This morning, a bipartisan working group led by heavy-hitters from recent Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, chaired by Annenberg Public Policy Center's Kathleen Hall Jamieson, issued a major 47-page report chock-a-block with recommendations for increasing "the value and viewership of presidential general election debates," arguing they need to be updated to take into account the rise of early voting, the ubiquity of social media, the spread of alternative media networks, changes in campaign financing and the increase in independent voters.Opening up debates to more meaningful participation by the public has been a concern of ours going back many years, to the experiments we did with 10Questions.com in 2008 and 2010. (See our past coverage here.) Political debates play a key role...
