(Updated) Thursday: Tavis Smiley to Moderate PBS Dem Prez Forum on Domestic Issues

Tavis Smiley will host the All American Democratic Presidential Forum from Howard University in DC on Thursday night, June 28th, from 7-8:30 PM Mountain Time on PBS stations, including KNME, with a live stream at the PBS Forum website. The show will also be available as a video download or podcast after the show, and will be rebroadcast on PBS at 2 AM MDT.

For the first time, a panel exclusively comprised of journalists of color will be presented in primetime. Questions to the candidates will be posed by Tavis and journalists Michel Martin of National Public Radio, nationally syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. and USA Today and Gannett News Service columnist DeWayne Wickham. The topics of the questions will be limited to top domestic issues including healthcare, education, criminal justice, immigration, affordable neighborhoods, voting, rural development, economic prosperity, environmental justice and the digital divide. All eight declared Dem candidates will participate.

Unfortunately, PBS has selected much criticized Republican pollster Frank Luntz to do its after-event analysis on public response to the forum. As reported on Media Matters:

... Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who the Public Broadcasting Service has announced will provide "public feedback" following PBS' coverage of the June 28 Democratic presidential forum, has shown open disdain for Democratic priorities and candidates and has reportedly been reprimanded and censured by his peers for withholding and misrepresenting polling data and methodology. But, in addition to leaving out these facts from its press release announcing Luntz's participation, PBS, which referred to Luntz only as a "noted pollster," made no mention of the fact that Luntz has worked for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a potential general election opponent of one of the forum's participants, and has heaped praise on Giuliani this year.

... Luntz worked for Giuliani during each of Giuliani's three previous political campaigns: his campaign for New York City mayor in 1993, re-election bid in 1997, and aborted campaign for U.S. Senate in 2000. On the second page of the introduction to his book, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear (Hyperion, January 2007), Luntz describes himself as "[t]he man who worked for Rudy Giuliani, two-time Republican mayor of a city where Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans 5-to-1 (xii)."

6.28.07 UPDATE: Frank Luntz will no longer be providing presidential forum analysis on PBS' after-forum commentary, but he's still scheduled to appear on Tavis Smiley's Friday show discussing the forum. Here's the latest from Media Matters.