Liberty Maven

At 8pm tonight on CNN the Republicans will finally have their YouTube debate. At first glance one thinks of the open access this debate will bring where anyone can submit a question via a YouTube video to be asked during the debate. The reality is that a pool of main stream media journalists will decide which of the questions actually get asked.

It is not surprising since they received over 750 submissions on the final day of eligibility. Rather than control the questions to be asked so tightly, I think the method employed should be more random. Sure, they have a responsibility to weed out the completely ridiculous and offensive video questions. Once they eliminate those they can set up a system to randomly choose each question to be asked in real time during the actual debate.

If they really wanted more control they could categorize the questions by issue so they could cover a variety of questions.

CNN has been pretty Ron Paul friendly lately. They will have a live focus group during the debate to show in real time how the focus group is responding to the candidate’s answers. It can’t be much worse than the FOX Frank Luntz biased focus group. Or can it? This debate (like all of them) can make or break Ron Paul’s candidacy. Most likely it will do neither, but we’ll be watching tonight at 8pm.

I may even try my hand at some live blogging during the debate. Either that or I’ll be in some chat room arguing with Ron Paul supporters about how well he did.