Dan Rather on the power of the CNN/YouTube debate:
“Candidates do hate, genuinely hate, audience participation, because they like to control the environment,” said longtime television news anchor Dan Rather, now the global correspondent for HDNet. Tell candidates people will ask them questions via a YouTube video, he says, and “they get the shivers.”
Dan…it’s an open book test. Unless YouTube has a bunch of secret questions from its users that they’re holding for the debate, all of the questions are already online. As of today, there are 1514 videos up. It would take 5 of a candidate’s lowest level staffers maybe 3 hours in total to watch all of the videos and catalog the questions, making note of any “gotcha” ones. The only person shivering is debate moderator Anderson Cooper who has to be questioning the benefit this train wreck will have on his career.