Obama, Edwards Want Debate Footage Online

This post was written by Ben Homer, a prospective NewTeeVee contributor.

Online video has already changed the way political campaigns are run. In the 2006 midterm election Senator George Allen’s “macaca” remark effectively ended his campaign. Earlier this month, John McCain’s Bomb Iran made waves on YouTube, and just last week people were lining up to watch Mike Gravel ask Barack Obama “who are you wanna nuke.” But online video has also had a profound effect on the ability of candidates to bring their message directly to the American public in their own words. Every leading candidate now creates his or her own content.

Footage of presidential debates, on the other hand, is tightly controlled by the networks that broadcast them. Barack Obama and John Edwards yesterday added their support to a growing movement of online thought leaders led by Creative Commons CEO Lawrence Lessig in urging both parties to require broadcast networks to place debate footage in the public domain or license it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) License.

This move would legalize the thousands of unlicensed debate clips already posted on video portals, including debate segments posted technically illegally by many of the candidates themselves. In a letter to DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Obama writes:

“The Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election. Much of that participation will take the form of citizen generated content. We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation.”

John Edwards in a letter to five news networks (Fox notably excluded due to Democratic boycott) argues that the current media environment of “of 30-second ads, 7-second sound bites and media consolidation” requires open online availability of debates in their entirety.

While no Republican candidates have yet joined Lessig’s call, today a number of prominent Republican strategists and bloggers added their names to the letter including former Bush-Cheney ‘04 webmaster Patrick Ruffini, who now serves as eCampaign director for the RNC.

As we get closer to the 2008 election, more people than ever before will view election coverage online. More than 2.7 million people have viewed Obama’s YouTube channel alone. Should networks try to play hardball with the content, it would be interesting to see if candidates would then opt to do more things directly online, a la the planned online debates. From here, Lessig’s idea seems an ideal compromise, with voters the main victors.