The Comment Factory

Al Jazeera English, or AJE, came to Ohio State this week to host a panel of students who watched and discussed the second debate between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, broadcasting from Eddie George’s Grill AJE’s 120 million viewers in 80 countries.

“Our audience is incredibly interested in the U.S. Presidential election. They want to hear what’s on the minds of voters in this country as we approach election day,” said Mariam Simpson, the AJE producer who coordinated the event in Columbus. The international network has hosted similar panels in the Tampa, Florida and Scranton, Pennsylvania for the last two debates.

The broadcast featured two panels of three students that represented the spectrum of political opinion on campus. An Obama supporter, a McCain supporter and a libertarian participated in the first panel. An Obama supporter, a McCain supporter, and an undecided voter participated in the second.

“It’s as close to the views of the average American that you can get,” said Mike Kirsch, the AJE correspondent hosting the forum. ”We’re not listening to the pundits, but learning from the actual voters.”

The panelists discussed the candidates and the issues live before and after the debate, the second of three face-offs between Sens. McCain and Obama. The six student panelists watched coverage of the debate in the V.I.P. room at Eddie George’s.

The candidates, speaking from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, addressed questions from a live audience of voters in a town hall style debate. While both candidates seek to win over voters from their opponent, the debate did not change the views of Al-Jazeera’s panel.

”I heard what I needed to hear,” J.D. Hamel, a senior in political science and philosophy, said after debate. A staunch McCain supporter, Hamel said the Arizona senator’s ”political courage” had earned him his support, but wished McCain would have “made more of a distinction [from Obama] on big picture, philosophical issues” than he did.

Brian Chorley, a graduate student in Political Science, appreciated Obama’s points on reforming health care, which the Illinois senator described as a right, not a matter of personal responsibility as McCain did. Chorley had hoped, however, that Obama’s foreign policy views would contrast more sharply with McCain’s in the debate.

“He sounded like McCain. They sounded identical pretty much,” Chorley said.

The panel’s only undecided voter, Shivani Kakde, a senior in International Studies, remained undecided at the end of the night.

“I thought it was politics as usual and the repetitive arguments of two years of campaigning and some flip flopping for crowd pleasing,” Kakde said.

During their discussion of the debate, the panelists remained respectful of opposing viewpoints.

“I was very impressed with my fellow panelists,” Chorley said. “They watched the debate and thought through the issues. Each one of them had good and bad things to say about both candidates.”

In the United States, the raced has heated up as the weather cools down and the margins of undecided voters narrows. Most of AJE’s viewers, however, already have their candidate picked.

“There’s been polls done internationally showing people want Obama because they want change from the last eight years,” Al-Jazeera correspondent Mike Kirsch said. “They blame this administration for some of the problems in the world today.”

A BBC poll of 22,000 people in 22 countries revealed Obama’s support at 80% and McCain’s at 20%. The Economist, a British-based magazine, also conducted a non-scientific survey where readers ”vote” in a global electoral college that allocates delegates by national population, giving China 1,900 delegates and the United States just 432. In China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, Obama beats McCain by over 80 percent. In Indonesia, the third most populous country, the junior senator from Illinois beats McCain 97% to 3%.

Al-Jazeera English, launched in 2006 by the Emir of Qatar, has become the third largest English language international news network after the BBC and CNN with offices in Washington D.C., London, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Doha, Qatar.