News Corp. announced Wednesday that it will be streaming the upcoming Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates live via MyDebates.org (an offshoot of MySpace.com) in what MySpace is calling a “landmark voter education partnership” with the Commission on Presidential Debates. The debates will be televised as normal to an estimated 36 million viewer (taking up valuable screen time for the new fall TV season) and will also “include an entirely new audience online able to watch each debate via live web stream.”

MyDebates

Landing the first exclusive online distribution deal for a Presidential Debate is quite the coup for News Corp. (parent company of such illustrious conservative news sources as Fox News and The Washington Post). Landing this deal just may help MySpace maintain its all but forgotten dominance over its much prettier younger sibling Facebook. If the debates attract the kind of online audience that I’m quite sure they are banking on, it just might breathe some new life into a service that has become as passé as tattoos.

MySpace has made a very concerted effort to make itself more relevant during this election season rolling out a voter-registration contest (in association with Rock the Vote), a citizen journalism contest (in conjunction with News Corp. rival NBC), an NBC news powered election news site, the polling of it’s users and a series of candidate dialogues in partnership with MTV. Yet through all of this, MySpace has continued to lose steam in its never-ending battle for social network supremacy.

News Corp. would certainly like everyone to think that MySpace is still a valuable commodity on the wider web, but trends seem to indicate otherwise. Facebook overtook MySpace as the net’s largest social network back in April and has shown very few signs of slowing down, with ever increasing numbers of users from the world over (especially among Latin Americans and the Japanese). Facebook seems to have had the edge over MySpace for a while now (not that I’m surprised given MySpace’s primitive layout features and far too recent adoption of user designed applications), but will this initiative help MySpace to reassert itself as a major player in the future of social networking?

MySpace has millions of users, many of whom are in the heavily targeted 18-35 voter demographic, so it’s users politics would tend to skew liberal (unless decades of research on voter demographics is wrong). Additionally, it is ostensibly a site created as a place for musicians and other artists (a notoriously liberal set) to put their talents on display for all the world to see. In an election cycle where we have seen a resurgence in political support from younger demographics, perhaps this could be a boon to MySpace. Often ridiculed for being a place to collect mostly imaginary “internet friends” (Tila Tequila anyone?), the team at MySpace seems to be looking for a way to stay relevant, or at least to keep their name in the mainstream media.

Perhaps I’m being cynical (okay, of course I’m being cynical, it’s what I do), but is streaming the Presidential Debates live really going to bring that many new users to MySpace? Given that every major news network will be streaming their coverage of the debates, does MyDebate.org all of a sudden become the hip place to be for those social networkers who are in the know? Hell, does the average MySpace user (there are over 100 million of them after all) plan on actually watching the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates?

To me this smells more of pandering than of engagement. The candidates have spent millions of dollars over the past 20 months trying to convince young voters that they are listening and more importantly that they care about what we think. They’re all using Twitter (or at least their aides are), they have pages and groups on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and every other social network out there, and they’re overtaking Scoble in terms of popularity on some sites (although Justin Rose still has the edge on Obama over on Twitter at last check), which is just hard to fathom. Yet, is the message really being disseminated through these channels?

I’ve listened to more speeches during this election than I had ever heard in my life up until this point and you know what, none of them are actually saying anything. Barack Obama spreads his message of Hope through vaguery and amazing oratory skills (the man is a damn good speech writer and one hell of a public speaker). John McCain spreads his message by continually validating the fears of his constituency with constant reminders of terrorists and the danger of negotiating with countries run by people that Republicans don’t like. But in the end, the message is simple, vote for me, because I’m not the other guy, and the other guy is bad.

Social media is about democratizing the web, giving everyone who wants to be heard a venue in which to do so, yet just like every other media space it is being co-opted by the mainstream and turned to their will. Mainstream politics have come to MySpace and Facebook, they have adopted blogging and micro-blogging. I suppose this means that the democratization of the web is nearing its completion. The question now becomes what do we do when this new media republic starts acting the way our current representative republic functions? What do we do when the echo chamber gets overtaken by a single voice, or two voices yelling at each other, claiming to both be the voice of the people?

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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