As I write this (October 12, 2000), we are in the middle of the presidential debates in the United States. The second debate between Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore took place October 11 in Winston-Salem, N.C. The third will take place in St. Louis, Mo., on October 17. There are varying debate formats, but each debate is a 90-minute-long question/answer session with the two candidates and Jim Lehrer posing questions as the moderator.

I had the chance to attend the debate in Winston-Salem as a member of the audience, and it was interesting! What I'd like to do in this article is tell you how the debates work when you are actually there, and compare it to the television experience.

Where the Debate Was Held
The second presidential debate was held in Wait Chapel at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Winston-Salem is about a two-hour drive from the How Stuff Works headquarters in Cary, N.C. If you look at the photo of the university on this page, the chapel is the big building with the columns and the steeple. The chapel is pretty big inside and holds several thousand people.

Security at the Debate
If you spend any time with national public officials, you quickly discover that security is important. Here is what they did to secure the debate:

• They built a 6-foot-high (2 m) chain-link fence perimeter around the chapel for this event.
• There were several gates in the fence. At the gates they created a sort of tunnel lined with U.S. Secret Service agents who checked all tickets.
• From the tunnel, you went to an area similar to an airport security checkpoint with tables and metal detectors.
• They hand-searched all bags and led you through the detectors.
• From there you could proceed to the chapel. They limited the audience's access to the chapel to a single doorway, where there was another throng of Secret Service agents and volunteers checking people and tickets.

Overall, the security checks took about 30 minutes from the time the bus dropped us off until we were in our seats. We had to be in our seats at 8:15 p.m. so the debates could start at 9 p.m.

The Chapel
Inside the chapel, the stage up front was surrounded by a giant, semicircular blue backdrop. On the stage was a single desk with three chairs and nothing else. Over the stage hung huge theatrical lighting grids with about 100 theatrical lights shining on the stage.

An overhead view of the stage layout for the debate, with the cameras in blue, the TelePrompTer in green and the desk in yellow. Jim Lehrer's back was to the audience. The audience sat in rows of seats shown here at the bottom of the figure.

In the backdrop behind the desk, there were two windows. Behind one window was a TV camera and a TelePrompTer that Jim Lehrer used briefly at the beginning and end of the debate. Behind the other window was another TV camera pointed at Jim Lehrer. On stage, there were two rolling TV cameras positioned in the wings. In front of the stage, there were two large fixed TV cameras like those you see at a football game. It appears that all of the TV networks take all of their video from these six cameras -- they all share the same video feeds.

Print photographers do not seem to have these same sharing relationships. There were dozens of photographers at the event. Along both sides of the auditorium were staircases leading up to the balcony and photographers were positioned on these stairs with their 3-foot-long (1 m) lenses to get close-up shots.