# Political TV debates in Norway


![](http://nrk.no/contentfile/file/1.3383510!img3383496.jpg)In a few
days Norwegians will vote for local and county representatives, and of
course the newspapers and TV channels are full of debates and analysis.
Today I watched the equivalent of a town hall meeting with mostly
representatives from the national parties in Northern Norway on our
state television channel ([link in
Norwegian](http://nrk.no/nyheter/innenriks/valg/val_2007/1.3383452)).
The first thing that sprung to my mind was the problem of having
national politicians dominate what are city and county elections - this
is not a new thought, it has regularly been decried by both media and
politicians themselves. However, the problem is that we only have
national TV stations in Norway, and they need to cover the debates as
well. I would love to have attended some of the political debates in [my
town](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamar), but either I was working, or I
forgot about it, or I was tired after a long day at work and didnbother
biking downtown the site where the debate was held.

So how can the state television channel, which has a mandate to report
objectively and widely on this election campaign, contribute to my
finding out more about my local political debate? How about they sent
someone to the local debate to film the whole thing, and they put it up
on Google Video? (It’s fine if they choose to put it up on their own
site, but please let it be for download and not just for streaming!). I
would actually be quite happy to watch an hour debate if I could choose
the time myself, because so far I have only read newspaper reports of
what the politicians say, or politicians’ own letters to the newspapers’
debate pages etc, but not actually seen them debating each other. Of
course, we wouldn’t need NRK to do this, we could just show up ourselves
with a video camera, getting written permission from all the
participants (and if some refused to sign, we’d go to the local
newspaper and have them make a big deal out of it) to put this up.
Ideally, we’d put it up under a permissive [Creative
Commons](http://creativecommons.org) license, which is [admirably
done](http://www.thedailybackground.com/2007/05/05/cnn-plans-to-release-upcoming-debate-footage-uncopyrighted/)
by CNN for the current presidential debates in the US.

However, apart from the issue of local versus national, I also thought a
bit about the whole format. The debate was about climate issues, and the
nice thing was that every single political party, except the [Progress
Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Party_%28Norway%29), a
populistic right-wing party that has a worrying amount of votes, were
busy hitting each other over the head with how much more they would do
for the climate. I think this has really shifted in the last few years -
seeing the Conservatives standing there attacking Labour for not being
radical enough, and challenging them to double their support for
alternative energy research was neat. So I guess the ideas war has been
won - but putting things into practice, things that might even hurt some
people’s living standards or jobs, will be a whole other ball game. So
instead of choosing to support the candidate that said more collective
transportation, instead of the candidate that wanted more high ways, you
have a row of six parties all wanting more collective transportation,
and to choose whom to vote for you have to examine previous voting
patterns, individual cases and plans, etc.

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/4/5164339_9e85b7a74c_m.jpg)So I was
also thinking of how we could make the debates - whether live or
asynchronous - more informative and enlightening, in the face of TV
hosts who often just want to play up the personal conflicts, to get more
viewers. A typical event is a politician citing a fact or an event, that
the other politician disagrees about, with the host saying “Well, let’s
not get into the whole numbers game - let’s move on”… But when it comes
to numbers and facts - they can actually be objectively proven. So what
if for example the debate was not live, but pre-taped, and fact checkers
then went out and checked out each statement by the candidates (during
our presidency pollution was reduced by 20%), etc, and then inserted
those details into the final broadcast? Or what if we could create a
massively tagged and commented version of the debate transcript - using
[crowd-sourcing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing) to look up
references, link to statistics and analysis etc.
[CommentPress](http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/) is one
example of how this might work, here is an example of [a Bush speech
marked up like this](http://www.futureofthebook.org/iraqspeech/address).

![](http://www.webshotspro.com/gd/show.php/267x200/screenshots/90c18da649bec05cecea8f818a27d22b.jpg)
Of course, in order to have things to link to, we’d need information and
statistics on what politicians actually do in parliament.
[TheyWorkForYou](http://www.theyworkforyou.com/) in Britain is a really
neat model. They digitalize the
[Hansard](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansard) and do lot’s of neat things
with it to extract information and statistics, so that you can look up a
politician and see exactly how they’ve voted in different issues, what
they’ve said etc. We need something like this for Norway too.

I could think of other ways of having more intelligent debates too -
I’ve been learning a lot from innovative ways of doing it for example in
the blogosphere. How about each politican preparing a brief, that people
could read and comment upon and challenge. Then they’d meet for an
online debate at a certain time, which would be transcribed, and then
there would be a discussion of the transcript and further analysis
later. I guess the biggest challenge is the partisanship - whether
people would be willing to sit down for a serious discussion, and agree
on certain facts, or whether they would automatically distrust
everything anyone on the “other side” said… Perhaps this would be easier
in Norway, with more political parties and less black-and-white than in
the US. Perhaps one could even try this with political parties that are
closer - ie. the Socialist Party and the Red Party debating, instead of
the Socialist Party and the Progress Party. Not sure, but it would be
interesting to try. While we long for those times mentioned in [Neil
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to
Death](http://books.google.ca/books?id=KEzKAAAACAAJ&dq=&prev=http://books.google.ca/books?id=KEzKAAAACAAJ),
where presidential candidates gave hours-long heavily argued speeches,
and the public listened with rapt attention…

Stian\
 PS: I started writing this a few days ago, but only finished it today -
the day of the elections.\
 Image of empty parliament courtesy of [Dave Morris @
flickr.com](http://flickr.com/photos/davemorris/)