Debate Brings Youtube to Centre of 2008 Presidential Campaign

Old media enter into an uneasy alliance with new media tonight to grill the Democratic candidates in the United States's 2008 presidential race.

CNN and YouTube, the video-sharing website, are holding a joint debate in which the public have sent in video-recorded questions for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the other candidates.

Hours before last night's deadline, more than 2,300 videos recorded on webcameras and mobile phones had been submitted.

Among them is a 30-second clip from a cancer survivor who removes her wig and says her chances of survival are not as good as they would have been if she had had health insurance.

"What would you, as president, do to make low-cost or free preventative medicine available for everyone in this country?" she asks.

The event is being hailed by the organizers as a breakthrough for the new media, comparable to the impact of television on politics when Richard Nixon debated with John Kennedy in 1960.

But some bloggers, who see the internet as a democratic free-for-all, have expressed unhappiness about the involvement of CNN.The candidates will meet in a military college in Charleston, South Carolina and watch the questions being displayed on a 7.6 meter by 5.5 meter screen.

Allowing CNN to select the 25-30 questions has upset many bloggers.

Questions submitted so far cover climate change, immigration, gay rights, welfare and foreign policy. The ratio of questions about Iraq is low in comparison with the extensive daily coverage it gets in US papers and on television.

Although CNN is filtering the questions, there is the potential for the quirky or emotional question that might unsettle a candidate.

Steve Grove, head of YouTube's news and politics section, told the Washington Post: "These YouTube questions - a lot of them, anyway - are intimate, emotional, personal. That person is in his/her surrounding, and that person is bringing you into their world, their reality. That makes it a very powerful experience."

Some of the videos do not ask questions at all: in one, a man plays guitar and sings a song about potential vice-presidents; another includes a talking duck; one man, making a point about the impact of petrol on the environment, is shown driving a 1987 Chevy convertible.

Phil Noble, founder of PoliticsOnline, told Reuters YouTube's increasing coverage of politics was significant. "In the past, the campaigns sort of stuck their toe into technology and innovation - it was a small detail of what was going on. The difference in this election is that technology has become fundamental. Every campaign has figured out ways to use YouTube all the time."

The internet played a small but short-lived role in the 2004 presidential election, with online donations funding the sudden rise of the Democrat Howard Dean. Online Democratic bloggers played a bigger part in last year's Congressional elections.

But the internet is shifting into a central position in this campaign in terms of disseminating ideas, fundraising and mobilizing support, particularly among the young.

YouTube, which did not exist during the last presidential campaign, has already had an impact on this one. More than 2.5 million people have viewed the video I've Got A Crush ... On Obama since it was posted last month and a follow-up about women fighting over Mr Obama and Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, has been watched more than 500,000 times since it appeared last week. A Hillary Clinton campaign spoof on the final episode of the Sopranos was also popular.

YouTube effectively knocked the former Republican senator George Allen out of the race . A video of him last summer referring to a dark-skinned Virginian as "macaca" cost him re-election to the senate and a tilt at the presidency.

CNN and YouTube are to join forces again on September 17 for a Republican debate.