BRISTOL — Almost every hand went up last night at Roger Williams University when CNN special correspondent Frank Sesno asked students whether they had seen the YouTube video Charlie Bit My Finger.

Not so much so in the show of hands for those who watch the evening news or read The New York Times regularly.

But hands went up again when Sesno asked how many watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

And nearly all hands went up again for who intends to vote in the presidential election.

Speaking as part of the university’s series titled Civil Discourse: The American Presidency, Sesno told an audience of nearly 400 that the media is not doing its job.

Sesno, former CNN anchor, White House correspondent and talk show host and now professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, invited students to be part of the technology-driven revolution in politics and journalism.

Saying there’s “too much screaming and yelling and not enough information,” he said the national dialogue has lost its long form. “Newspapers are collapsing. With the exception of CNN, none of the cable news channels are actually news gatherers. … I’m taken now with the idea that we just have to tell stories differently. We have to connect with the audience or we will lose you.”

Describing the economic crisis as one that “affects everyone who works, spends, saves, invests, borrows or owes,” he wondered “why, in God’s name, would anybody want to be president?”

The next president, he said, will have to decide what to do next in Iraq, how to pay for the next stimulus plan, which taxes to cut, how to help higher education, what to do with baby boomers retiring and what to do with 50 million people who have no health insurance.

He encouraged his audience to “make your voice heard. You are a presence for our elected leaders.”

The next leader will have to bring together disparate parts of the world and get them talking.

“We are so good at yelling, so good at isolating the extremes of a conversation, that we never get around to discussing solutions,” he said. The national debate should have three parts: Define the issues, debate them and try to find ways to fix them.

“What if we were to design a program, an experience, that starts online and makes use of what we can do online, where we can really listen” to what people are saying, he said.

What if that experience allows experts and citizens alike to share their ideas?

Participants could vote on who would discuss the solutions on a television panel, such as Meet the Press meets American Idol, he said.

He urged the students to unleash their creative storytelling powers, to give issues of national importance the kind of attention they give to funny videos on YouTube.

“If we can connect on the way” to the future, “maybe we can make it better.”

He urged students to get informed. “Talk to people you would never talk to. Go to places that are weird. Study abroad. Challenge your own conventional wisdom,” he said.

dnaylor@projo.com