By Brad Friedman on 7/23/2008, 2:24pm PT  

Ed Note: The following request comes from Matthew Segal, who formed the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) following his experience voting as a student at Kenyon College in Ohio in 2004 where the last vote was not cast until after 2am on Election Night. Please take the time to read it, and use the opportunity to get some tough questions directly to the folks who will be on his panel this week! - BF

Dear BRAD BLOG readers:

This Friday, July 25th from 11am-2pm ET, I will be hosting a Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) press forum entitled "Asserting the Youth Voice".

The panelists will be Thomas Friedman, national best-selling author of The World Is Flat and New York Times columnist; Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; Joe Scarborough, former U.S. Congressman and anchor of MSNBC's Morning Joe; Eleanor Clift, contributing editor of Newsweek and regular panelist on The McLaughlin Group; David Broder, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist of the Washington Post; and Mike McCurry, former White House Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton.

We want YOUR help with questions to ask our panelists.

Roughly 200 young voters will comprise the audience and the central question the panelists will be asked to answer is: what can we as young voters do to make our voices heard, affirmed, and recognized in the journalistic community? Audience members and online viewers will also have the opportunity to ask issue-focused questions to further the discussion of youth involvement in the political process.

Here was the statement I issued regarding our forum earlier today:

A transparent and participatory democracy, which is fundamental to our mission statement, is not possible without an accountable and informative media; and therefore we are eager to sit down with some of the nation's leading press figures to ask some tough questions. It is clear something is not working here: the approval ratings of Congress and the White House are at record lows, and according to a 2006 Gallup Poll, less than one-third of Americans express confidence in the quality and integrity of the media. Young people yearn for more accountability and we intend to take these matters into our own hands. Our press forum this Friday is one such step.

As I know The BRAD BLOG covers issues of press accountability closely, I'd love to share some of your thoughts, concerns and queries with the esteemed panelists we've assembled for this week's important discussion.

Please send your questions to info@savevoting.org and/or post them in comments here and hopefully you can watch them answered live on C-SPAN.

Thank you!

Matthew Segal
Executive Director, Student Association for Voter Empowerment

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