MTV's Candidate Dialogues Are On Deck

MTV's "dialogues" with the candidates are starting up next week, beginning with John Edwards on September 27th. As we reported here just a few weeks ago, these dialogues have the potential to be the most interactive and informative debates thus far in an election cycle that's seen some decent innovation in how candidates and the public interact. Streamed live over MySpace TV and MTV.com, the debates offer the chance for viewers to provide instantaneous feedback and ask new questions in response to answers provided by the candidates.

The kind folks at Mashable have produced this early glimpse at the MTV MySpace Widget that will allow viewers to rate the candidate's responses in real time.

I have somewhat unreasonably high hopes for this debate, though there are a few minor SNAFUs that are giving me pause.

First, a video on MTV's website describing how to participate was unembeddable here on the FM site (even though MTV supplied an embed code), and information on the event is no where to be found on the MySpace Impact page. I understand that participation requires placing a candidate in your top 8 friends, but beyond that I'm still a bit mystified as to how I submit a question via MySpace. I'll probably end up trying through the MTV website as this seems the least confusing option (though I'm not sure if the candidate rating system is available both at MTV and MySpace, or just on the social networking site.

The announcement of the moderators is also giving me The Fear that this will be a less than successful event: Gideon Yago, whose political coverage never particularly impressed me as hard hitting, is one of the moderators along with SuChin Pak, an MTV news reporter of whom I've never heard of (even though thanks to my girlfriend, I watch a lot of MTV), and Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza. I've got a hard time seeing Yago or Cillizza really push these candidates on their answers, something that I think is a requirement for these dialogues to be really worthwhile. SuChin Pak is a wild card in this equation.

The third strike is the day and time of the event - Thursday at noon? Whose got time to watch a live debate on MySpace in the middle of the day? Students are likely in class or roaming campus, away from their computers, and young adults will be at work. These debates should have been held at 7 or 8pm, when everyone is home and has time to sit in front of their computer. The point of making them interactive is to encourage participation, but MTV is discouraging participation by scheduling the event in the middle of the work day.

Despite this, I remain cautiously optimistic. I hope these events will be groundbreaking, though they could easily just fizzle out. We'll find out next Thursday at noon, when John Edwards takes the stage in the first of this live series.