Why Should We Create Debate? A New Debate Format for a New Medium

On September 26, 1960, then Vice President Richard Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy met in Chicago for the first televised Presidential debate.  70 million Americans watched.  Today, their grandchildren still learn about the importance of that debate in school.

What they are far less likely to learn is that this debate, and those that have followed since, resulted from the vision and inspiration of Frank Stanton, president of CBS between 1946 and 1971.  Stanton believed that television, a new medium to most Americans, could help inform the electorate by showing the candidates to the nation as they came together for respectful confrontation.

In the early 1950s, Stanton recognized that Presidential debates must be properly organized and operated for the television medium.   They must be held in a reasonable amount of time to keep audience attention.  They needed to offer sufficient time to viable candidates to allow these candidates the opportunity to state their opinions on multiple topics.  And they needed to permit exchanges between the candidates, allowing each candidate to reveal weaknesses in his opponent’s plans or claims.

To create a successful debate, Stanton lobbied the FCC for eight years, seeking the repeal Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934.  This section, called the “Equal Time Clause” of the act states: 

If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station: Provided, That such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast under the provision of this section.

Stanton recognized, however, that if the time allocated for a reasonable television debate were divided among all those who were running for president, it would leave far too little time to each for a substantive debate.  He therefore sought to limit the debate to just those candidates deemed viable.  He succeeded. And the modern Presidential debate was born.

Forty-seven years later, as we approach the 2008 elections, those debates have changed.  The candidates, realizing the stakes of poor debate performance, negotiate lengthy agreements with the Commission on Presidential Debates.  With long legal agreements (32 pages in 2004), the campaigns have transformed what was meant to be a free exchange of ideas into a staged recitation of sound bites.  The questions are predictable.  The answers, scripted.  And, with candidates banned from questioning one another, we search for the impromptu reactions or visual clues to see beyond the stump speeches repeated and reported in the months preceding.

The media landscape has changed as well.  Today, instead of three broadcast television networks, there are hundreds of channels.  There are thousands of radio stations nationwide.  And much more dramatically, instead of living in a world dominated by network-created content, we have seen the explosive growth of user-generated content or “social media” over the past six years.  Online, tens of millions of people now explore, discuss and debate everything from politics to Pinot.

A new medium has arrived.  And with it, a new format for debate is possible.  It is time to create a debate format that capitalizes on the strengths of this particular medium.  It is time to remove the limitations of televised debate, particularly as interpreted by recent campaigns, to introduce a more substantive debate, a true exchange, that better informs the public.

In this space, we can permit candidates to publish detailed positions on topics of great importance to the nation, sharing text, video, or illustrations to make a point.  Freed from the constraints of broadcast schedules, we now have time to allow direct questioning and confrontation between the candidates, with rebuttals continuing until there is nothing more to say.  And with the ability to draw upon all available external research, we have the opportunity to fact-check candidates, leveraging experts in each field discussed to help us evaluate candidate credibility. 

Perhaps most importantly, we can allow citizen participation like never before.  We can allow Americans from all over the union unrestricted access to candidates.  We can question candidates.  We can debate the merits of their plans for the nation.  We can discuss our own opinions with millions of others, benefiting from their knowledge and perspective. In short, we can move from sound-bite to substance.  And in so doing, we can better prepare the American electorate to make an informed choice in 2008.

Or so I hope.  Of course, only the citizenry can create a citizens’ debate.  And only with broad support can we build national awareness of the effort and gain participation of the candidates. Please join usin signing an invitation to the candidates to participate in a new debate format here on Gather. Forward it to your friends and family who are politically interested and ask them to join the conversation. We need bloggers, wonks, campaign staff, elected officials, and concerned citizens from every party (Gather members or not) to participate in planning this debate if we are going to succeed.  Together we can create debate!