube. (Even then, CNN's role in picking the questions was controversial. Critics thought the network was still retaining too much editorial control over the process.)

But the most innovative forum came from TechPresident, which created a site called 10Questions.

The site attempted to create an interactive town hall format by allowing voters as a group to surface key concerns using a Digg-like voting mechanism, rather than providing arbitrarily chosen questions that presented the candidates to bloviate, Sifry said at the time.

10Questions.com allowed citizens to submit questions via video, which were voted up or down by the site's users, and the process was audited to prevent gaming. The site was widely supported by mainstream media, activists and bloggers from both ends of the political spectrum.

MTV and MySpace even included one of the site's top questions in one of its town halls with Barack

Obama. Participants in the forums appreciated their ability to converse as a group with the candidates.

"MTV and MySpace keep upping the ante with these candidate forums, and in terms of creating a more transparent, participatory interaction between the candidates and a mass audience, they continue to blow CNN and YouTube out of the water," said Mike Connery, a 29-year-old youth activist on his Future Majority blog.

But the upcoming presidential debates are by-and-large reverting back to the tried-and-trusted television format. The Commission on Presidential Debates is hosting a series of four debates between the presidential candidates and their running mates between September 26 and October 15.

MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday unveiled a new site called

MyDebates.org. In addition to an online quiz, it will stream the debates online, and poll site users about which candidate they support.

MySpace is soliciting questions online, some of which may be posed by NBC's Tom Brokaw during the second town hall-style debate in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7.

"The CPD believes that the internet can be used to personalize the debates in a way that allows for in-depth examination by individual citizens and joint discussion with others," said the commission's executive director in a statement.

However, Open Debate's Farah says the commission's use of the internet in this case is a sham.

A document obtained by the group labeled "Memorandum of Understanding"

concerning the debates between John Kerry and President Bush and their vice presidents in 2004 spell out the conditions under which the debates were to be held. It specified everything from the color of the backdrops, to the heights of the podiums, to who will and won't get to speak.

One section of the document outlining the details of how a town hall event that year would unfold stated: "The commission shall take appropriate steps to cut off the microphone of any such audience member that attempts to pose any question or statement different than that previously posed to the moderator for review."

"If you allowed voters in the process and gave them control, they might come up with a particularly challenging and unexpected question that may throw the candidate off their script, and that is something that is unlikely to happen," Farah said.

He wants the Commission on Presidential Debates replaced with a group run by citizens and public interest groups. The CPD is co-chaired by the former chiefs of the Democratic and Republican national committees.

Open Debates issued a statement Thursday with nine other groups, including the Personal Democracy

Forum, that asks the commission to make the terms of its contracts with the candidates publicly available. Farah says the contract lays out most of the details of how the debates will be conducted.

Asked about the "secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and McCain campaigns," that the 10 pro-democracy groups asked to be made public, Scott Warner, a spokesman for the commission, says that it doesn't exist, and never has. He didn't return an e-mail about the 2004 document.

Both Obama and McCain participated in MTV and MySpace's Presidential Dialogues series during the primary season, and did well by most accounts. And both answer questions and appear before audiences of all sizes on the campaign trail. But Farah argues that the televised debates are different because they may be the only opportunity for many Americans to really compare the candidates before they head into the voting booth.

"I have great respect for MySpace, and what they’ve done with the Impact Channel, but what's going on here is an attempt to sprinkle a little fairy dust on a crusty old

(format,)" says TechPresident's Sifry.

To be sure, the interactive debate format has its naysayers.

"I don't know that the questions would be any more valuable coming from a crowd – I don't think the whole crowdsourcing of questions has been done very well yet," says Jon Henke, a new media consultant in Arlington, Virginia. "The debates are just one more act to me, in a stage play."

Lee Brenner, MySpace's executive producer of political programming, and director of the Impact Channel, says that the commission decided on the format of the debates before MySpace got involved.

"It's an evolving process," he says. "The commission is definitely taking a step in the right direction as we tried to take the best quality approach while keeping the integrity of the debates intact."

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