Web media push for online presidential debate

Ten. That’s the number of candidates running for the French presidency, and the problem of finding a way for all of them to debate together may find a solution online. 

A televised debate on France 2 show “Mots Croisés”  will take place on the 16th of April, but organizing it is harder said than done. François Bayrou insists it is public broadcasting’s role to do so, and smaller candidates like Jacques Cheminade and Nathalie Arthaud said they would come. But Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign only wants a second round debate, François Hollande is still hesitating and Marine Le Pen will come…only if the latter two do.

For an American audience this may be difficult to understand. Didn’t the Republican primaries host a multitude of debates with eight candidates? There are important differences that make it hard to repeat the experience here. All the primary candidates were, by definition, Republicans or conservatives, which meant that despite differences between individual candidates, most of them had the same thinking framework. The French presidential election couldn’t be more different (although, amusingly enough, both Newt Gingrich and Jacques Cheminade share a passion for space travel). The ten candidates span the whole political spectrum, from extreme-right to extreme-left, and getting them to debate in a constructive and clear way is an arduous task.

Then why not forget the smaller candidates that are barely polling in single digits and focus on the main four or five? asks my fictional American audience. In France, CSA regulations (see my previous post for an explanation) make this impossible. All candidates need equal airtime, and favoring candidates is not an option.

WE WANT A DEBAT #ledebat http://t.co/CJKklzUt

— Lise Pressac 🐳 (@LisePressac) April 5, 2012

This is where the web kicks in. CSA regulations don’t apply to the Internet, so organizing such a debate is legal. It would also allow for a much more flexible organization. These past few days Dailymotion, the Parisien.fr, Europe 1.fr, Yahoo! and the Nouvel Observateur.com have joined forces to do just that. In a common statement they wrote:

“In the face of the innumerable difficulties the traditional media are encountering in trying to organize a debate between the main presidential candidates, and to fulfill the voters’ need for information, Dailymotion, Le Lab Europe 1, Yahoo!, Le Nouvel Observateur.com and LeParisien.fr are joining forces to propose a real debate. […]”

They added that the candidates:

“will be able to challenge each other, exchange and debate without constraints, and will be interviewed by young, experimented and talented journalists as well as by web users via social media.”

The Twitter hashtag #ledébat is the rallying point for these web media, who have started contacting candidates on social media, as you can see below:

Candidats, que diriez-vous de débattre sur Internet ? @bayrou @dupontaignan et @MLP_officiel ont dit oui ! http://t.co/mVpsx7n7 #ledebat

— L'Obs (@lobs) April 6, 2012

@fhollande @evajoly @mlp_officiel @philippepoutou Bonjour ! Que diriez-vous d'organiser #ledebat ? http://t.co/ylk77QgE via @LeLab_E1

— Europe 1 (@Europe1) April 6, 2012

Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Dupont Aignan and François Bayrou have already accepted. But while an unrestricted online debate is in the interest of the smaller candidates (as is the televised one, where they get airtime equal to that of their opponents), heavyweights Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are much more reluctant to jump into a ten-man arena. Both already have the second round in sight, and their campaigns don’t want to get bogged down in such an event, online or off.

Web gives candidates more leeway against campaign restrictions

France has stringent campaign rules, especially when it comes to media coverage, but the web is disturbing this finely tuned framework.

The Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (or CSA, an administrative media watchdog) closely supervises the amount of airtime and coverage each candidate gets, excluding newspapers and magazines from the tally because their influence is seen as weaker than television’s or radio’s. Below (in French) is a graphic that explains how the process is divided up in time before and during the official campaign.

Since last week the ten official candidates have to receive equal airtime and equal speaking time. But what about online content that doesn’t emanate from a traditional media? Contrary to your more traditional election, candidates can now address their electorate directly on the web, without going through the gateways of television, radio or press.

This creates a difficult regulatory situation for the CSA. Candidates have always tried to seize every small occasion to mitigate the effects of equal airtime, by increasing the number of interviews with the local press or using activists on the ground to put up posters and distribute pamphlets. But the web offers unlimited possibilities to not only circumvent CSA regulations through in-house productions (videos, podcasts, etc.) but also to spread these productions online. François Hollande’s campaign recently launched Radio Hollande, a daily podcast. Listen to the first episode below.

Nicolas Sarkozy also launched a mini web-series called “The Experts”, in which UMP personalities are interviewed. Jean-Luc Mélénchon, the Front de Gauche candidate, has had a mini-series for several months. But none of these web initiatives should worry the CSA: so far, their impact is negligible. Sarkozy’s videos garner a few thousand of views at best, as does Radio Hollande. Mélenchon’s web series have a wider following (the last episode was seen over 27,000 times), but the numbers still pale in comparison to the millions one can reach on a television show.

These small initiatives on the web aren’t a real problem for the CSA. The more pressing issue is what will happen when the first preliminary results leak online and possibly influence the vote in cities where polling stations close later. In the 2007 presidential elections numbers were leaked onto Twitter. Back then social media had barely taken off, but Facebook, Twitter and other networks have a massive presence today. Fines and sanctions are planned for those who spread preliminary results online, but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

Political blogs adapt to social media intensive 2012

Social media is in, blogs are out, according to a recent Rue89 article entitled “RIP: the political blog is a state of clinical death.” The 2012 presidential campaign is supposedly social media oriented whereas the 2007 one relied more on blogs. But even though other news sites have reached similar conclusions, reality is more complicated than the piece suggests.

According to the Wiktionary, a blog is:

A website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal while readers may comment on posts.

In other words, contrary to a social network, a blog is a static website, not a sharing platform. There is, of course, the ability to comment and link to other pages, but a blog does not enable you to share and interact as quickly, easily and seamlessly as social media do. This post considers only political blogs, i.e. blogs by politicians, activists, sympathizers or netizens that deal with politics.

Today, political blogs are at a disadvantage:

– Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are much more widespread today than they were five years ago. There were barely 4 million French Facebook users in 2007; today there are nearly 25 million. This means that candidates eager to reach out towards voters online are going to target these social networks first, and that political junkies who used to or still blog have taken to social media to spread their message. Social media are also much more suited to the rapid-fire, back and forth communication wars that campaigns wage against each other. Here are a few examples:

Avec #Hollande le manque de crédibilité c'est permanent !

— Nadine Morano (@nadine__morano) March 14, 2012

(With Hollande, the lack of credibility is permanent!)

Nicolas Sarkozy président du syndicat des riches ce matin sur @f_inter

— Benoît Hamon (@benoithamon) March 1, 2012

(Nicolas Sarkozy president of the rich people’s union this morning on France Inter)

Sarkozy découvre donc que "la moitié des entreprises des CAC 40 ne payaient pas d'impôts sur bénéfices" !! Il était où pendant 5 ans ? #pdc

— Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon) March 12, 2012

(Sarkozy discovers that “half of CAC 40 companies don’t pay taxes on their profit” !! Where was he the past five years?)

– Pure player (web only) news sites are now firmly established and have copied the blog format. Rue 89 was created right after the second round in 2007, back when neither Mediapart nor the Huffington Post.fr existed. The traditional media wasn’t as interested in blogs, whereas most news sites today have dedicated sections for blogs or host blogging platforms (for instance, the following article on French magazine website L’Express – which also details the decline of blogs in 2012 – was wrote on a dedicated blogging section called Express Yourself ). Journalists, editorialists

But despite these changes, the political blog is not a dying breed. Social web think tank Linkfluence and LeMonde.fr collaborated to create the following cartography of political blogs, which shows how prevalent they still are (click on the image to access the application).

There have been many blogger reactions to the Rue89 article, underlining the democratic virtues of having independent voices online and the importance politicians still grant to blogs, as exemplified by campaigning platforms such as toushollande.fr for Hollande or the “Toile Bleu Marine” for Le Pen, or even individual blogs like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s. This blogger says that only the crème de la crème remain, and that only the political blogs with uninteresting content were weeded out. Another one explains how political blogs may not be as suited for campaigning in the era of social media, but that this does not mean there are obsolete in the long-run.

The over-arching argument is that social media now have better visibility than blogs and are more suited for campaigning, but that political blogs still exist, are complementary to social networks (you promote your blog on Twitter, for instance) and enable longer, more constructed debates. Blogs are also an anchor in the fast-paced world of social media. Tweets and statuses have to be strategically posted to reach an audience less they drown under the onslaught of never ending updates. A blog post follows a less chaotic temporality and is easier to find. It is on her blog, for instance, that a Belgian journalist posted a very critical article on her French colleagues that was then picked up by the French media.