For my third blog post, I wanted to share my thoughts on the coverage of the Presidential Debate by CNN. This is done through an Op-Ed by The “Debate Coach”, Todd Graham, Director of Debate at Southern Illinois University.
While I’ve talked about their live broadcast feature in the previous blog posts, in this story on “Debate Coach: A star emerged from the debate,” Simmons does an exceptional job of incorporating the multimedia elements of video and text.
With the focus on Live Coverage, they have included clips from the broadcast version to provide previews of it online.
Each of the clips are no longer than 3 minutes and provide a quick review for someone who wants to be briefed up on the Presidential Debate. Moreover, they have strong headlines for the clips such as “Biden: My son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong” that help the viewer to even recognize the content of a particular clip and be aware of the important statements from the debate.
Straying from the multimedia aspect, they went towards a traditional track that would help even a preschooler understand who did well in the debate. They did so by ‘grading’ each candidate on their performance in the debate.
Bernie Sanders stood at the top of the class with a stellar A, while Joe Biden was in the lower C range.
With a briefing and coverage of the debate, Simmons hones in on the “public speaking” skills of each candidate and seems to have put a 50% weightage on it for the grading criteria. This shines a different light on how in the context of the debate, it’s not only the content of your debate that matters, but also the way you present it.
Out of all the coverage done on the Presidential Debate, this Op-Ed by Todd Simmons on CNN’s website is the one that provides a different and interesting way of learning about the debate, especially if you haven’t watched the Live one.
I believe that this story is as close as one can get to seeing the actual Live version of the Debate.
CNN Tracker 