Clinton, Huckabee confirmed for final MySpace-MTV election 'dialogue'
Media companies claim the event, scheduled for Saturday evening and broadcast on television, the Web, mobile platforms, and in Times Square, will be "the most publicly accessible and interactive presidential candidate event in history."
As "Super Tuesday" on February 5 approaches, MTV and MySpace.com have announced the final installment of their ongoing "presidential dialogue" series. Co-presented by the Associated Press, the event will take place at 6 p.m. EST on Saturday, February 2; all candidates from both parties have been invited to participate, and so far, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Mike Huckabee have confirmed that they will be part of it.
The remaining presidential candidates--Democrats Barack Obama and John Edwards, and Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani--have been invited but have not yet confirmed whether they will attend. McCain, Edwards, and Obama have already participated in previous MySpace-MTV dialogues.
The Viacom-owned MTV and the News Corp.-owned MySpace aim to make this the "most publicly accessible and interactive presidential candidate event in history," according to a release from the two companies. The event will be broadcast live on MTV, MTV2, and the Latino-geared MTV Tres, as well as shown in part on the college network MTVU, streamed live on MTV Mobile, MySpace's election site, MTV's Choose or Lose politics site, and the Associated Press Online Video Network. It will be translated into Spanish for La Vibra, and broadcast on XM Satellite Radio, AP Radio, and MTV Radio. In addition, the event will be broadcast on MTV's giant high-definition TV screen in New York's Times Square.
As with past installments of the presidential dialogue series, questions for the candidates will be gathered not only from the live audience (this time it will be in MTV's Times Square studio), the Choose or Lose Web site, and MySpace's MySpaceIM instant messaging client. Real-time polling will be conducted through Flektor, the social-media start-up that MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media purchased last year.
Both MTV and MySpace have been particularly visible in youth voting initiatives for the 2008 campaign season. MTV has launched a citizen journalism campaign, and MySpace has been polling young voters as a way to gather data and spread awareness.