The Patron Saints of Spontaneity

March 4, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Presidents, Richard Nixon 

In the Guardian, Alan Shroeder — nostalgic of the first televised Presidential debate — argues that the groundwork for the British Prime Ministerial debates is beneficial to the candidates, but bad for democracy:

How paranoid is this document? An entire section is devoted to reaction shots, one of the most terror-inducing of all production details for TV debaters. This fear of cutaways dates all the way back to the patron saints of televised debates, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and their contrasting visages in 1960. The current document shifts this concern to the live audience and the possibility of unflattering cutaway shots of individuals while a candidate is speaking, as though a single misbegotten grimace on the part of a random citizen could turn the entire election.

Although the goal of having British voters pose the questions is laudable, the positioning of the three debaters behind lecterns creates a needless visual obstacle. The entire point of a town hall format is to encourage interaction between politicians and their constituents. The debates are hampered not only by the physical barrier of lecterns, but also the process of determining which of the audience’s questions will merit inclusion. Requiring the participants to submit questions in advance sucks a lot of oxygen out of the debate, underscoring the degree to which politicians fear the unknown.

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