What? Are you demanding that the voice of the American people be heard? I don't know how they do it in Pittsburgh, but in real America the media writes a script deciding what are the issues, the candidates play their roles and that is what Anne Coulter blogs about. That is why this is the greatest nation on Earth, right?
Even if there Republicans were asked about these "substantive issues" -- on the domestic or international front -- what nonsense would they offer? How would they dodge the question? How many ways could they spell out how to bomb countries back to the stone age or to snatch lazy no-good loafers (of the welfare and non-welfare sort) out of their Cadillacs? Would they ever get past symbolical digression? Maybe by giving us no issues -- by choosing no pertinent questions -- the gatekeepers are making the symbols a little more palatable. Depending on the perspective, this might be our loss, or our gain as an electorate.
I agree with the post's comment on the need to know something about the total population of video entries. YouTube debates on CNN restrict participation at the outset in three ways: 1)People with no Internet access cannot participate; 2)People with dial-up access to the Internet rather than high-speed cannot participate (at least not easily); 3)People without cable TV subscriptions cannot see the debate, let alone participate.
LC, you're right that there could be selection bias. One way to check is to consider internet and broadband, or cable tv penetration rates. We are comfortable with the accuracy of randomized phone surveys, (with error, certainly). Then compare the distributions of people in the total videos, and the sample CNN took, to the population we expect this to be drawn from.
Charli has an interesting empirical question here.
"A fascinating qualitative analysis could and should be done on the total dataset of video entries to measure the gap between the population of entries and the sample that was used tonight to represent "the public agenda." The findings would have important implications for our assessment of the YouTube debates as a genuine populist shift in electoral politics, rather than an attempt of the media barons to co-opt the emerging power of Web 2.0. "
I think this would sound better if you got rid of the media barons story. I don't think the data you're talking about would support that conclusion. It could simply be that CNN didn't choose a random sample. There could be, as you and LC have mentioned, selection bias, which constrains the conclusions you could draw without controlling for it somehow.
I think it's interesting enough to see if the claim of "web 2.0 is a populist revolution *right now*" is true. Looking at this data would be one study, and worthwhile, as well.
You'd have to do some quant to be able to control for certain characteristics if there is bias, but nothing too onerous, i would think.
How about scrapping audience participation entirely and simply having real debates and forcing all the candidates to think on their feet ?
Frankly, I could care less if "X" demographic is being adequately represented or if "Bob" in Idaho is able to put together a cool youtube question. The audience isn't running.
Instead of questions, why not just announce topics for the evening. Go around the circle and give each a few minutes to say something on a topic and then one or two more rounds for rebuttal. then go to the next topic. The moderator is responsible for calling names in order, enforcing time limits and politness codes.
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