Nowhere-Fast.net

I’m not going to talk about the content of tonight’s debate.  Plenty of people are doing that already.  I do want to talk about the presentation, though.

I watched the debate on CNN and they had presented the event in an interesting format.  In the center of the screen was the traditional “politician at a podium” debate set up, but on either side were “scorecards” by various pundits that reflected either positive or negative points for each candidate.  Across the bottom of the screen was a real-time graph that tracked the positive or negative feelings of a group of Republicans, Democrats and independents.

All in all it was not only a very busy format, but it was frustratingly distracting.  As a viewer you spent as much time focusing on the points being scored as you were on what was being said and because of that it was easy to miss some important pieces of information.  The debate is about what the two people campaigning for the highest office in the land think about certain issues, not what a selection of “experts” think about what the hopefuls say.  Let the viewers form an opinion before forcing your punditry upon them.

I really would have preferred a simpler presentation - say, a shot of the candidate talking and the text of the question or statement that they’re responding to written across the bottom of the screen.  Allow me to make up my own mind.