Over the past few months, with the support of the Democracy Fund, we at Bloggingheads.tv have been trying to show that, even in today’s highly partisan atmosphere, policy disagreements can be expressed civilly—and, what’s more, even ideological opponents can find things they agree on.
In a certain sense, this has been our mission ever since Bloggingheads.tv was created in 2005. From the beginning we found that when ideological antagonists have a face-to-face conversation, their civilizing instincts usually kick in. What’s different about our new project, The Good Fight, is our attempt, in collaboration with The Atlantic, to make this civilizing effect visible beyond the small but devoted audience of politics and policy aficionados who come to the Bloggingheads site to watch meaty discussions that can go on for 30, 45, even 60 minutes.
Here is how The Good Fight works: We host a video debate on some policy issue, and the moderator encourages the debaters to crystallize their disagreements but also to highlight any areas of agreement they may have. The whole conversation is shown on Bloggingheads.tv, and, in addition, we distill the results into a highlight reel of only four or five minutes in length. That’s what gets distributed on The Atlantic, the aim being to reach a broader audience than we normally reach, including people who won’t invest as much time in a policy discussion as will traditional Bloggingheads.tv viewers.
So what have we learned from this experiment?
Well, for one thing, we’ve learned that, though 4 or 5 minutes may seem short by Bloggingheads standards, to many of today’s internet denizens, that’s an eternity.
Some commenters on the Atlantic’s site have demanded that we just print a transcript—it’s faster to read than to watch and listen, after all. Others have suggested that, if they’re going to invest as much as four or five minutes in a video, they want something slickly produced, with vivid graphics, arresting animation, and so on. One Atlantic commenter recently wrote, “If you want to produce a video about it, then produce a video about it. The point of video is ‘show me’ rather than ‘tell me’.”
To be sure, some of the videos have done pretty well. A debate between Andrew Sullivan and David Frum on the legalization of marijuana got thousands of views and was shared 700 times on Facebook. And that’s not bad—especially given that the Atlantic precedes each video
with a 30-second ad, thus discouraging casual viewers from sticking around. Still, most of the videos haven’t done as well as the Frum-Sullivan debate.
And maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If you reflect on the last time that you clicked on a video, you may find that it involved something visually compelling: footage of a storm or an unruly demonstration, say. And if the video was of two people talking, there’s a pretty good chance that there was heated debate, perhaps including a sustained rant. We all like drama, and the internet gives us so much of it to choose from that less dramatic if more edifying content faces an uphill battle for attention.
In any event, we’re proud to have produced some of that edifying content. Good Fight videos have shown that, even though committed partisans are often reluctant to cede ideological ground, points of agreement can almost always be found. For example, Sullivan and Frum agreed that marijuana can harm teenage brains. And NSA critic Conor Friedersdorf admitted that spying on foreign heads of state is appropriate, while Edward Lucas, a supporter of the NSA, conceded that Edward Snowden’s revelations about bulk metadata collection benefited the American public. And in a debate on whether to raise the minimum wage, Tim Noah agreed that placing the minimum wage too high would hurt employment, while Glenn Loury conceded that indexing the minimum wage to inflation made political and economic sense.
Our experiment is far from over. In collaboration with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts, we’re going to conduct a rigorous study on the effects that such agreements can have on the viewing audience. For example, will conservatives who see liberal Tim Noah concede that point about minimum wage be more open to the liberal side of the debate than conservatives who only see disagreement between Noah and Loury? The study is scheduled to take place in June, and we’re eager to see the results.
Robert Wright is a journalist, the Editor-In-Chief of Bloggheads.tv, and President of the Nonzero Foundation.