ASHINGTON - If a debate were held in New Hampshire and no one could see it on TV, would it make a sound?
Political analysts were left to wonder that yesterday, after the Republican presidential primary debate in Manchester Thursday night. The problem: Outside New England, most viewers could see the debate live only if their cable company carried the Fox News Channel.
That meant as many as 57.8 million US households, whose cable companies do not carry Fox News, could not watch the debate on televison. But for the first time during a presidential primary campaign, the debate was also broadcast live on the Internet, shifting the landscape of an event that has been carefully tailored to a single format for decades.
''In the last election, everyone was talking about the potential of the Web,'' said Bob Lichter, director of the Center for Media & Public Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit group. ''This time, it's actually being used. But the Web is not a mass medium. When you combine the limitations of the Web and a cable news channel, you're cutting out a lot of the electorate.''
Whether the changing media will have an impact on the election is difficult to calculate, analysts said, especially since many average voters across the country don't tend to focus on the New Hampshire primary until election day.
It did, however, cause noticeable excitement on the Internet. Several chat rooms became advice forums for frustrated viewers wanting to know how to watch or listen to the debate on line, and for political junkies eager to share information from far-flung states about what others were missing on Fox News.
Foxnews.com, the network's on-line service, experienced a ''huge spike in traffic'' that began just before the debate started and lasted until well after midnight, according to Laura Durkin, the service's vice president for news. And various other sites had chat room discussions running simultaneously with the debate.
''It's a first,'' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for the People and the Press in Washington. ''In the new, fractionalized media environment in which we operate, I guess this may be the way these things are done.''
Already this year, the number of people who get their news via the Internet has grown in leaps and bounds.
According to a Pew survey of 1,032 people conducted in October, 11 percent of Americans get their national and international news from on-line sources. That still pales in comparison to the 80 percent who said they rely on television and the 48 percent who read newspapers. But it was a huge leap from a similar survey just 11 months earlier, when only 6 percent of Americans said they got their news on line.
Foxnews.com did not have immediate statistics on the number of users who tapped into the on-line service during the debate. But on more than one Web site, users expressed frustration at being forced to listen to it on National Public Radio affiliates or not being able to get it at all - and thanked others for providing details of each candidate's remarks.
In a chat room on Townhall.com, a number of users gave anecdotal accounts of watching the event on the Internet; one user said he listened on line from Wisconsin, while another said he watched it over the Internet from his house in Arizona. Others still asked questions about what was happening during the 90-minute debate.
''I just fired off e-mail to all the networks for not carrying the debates,'' wrote a user named Sparrow on the Townhall.com site, after reading other users' comments about presidential hopeful Steve Forbes and his flat-tax remarks during the debate. ''I am so jealous. I do not get Fox.''
The candidates may not have lost out because of the lack of national broadcasting, especially because the debate was so heavily covered by newspaper and television reporters once it was finished. Howard Opinsky, press secretary for Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the ''debate was mainly about connecting with New Hampshire residents'' anyway.
But for Web sites, the television abyss only stood to boost their ratings on Thursday night. ''We hope that people are now using the Internet as truly a national or global tool in which to participate in the American political system,'' Durkin said. ''We believe that this coming year is the year for the Internet to take its place in the journalistic pantheon.''
