In which we honor Ted Turner Debate

Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this…

Once upon a time there was high school debate. (My HS time, for the sake of full disclosure.) A team of two debaters argued one another over government policies, citing facts to support their positions. Each team had a shoebox of index cards on which were hand-written the facts they were presenting, collected mostly from magazine articles, discovered through using a library reference book entitled The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (which, BTW, still exists online). Over time, and thanks to Xerox machines, those index cards grew into giant files of 8x10 sheets of documentation; an elite team might wheel four giant Rubbermaid tubs of these files from tournament to tournament and from round to round. In order to use this vast collection of research, speakers had to talk fast. Eventually, at the so-called highest levels of debate, the speaking speed was virtually incomprehensible to anyone not trained in it. 

Phillips 66 is a petroleum refineries company that, as many major corporations do, sponsors community activities. For a number of years Phillips sponsored high school debate: let’s face it, it takes a bit of the thing Woody Guthrie called the do re mi to run a national tournament. One year around 1980, the story goes, Phillips execs visited the NFL (as NSDA was called then) national tournament to bask in the glow of all that beneficial do re mi. They made the mistake, apparently, of visiting a debate round, and found themselves in a tobacco auction. Can’t we have something our people can watch and actually make some sort of sense out of? 

Thus Lincoln-Douglas Debate was born, aimed to provide an alternative to the existing Cross-X or Policy debate. The goal was to create an event that wouldn’t have all year, including summer camps, to amass evidence, and for that matter, to debate on a more philosophical rather than practical/policy level. Maybe with these changes, perhaps the average civilian could drop into a round and not only understand it, but even adjudicate it. 

And it worked. For a couple of decades. But as computers and the pipes of the internet came into our lives, eventually, as with Policy, at the so-called highest levels of debate, the speaking speed was virtually incomprehensible to anyone not trained in it. The content wasn’t exactly orthodox either, as postmodernism and critical theory bubbled up from contemporary academia. (This infected policy as well, and probably first, for that matter.) LD was becoming a one-person analog to Policy. And once again only an expert adjudicator could make much sense of it. None of this is to support a claim that there is something wrong with an extremely parochial forensics event; I am simply reporting the reality. Personally I’m all in favor of all kinds of debate, as long as we keep them in perspective. I’ll defend that position elsewhere (and already have, often enough, come to think of it).

And now, around the turn of the millennium, enter Ted Turner. 

Turner was something of a controversial figure in his day; you can read his obituary to get the details. And he was a philanthropist, with plenty of the do re mi to philanthropize with. I do not know the details of how it happened, but one day the NFL/NSDA announced the creation of Ted Turner Debate. Loosely based on the CNN debate program Crossfire, the paradigm of this new debate event was who could make the most persuasive argument. Like the TV show, facts and/or reality were not as important as being convincing. The topics would change every month, so that teams couldn’t amass tubs (or at that point, portable hard drives) of evidence. Since extreme speed was anything but persuasive, that managed inherently to cancel that aspect out. And to put that in boldfaced underlined italics, the audience literally allowed to judge the event was, as much as possible, members of the community (for which read, parents). The people who were presumably responsible for the flaws of CX and LD—the non-teaching professional judges and whatnot, college kids I guess—were banned. Quickly enough Ted Turner Debate became Controversy debate became Crossfire debate, in some order or another. And finally it became Public Forum.

Public Forum has changed a bit over the years, and if you’re reading this, you probably know how. Some topics are monthly, some bi-monthly. There are no longer bans on judging, and parent judging is as often as not the main core of the pool. Which means that at a given tournament a team might face anything from an expert college debater to a local businessperson to a first-time parent in the back of the room, and must adjust accordingly. I think that’s one of the best things about the activity. Flipping for sides and precedence happens sometimes (the NSDA) and not other times (the NCFL). Loosey goosey evidence is still problematic enough, with most of the complaints coming against paraphrasing and bogus strategic challenges. And, say what you will, Public Forum is now the coin of the realm. At least around my region, it is the most popular event on the docket. I would ascribe this ultimately to its accessibility. Any good educator can coach it. Any determined student can master it. Any reasonably intelligent adult can adjudicate it. (Parent judges, as a bonus, do not need to be paid, and can also act as chaperones, a double whammy.) 

So Ted Turner, recently deceased, creator of CNN and TCM and God knows what-all, should be honored in our debate circles for being one of the reasons we have our most popular debate activity. 

Rest in peace.