By Chris Satullo
Now that we’ve finally shown ourselves that the traditional political convention is pointless and passe, how about we do away with another template that has overstayed its welcome?
The traditional presidential campaign debate.
Admit it: The prospect of having to endure three rounds of Donald Trump and Joe Biden flinging word salads at each other while an overmatched moderator begs them to comply with absurd time limits…well, it fills you with a mixture of dread and ennui.
And do we really need another televised platform for Mike Pence’s bland servility to lethal incompetence? Please.
Now, it’s true that some of the angst we’re now experiencing at any mention of “presidential debate” has to do with the particulars of this race and these candidates. Polls indicate that most Americans, inhabiting as they do alternative and incompatible information ecosystems, are already locked into their choices for Nov. 3. Undecideds, supposedly the prime target audience for the debates, form an unusually small sliver of the electorate this time around. The only purposes the coming debates seem likely to serve are to provide more cement for each side’s certitudes and more ammunition for insults to the other side.
And…the candidates. Sigh. We know without having to watch that the debates’ regimented cadence of question-short-answer-short-rebuttal will be wholly inadequate to the task of disciplining Donald Trump’s boundless capacity for mendacity. It will instead indulge it.
Then consider Joe Biden. We already know this good man is a bad “debater,” in the debased sense of the word that rules modern politics. The debates exist now primarily for two purposes, each mostly of interest to journalists and partisans: 1) the delivery of prepared and putatively devastating quips and 2) the possibility of memorable and potentially devastating gaffes.
The debates are a quagmire of risk for Biden, prone as he is to fumbling his “prepartee” and to stumbling into unfortunate word choices. This is why many of his supporters would like to call the whole thing off.
But, beyond all that, the debates as now conducted are outmoded, designed for a media universe long ago shattered, one where three broadcast networks dominated, providing a limited but shared news diet to the electorate.
The current debate format’s annoying obsession with timekeeping stems from the networks’ desire to keep debates short, wrapping up precisely at the top of the hour, so they can eagerly return to selling soap and beer to the masses. But the masses are now scattered amid dozens of streaming and social silos. People will watch, comment and get analysis of presidential forums from wherever they want, whenever they are, whenever they want and from whomever they prefer. Broadcast TV is almost entirely beside the point. Why are we still catering to its anachronistic needs?
Let’s smash the old model. Let’s try new approaches designed to exploit the hyperlinked, embedded, crowd-sourced, machine learning tools of the digital age – while being savvy about all the ways that bad actors will try to deploy them for dark ends.
Over the course of decades as a news executive with a specialty in civic engagement, I’ve had chances to experiment with a number of alternative formats for candidate forums. These sought to end the tyranny of the broadcast clock – as well as the damage done by the poor moderating sometimes done by journalists who prove more interested in preening and fomenting drama than in informing voters and serving democracy.
Let me share two formats that have worked well a number of times and could be even more powerful, if updated to use the digital tools that have grown more muscular since we last elected a president.
The skilled interview/real debate model
The basics
We begin with two sustained (45 minutes or so) interviews with each candidate, each conducted by the same person, a knowledgeable journalist with strong interviewing chops and a penchant for fairness. Which candidate goes first is determined by coin flip. After each interview comes a 15-minute interlude to fact check that candidate’s claims and assertions.
Then the candidates meet face to face for 30 minutes of true debate, moderated by another journalist of repute. The candidate who went second in the first segment goes first here, asking a question of the opponent. They go back and forth from there.
The moderator generally lets the dialogue flow but monitors it for low blows or falsehoods, which he/she has power to flag and chastise. The moderator also ensures that each candidate will, over the half hour, get nearly equal time. If one candidate bloviates and chews up too much time early on, the moderator has power to turn off that person’s mic and give the other candidate, say, the final five minutes to even things up – a real threat that would lead the wise candidate to keep statements concise.
The details
Let me first note that Trump’s two recent encounters with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and Axios’ Jonathan Swan show the value of an extended interview with a credible journalist who is more interested in doing a good job than in toadying up to power or burnishing his rep with a partisan following.
The interviewer’s questions can and should be informed, but not determined, by a robust public engagement process with a diverse sample of the nation’s voters – in the vein of political scientist James Fishkin’s National Issues Conventions.
This deliberative groundwork would arm the interviewer with solid information about what issues matter most to voters and how they frame them.
Each forum’s fact-checking could be done by any one of the journalistic organizations with a proven track record doing that task with fairness and accuracy. Fact checks could run as a real-time ticker or in pop-up bubbles as the candidates are speaking, to be further explored during the interim periods.
In the final segment, a running tally of how much time each candidate has used could appear on viewers’ screens, so that a silencing of one candidate and granting of a chunk of makeup time to the other would surprise no one.
Concerns
This is a 2-1/2-hour format. In an ADD world, some will object that this is too long. I, frankly, have little patience with this objection. We are interviewing candidates for the most important job in the land. You’ll likely spend more time next Sunday watching the NFL Red Zone or binging some show on Netflix.
Complaints about the choice of interviewers and fact-checkers will be noisy and inevitable. The key is to treat all the complaints, whether from right or left, as just that – partisan noise. I’m particularly unsympathetic when whining about the unfairness of the fact checking that comes from a party that has embraced blatantly counterfactual narratives as its brand.
The Week-Long Digital Debate
The Basics
Use the same public engagement process as above to generate a list of 10 meaty, high-interest questions for the candidates. Stage a digital debate Monday through Friday on a secure, password-protected, but publicly viewable dialogue platform.
Monday morning at 8, send each campaign a different question, giving them until noon to post a reply. Then give each campaign until 4 to reply to the other side’s initial post of the day. At 4 p.m., open the platform to comments, responses and follow-up questions from the 400 or so voters who formed the random sample that fashioned the questions. Have a moderator screen the responses for profanity, ad hominem attacks on other voters, or other violations of the agreed-upon rules. Candidates can jump back in to respond or clarify.
Tuesday through Friday, rinse and repeat. By the end of the week, each campaign would have done the initial response to five questions and done the rebuttal to five. Hundreds of voter comments, lauding, critiquing, citing omissions or fallacies in the candidate responses would have been posted and seen by millions. Fact checking memos could be hyperlinked to the pertinent answers or comments.
The details
When I was at The Philadelphia Inquirer, we used this model for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race. I was delighted to see that incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum, or someone authorized to speak for him on the Internet, was sometimes up at 2 a.m. furiously typing rebuttals to voter comments.
This kind of digital event can build audience, interest and value throughout the week before an election, spawning a cascade of analysis, comment and fact checking from experts and ordinary voters.
Concern
Obviously, in this era of bots and trolls and foreign disinformation, security of the platform is an overwhelming and challenging priority.
So there you have it: Two ideas to reinvigorate the job interview known as a presidential election. Those with more mastery than I about the possibilities of digital platforms can probably add plenty of useful ideas for how to make these formats even more lively and informative.
You may have your own ideas for formats that could nudge the current debate template into the retirement it has long deserved. I’d be delighted to hear them.
—
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.