Election 2008: The CNN/YouTube debate thing

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Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

“The subtext of everything we do is innovation,” Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

Klein actually exudes a remarkable ease for a guy whose network gives us “Wolf Blitzer’s Panic Room.”

As a branding strategy for the network, this whole CNN/YouTube debate thing is interesting, given that it holds out the promise that all those people uploading their personalities will presumably get free-and-easy access to the candidates, who will have to answer their realer questions.

Currently, the brass at CNN — including debate moderator Anderson Cooper — are culling through hundreds upon hundreds of uploaded videos from the electorate toward deciding which ones will be presented to the candidates.

“Fox [News] would want to filter [videos] through the prism of their point of view,” Klein said.

But how do we know the whole thing won’t just be a glorified town hall? — a YouTuber asks a question, the candidates answer, yada yada.

What remains to be seen, then, is whether Clinton, Edwards, Obama et al (and the Republicans, in September) will match the presumed candor engendered by the Web in a heart-to-heart forum.

Anderson Cooper joined us at the table. He looked properly road-worn and permanently fatigued, his voice an early-morning growl. He and Klein started to make small talk about mango.

Were they talking about mango? I had a question about Iraq.

Cooper then talked about the commitment on “Anderson Cooper 360” to covering the ongoing war, in an ongoing way, while people like MSNBC (he said) go to canned programming in prime time, “To Catch a Predator” and the like.

Cooper, who can throw around statements like “I’ve been going to Rwanda since I was 17,” is sort of the Rough Guide version of a journalist, his whole aura speaking to that 21st century bridge between actual journalist and citizen one.

One video entry he liked seemed to involve a cat asking candidates: What will you do to protect my food?

“I don’t think any of us knows what it’s going to be like,” Cooper said.

***

Later, Cooper was onstage in the Hilton ballroom to talk up “Planet in Peril,” an upcoming CNN documentary series on the environment, well, in peril. The special had Cooper (natch) and co-star (for lack of a better term) Dr. Sanjay Gupta traipsing all over the world to get stories on various fragile ecosystems and population crises.

In other words, there will probably be inconvenient truths in it, but that doesn’t mean it’s advocacy journalism, Cooper said.

Gupta was asked what it feels like to have the CNN-given title “surgeon general to the world.”

“One of the things about CNN and the medical unit in particular is we’ve been able to address global health challenges,” he said, with gravity.

His overly diplomatic droning when asked about last week’s on-air feud with Michael Moore over stats in a piece Gupta did questioning elements of Moore’s ‘Sicko,’ however, was less surgeon general and more plain general.

-- Paul Brownfield