Washington – Imagine shaping your own presidential showdown, using candidates and their answers like building blocks that shatter the standard conventions of a televised political debate.
Yahoo, the blog and the Web magazine will let viewers this week assemble their own presidential confrontations. They can stack one candidate against another or line them all up by single issue.
PBSs’ Charlie Rose will be the moderator and interviewer who will elicit the answer blocks in a series of interviews Wednesday with the eight Democratic presidential candidates. Rose will quiz each candidate separately, by satellite from New York, on topics selected by a vote of Yahoo users.
Once posted on the three websites on Thursday, viewers will be able to edit to taste. Joe Biden vs. Barack Obama on the war in Iraq. Hillary Rodham Clinton on health care, education and the war. All eight on a “wild card” question reserved for each one. And more.
The experiment is the latest offspring of the marriage of politics and the Internet.
Presidential candidates have ventured onto online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
They’ve established interactive Web pages to spread their message and raise money. They’ve learned to advertise based on keyword searches. They’ve participated in online town halls sponsored by the liberal . And they’ve lived, and suffered, by the power of YouTube.
“The point is putting power in the hands of the audience and letting them navigate it,” said Scott Moore, Yahoo’s senior vice president of news and information.
The idea, said Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, was to reach an audience made up particularly of young people who typically do not get their information from traditional media sources.
“If we’re going to increase their political participation we have to meet them where they are,” she said. “That was the idea of the mash-up – that is, to empower users to create their own tailored candidate forum experience.”
So far, only the Democrats have agreed to be part of such a debate. Moore, Huffington and Slate’s Jacob Weisberg want to have a similar exchange with Republicans.
“If you think back to the 1960 (presidential) campaign, that was the first time that television had a material impact on the election, on who won,” Moore said, referring to the televised debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. “I believe that 2008 will be the first time that the Internet will have a material impact on who wins the election.”
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