Tonight is the night of the second CNN-YouTube debate. This time it is not the democratic nominees but the Republican presidential candidates that will debate with each other and respond to questions that were sent in from Internet users, in the form of short YouTube videos.

The debate will be staged in St Petersburg, Florida. Although initially the idea was to let an online voting system make a selection of the thousands of questions that were sent in, the directors of the debate decided to select the questions themselves.

Like David Bohrman, senior vice president of CNN, says that the internet is still too underdeveloped a medium to set the agenda for a national debate. Bohrman regrets that he had to appoint his journalists to sift through all of the questions that were sent in by internet users, but he also said that it was necessary. He adds: “If you would have taken the most-viewed questions last time, the top question would have been whether Arnold Schwarzenegger was a cyborg sent to save the planet Earth.”

The CNN-YouTube debate is one of several debates in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2008 that use new kinds of media to organize the debates. One of the goals of organizing this type of modern debate is to attract people to vote, and to bridge the gap between politics and the “average citizen”.

Watch the CNN-YouTube Republican debate tonight via CNN

Source: wired.com