The next presidential campaign is already underway. All too soon, emissions from the first presidential debates will be radiating out to pierce our Buddhist defenses.   All too soon, we’ll be getting up from our couches, screaming and throwing things at our televisions as our favorite presidential candidate blows opportunity after opportunity to deep-six his/her opponent once and for all, letting that slippery b***ard get away with it again.  You know, you just know they’re better than this, and you’re right.  Even if your candidate is Donald Trump.  The problem isn’t your candidate, even if he’s Trump.  The problem is the playing field.

Part of our Political Games series, in which we explore the connections between politics and the games we play.  Make those games better–or create entirely new ones–and make life better too?  How about vice versa? Are you ready to come off the bench and play?

When the first debates debuted on television in 1960, the medium was relatively new–think the Internet in the early to mid-1990s.  Remember those days?  When a medium is new, it tries to win over its prospective audience by framing itself in familiar contexts.  So the state of the art 1990’s Internet interface featured a graphic interface that–with as much hyperrealism and fidelity as possible–borrowed some real world setting and deployed it as the guiding metaphor for navigation.  Actions that should have taken one click instead required you to open the door to a building, go up an ersatz virtual elevator, get off at the right floor, sometimes carefully study a floor plan that had been appended to the hallway with pixely evident haste (presumably after a little post facto pro forma usability testing), walk down the hallway to the right room, enter, take the right book off the shelf, open it, and access the About file for the site.  Even in the early aughts, post-bubble, one of us recalls attending a conference where a university spent an hour showing us, proudly, everything they did over the course of a year to recreate the lobby of their admissions office in Second Life.

In 1960, the real-world model that television borrowed to help new viewers understand the show they were putting on was, itself, already more than a hundred years old–the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1856.  Television has changed a lot since 1960.  And just as the only places you’ll still find a architectural metaphor on the Net are the Wayback Machine, E.gg, and Horizon Worlds (currently in the running to replace AA as the most expensive club you’ll ever join¹), it’s time to archive traditional political debates.

Today’s standard for the combination of drama, discussion, conflict, personality, character, and, (occasionally and incidentally) actionable and accurate information that old school debates were intended to capture, or at least represent, is reality television, which has proliferated, like a successful evolutionary line, into a seemingly endless diversity of forms.  Any one of which would better help us decide who the next president, or next senator, or governor of our state should be than what we have now.  For example (and only example):

Big Brother/Survivor

One of the biggest frustrations we, the people, have with our elected officials is their seeming inability to get anything done.  And we all know the key skill set involved, whether you’re a president, governor, senator, congressperson, or state-level legislator includes salesmanship, sausage-making, horse-trading, wheeling and dealing, alliance making–and sometimes breaking–essentially the same skills required to win a reality competition like Big Brother or Survivor, minus the legislation.  Except that the legislation wouldn’t be missing if we adapted this format to the campaign trail.

Though a political version could be used for crowded primary fields at any level, because these competitions are primarily legislative, we’d envision inviting pairs or Senate and House incumbents and hopefuls to participate.  Every candidate would bring a piece of legislation they want to get passed to the House.  Candidates would be able to form alliances, agree to support each other’s bills, borrow elements from each others’ (to increase the level of potential support for their own), and generally deploy the full range of anything goes, all’s fair tactics that apply, to a sometimes shocking degree, in these formats (from Richard Hatch to the present day)–and in the halls of every legislature in the country.

Every week, instead of one candidate getting asked to leave the House or island, someone’s legislation would be voted off instead, which, frankly, tracks more closely with reality–if you’ve followed the activities of the House and Senate, as we do for our Bill of the Day initiative, you know it’s pretty close to the survival of the fittest, zero-sum game Big Brother, Survivor, and others envision–very few bills pass both the House and Senate and get signed into law, relative to the number written up and introduced.  Unlike the generic versions of these formats, candidates whose bills get voted off would continue to stay and play, just as they would in real life, and cast votes every week based on their own unique calculus–who supported them, who betrayed them, who they’d most like to see fall short from the perspective of the real race going on, etc.

What we like about this format is that voters will not only learn a lot more about the legislative process than they ever did in civics and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more about the issues (via the vehicle of the legislation and its sponsors arguing its merits)  It’s also got significantly more of what game creators call “scope” than the original, because just as in the game–and on the floor of the House or Senate–the votes are not secret, but unlike the original version, they have a larger context–the real election the participating candidates are trying to win.

So if, for example, in order to increase your own bill’s chance of winning, you vote off a proposed piece of legislation that’s likely to be popular with viewers, you could lose votes in the only vote that really counts.  If, on other hand, you let your own bill get sacrificed to avoid having to take a stand against a popular bill, you risk looking like someone who won’t really fight for your constituents.  Put more bluntly, in addition to seeing your skill–or lack thereof–in coming up with legislation that can actually pass, see how you win over allies, and watch you shepherd it some or all of the way to paydirt, potential voters will get an up-close-and-personal view of how you balance the importance of making good policy against winning/your personal ambition, and decide whether you represent not only their views on policy, but their values as well, in a very visceral, granular way.  In other words, like classic Big Brother/Survivor, they will get a much better sense of you as a complex, nuanced person they can relate to and bond with (or not), as opposed to the 2-D cardboard cartoon cutout that plays you in a debate.  But unlike the originals, everything in this version is 3-D, with as many or more levels of consideration than 3-D chess or checkers for every move you make.  Just like real life.

Of course, one other big difference between Big Brother: Decision ’24 and Big Brother: Oahu is that candidates can’t possibly spend weeks sequestered in a house–not that the environment they do inhabit, especially during a campaign, is all that different; it’s life in a bubble, and for the average federal legislator or governor, whose net worth far exceeds that of his/her/their constituents, whether they’re campaigning or not hardly makes a difference in that regard.

In any case, there’s this new technology [insert sarcasm emoji] called Zoom flowing through the tubes that, thanks to the pandemic, pretty much everyone is familiar with.  We’d also include a full array of asynchronous platforms and tools in the competition environment, because at some point it would be good for Ben Wikler and (gulp) Donald Trump not to be the only politicos who fully understand the potential of the Net to be more than a fundraising tool to hoover up more money for the “air war.”

Some might think a competition of this type nevertheless represents a time-sink for candidates that they really can’t afford.  Our response: what would they be doing instead that’s more valuable, not only for themselves, but the country? Reviewing, editing, and approving more TV ads that nobody under the age of 80 watches anymore?  Giving the ol’ stump speech 8 times a day instead of 6-7?  Hitting up the same darksters 14 times instead of 15 or more?   Better to be focused on more important things, like making sure the final edit of this week’s edition is fair, because for this to work, everyone is going to have to sign off on that.

Chopped

Chopped is a culinary-based reality competition in which chefs make a three course meal for tasting and feedback by three judges. The catch is that for each course, the contestants are given a basket of often incongruous–and sometimes borderline inedible–ingredients and are required to use all of them in preparing the course for which they are intended. The competition begins with four chefs and the judges eliminate one after every course, based on their full body of work up to that point in the contest.

Relative to others, Chopped’s format is simple and self-contained. The entire competition takes place over the course of 45 minutes, which makes it among the most practical to adapt of those we’re putting forward, though also the most time-pressured–by far–especially given that the chefs have no idea or control over what ingredients they’ll have to work with.

In these respects, plus the relative modesty of the rewards for winning, it’s really quite analogous, we think, to the quotidian life of a typical executive branch politician–a mayor, a governors, and, especially, a president. As Jimmy Carter once observed, the vast majority of decisions in an executive branch are made at lower levels of governments, because they can be, and if they can be, they should be and are.

It’s only the toughest ones that are left up to the president, the ones that involve sets of variables and factors–some of them difficult to swallow or accept–that don’t lock into place neatly or obviously, often popping up out of the blue or the mire to lay waste to the best-laid daytimers. And executive politicians, especially presidents, often have to deal with several such every day, each squeezed into a tight window somewhere on their always overloaded schedules.

Because there’s no time and everyone else has already tried and failed to deal with them, executive leaders, like Chopped chefs, have to turn these lemon-filled buckets into limoncello on their own, and often the only way to know the decisions involved have been made correctly is if nobody outside the White House, state house, or city hall knows they’ve been made at all.

In short, these are the steaming silver samovars that cause every president to age rapidly and prematurely while in office. In our greatest leaders (which, having not had a hot hand in our quadrennial gamble for a while, we badly need a string of), grey hairs and deeper lines are often the only externalities. As for/in the rest, well, let’s just say it would be of great benefit to us all to know, before voting, who’s best at gauntlet running, who has the grace, the coolness under fire, and the presence of mind to truly and fully go the distance.

Fortunately, we can potentially find out by just swapping in political ingredients/scenarios for culinary ones and see what pops out of the oval oven. Whether we let judges (in Supreme finery?) continue to decide who gets “chopped,” or empower we, the people to take over, depends on whether we want to assume continuation of the system we have, or start getting in the habit, when not so fettered, of taking back the powers the Founders intended for us, and chop the candidate-contestants ourselves, American Idol-style.  OR go a third way: let judges say their piece, then take their opinion under advisement into the voting booth where the final decision can/should always be ours, and let the Court get in the habit of accepting that.

The Amazing Race/The Apprentice

As the 10-time winner of the Emmy Award for Best Reality-Based Competition (no other show has won as many as four times, and the award itself is only twenty years old), The Amazing Race, featured in the title art for our immodest proposition, would be worth consideration on this basis alone. But the format, in which 11-12 teams of 2-4 race around the world, deducing clues, taking on physical and mental challenges, and traveling, by public transportation, on a limited budget, has many independently attractive qualities and features for our purposes.

Much, if not nearly all of the gridlock in Washington is a casualty of our politicians’ inability to work with one another, even when one party controls all three branches of elected government.  As the truism goes, groups close to each other philosophically often fight each other more fiercely than either does against their common polar ideological opposite, and when you think about it, this really isn’t particularly surprising (right down to the atomic level).  Currently in our country, both parties are increasingly crippled by internal schisms–progressives vs. moderates in the case of the Democrats, establishment “RINOs” vs. Trumpist “populists” on the Republican side.

Similarly, while The Amazing Race is ostensibly between teams, virtually all the dramatic tension the show highlights is within them, and the winner each year is typically not the team with the outstanding combination of physical and mental attributes, but the one that works best together.   In fact, it may well be that sore recognition of the desperate importance of that message in our country today is an underlying reason why the show has been so successful, both critically and commercially.

Given the critical mass of contestants required to make The Race go, it would be best deployed in primary cattle call rather than a 1 v 1 general election, though an intriguing case could be made to pair each major presidential candidate with his/her/their VP and then add third, fourth, fifth, sixth party teams et al to fill out the field. More than 60% of Americans would like to see a third party (though, of course, they differ wildly about what they have in mind), and the usual logistical excuses used to exclude “minor” parties would not only not apply here, they’d be contraindicated by the format.

But one dream at a time.  As you can see from the way we’ve depicted it, we’d make the tensions that arise naturally in the game explicit, creating teams of individuals who, in sports parlance, ‘jest plain don’t like each other’: Bernie and Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, and figure that whoever emerges triumphant from these stews of natural intraparty rivalry spiced with personal and/or philosophical animus is probably also the best equipped for step two of the imperative two-step as well: reaching across the aisle.

In addition, Race highlights two other underappreciated–and likely to be increasingly important–attributes of successful 21st century politicians, especially at the executive level.  As their jobs become only more and more accelerated and complex, physical stamina is increasingly likely to be a differentiator as our politicos get centrifuged into leaders or also-rans. On this score, we have the support of a very surprising source:

Does he understand, we wonder, that the number of gallons of fuel your golf cart’s tank can hold isn’t dispositive in this regard?  In any case, stamina of the physical variety is an attribute Race requires more than any competition this side of college or professional-level athletics.

The other differentiator is locale; The Amazing Race is an international event, requiring contestant teams to navigate other countries and “interact with locals” positively and successfully, again and again, in country after country.  A president’s job nearly always ends up more focused on foreign policy than either he or his supporters hoped or expected, and this is especially true in an era of gridlock and globalization.  We’ve also entered an era of increasing popular unrest, and as such we believe an American leader who wants to increase our influence and the influence of our ideals is going to need to be able to go above, below–and through his/her/their counterparts in other nations, all the way back to their childhoods, before they became Ivy or Oxbridge-educated clones, largely culturally divorced from the people they lead.

If participating in The Race did nothing more for candidates beyond introducing them to the much larger world beyond the davosphere, it would be worth making every federal, state, and even local election include a Race within the race.  Take it from an old West African Peace Corps volunteer who lived for a decade in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago, cross-cultural comfort, intuition, and instinct opens doors at every level around the world–it’s a skill set that helped make Indonesia-immersed Barack Obama the most popular US president worldwide since Kennedy, a skill set that, as with his domestic grassroots army , it’s a real tragedy he didn’t make–or feel he could make–more (aggressive) use of.³

Still, if the logistics involved–an order of magnitude beyond those required to adapt Big Brother–are just too daunting (at least until such time as there really is a metaverse that truly supports international virtual travel), we could at least get the first, and most important, benefit we’ve envisioned here from a domestic team-based format like The Apprentice. Who wouldn’t tune in if Trump were running and had to sit on the other side of the table for the first time? Even if he wasn’t, wouldn’t it be fun to always refer to it as a poor man’s Amazing Race and watch for the steam signals to rise up from Mar-A-Lago?

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Ideal for a presidential general election, Millionaire might be the most easily transferable as a substitute for one or more old-school debates (and for this reason, we’re going to go into a bit more detail scoping it out, which hopefully will help us all in thinking about how to adapt any and all these formats–and others).  For both the candidates and the audience, a session could take about the same length of time as a traditional affair (with the mods we’ll be proposing below), and wouldn’t require any more time off the campaign trail.  Like the other constructs we’ve proposed, it much more accurately reflects the real job than a debate. Being a great president isn’t about winning arguments with staff or clowning members of Congress, but a lot of the daily mishigas does consist of repeatedly being given 2-4 options and having to choose the best one.  And like this game, some of the queries White House staffers, reporters, and others need answers to (from the leader of the free world) are trivial and easy, while others are gut-wrenching and hard.

All that said, there are a few political twists we’d add to the state of play:

• Cross-tabbing — When presidents factor polling into their decision-making process, it usually isn’t just the topline results they consider, if they consider those at all.  So whenever the candidate choose to “Ask The Audience,” we’d let them ask for any standard demographic breakdown of the results they want, and maybe even offer a few psychographics (if the campaigns let us know in advance what they’re likely to be interested in). And we’d expand the audience beyond the studio to get Ns large enough to capture any significant differences.  The catch(es)?
  • If the candidate asks for some demographic breakdowns, but not others, they run the risk of appearing to snub or slight the demographic(s) they don’t request.
  • If, to avoid this, they ask for all the available demos, they risk looking like poll-driven weathervanes–and beyond that, if, in this scenario, they end up choosing one demographic’s answer over another, it could be taken as an indication of which demographics he/she/they take most seriously.
  • If candidates decide these risks outweigh the benefits of evaluating data the way they normally would, would it be too cruel to give them the demographics anyway, whether they want them or not? They could always choose to ignore the demos and always pick the topline (overall) most popular answer, which could be taken by voters as noble (all opinions treated equally) or naive/chickens*** (all opinions treated equally).  In any case, we’re not wading in a sea of canned soundbites anymore, are we?

• No limit hold’em — We’d let candidates use all three of the traditional Millionaire lifelines on every question, if they want, because that’s a power they’ll have–and then some–in office, and we’d let them change who they phone for every question, too.
  • If they get an answer wrong, they’d lose the points/votes (game votes, that is), but keep going up the question tree, because when you’re president you can’t “take the money and walk away,” not until your term is up anyway, nor are you automatically removed from office anytime you make a dumb decision (in fact, it’s become pretty clear over the last 50 years you can’t be removed at all).
    • Besides we want voters to get as full a picture of candidates’ fund of knowledge and expertise as possible–e.g. maybe they’re the kind of leader who fluffs easy stuff that doesn’t matter that much (like getting someone’s name right/wrong at a presser or knowing exactly where every country is), but turn into Churchill or Zelenskyy when all about them are losing their s***.
  • At the end of the day, the only limit they’d face on the number of questions they answer and how much help they get is time–not for each question, but time overall–just like in real life.
    • There’d be a clock visibly running (as tension rises), and they’d have a body man or woman (if they want one) at their shoulder (e.g. someone they’re thinking of making Secretary to the President, or someone who already is) keeping an eye on the clock, whispering advice in the/their candidate’s ear, and servicing any other need they might have–more water (be careful), a kerchief to mop their brow (ditto), a favorite snack, whatever.
    • On the plus/flip side, if they finish before time’s up, they’d get additional points/votes prorated to their pace, because if they were in office, they’d be able to use that time to get more done.
• Oppo research — Each candidate would play two rounds of the game each time the format was used.
  • One round would be on a topic of the candidate’s choice, presumably playing to his/her/their strengths, defined as broadly (“foreign policy”) or narrowly (‘the Middle East”) as the campaign dares, which they’d tell the organization running the event in advance so that an independent panel balanced between liberals and conservatives can create a substantial randomized set of potential questions for each level that both “sides” have to sign off on.
    • The panel would agree to be sequestered with no access to the outside world from commencement of the question generation process until the debate is over, and would not know the topic they were generating questions for until they were sequestered.
• The second topic would be chosen by the candidate’s opponent, go through a similar question creation process, but would not be known to the candidate until they start to play the round, so as to better simulate the over-the-transom, seat-of-the-pants nature of the job.⁴
  • Clearly the opposition is going to want to pick a topic they believe the candidate is weak on, but if they try to game the game by choosing a topic that’s too obscure and esoteric, it will likely be one of those rare occasions when a dirty trick in American politics is actually punished by voters rather than rewarded: they’ll come off as elitists (because voters will be even more clueless about the answers than the candidate), cowards (because they were too scared to fight fair) who are wasting the voting audience’s time with irrelevancy and trivia.
    • Meanwhile the flailing of their opponent will not only not be counted against him/her/them, but might even generate a wave of sympathy and support, especially if the candidate handles the cheap shot calmly and with good humor.
    • So, in all likelihood, each candidate would get a topic they could reasonably have to deal with, but one that’s nevertheless be pretty far out of their wheelhouse, because nobody’s wheelhouse is as big as the presidency⁵

One of the things we really like about this format is the number and level of sophistication of the ways candidates can win because it provides a much richer set of relevant insights into who they are and how they’re likely to perform in office than any well-rehearsed and timed zinger ever could, and therefore provides a much stronger basis for voters to decide who won.⁶

At baseline, there’s the score, which is based on how many questions the candidates were able to answer correctly in the alloted time, along with their level of difficulty, and this, in turn, could tell us a lot about how organized and efficient they are, the general fit of their fund of knowledge to the job, and their capacity to function well under time pressure, among the other executive capacities on NZT-48 a presidency requires. But that’s only the beginning, the topline, as it were.  Some–and only some–of the other potentially useful “data points” guaranteed⁷ to be available for voters’ consideration include, for example:

• How willing or reluctant the candidates are to ask for help (i.e. use lifelines), the type(s) of lifeline/help they use the most, the least. Whether they’re willing–oh, the political agony–to disagree with the audience, whether they avoid this by never asking/polling.
• Who they rely on when they need answers, how much this varies from question to question, in what way, and whether this results in revealing patterns (e.g. whether he–and it likely would be a he, in this case–always turns to a white male for help with the tough ones)
• Whether they’re accompanied by the personal assistant they’re allowed to bring with them into the game (or prefer to fly completely solo), how they treat junior staff, based on how they interact with said assistant, assuming they bring one (they’ll be under a lot of pressure, so it won’t be easy for them to fake that relationship), what the assistant automatically supplies him/her/them with (if it’s cocaine, that’s probably not a good look), what they themselves ask their assistants for.
• What topics they choose for themselves, how broad or narrow said topics are (which could be indicators of knowledge and/or confidence), how well they do in the topical areas they’ve picked (which can tell us something about whether they’re good judges of what they know and don’t–the last thing we need is another embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect)
• How well they perform on topics that in theory they haven’t prepped for at all, and know little about (which could be a good indicator of how good their intuition and/or analytic skills are), whether it seems like they did prep for the topics chosen for them
  • Which, depending on how this manifests, could indicate they know well what their weaknesses are and are good at anticipating granularly what they’ll be hit with and/or highly committed to shore up/bone up on where they’re weak, that they strongly believe in the importance of being prepared for every contingency, or simply that they’re brilliant and highly knowledgeable in a well-rounded way (which shouldn’t be disqualifying)
• Based on their body language throughout the wide spectrum of job-relevant situations they’re likely to experience in the game, how wide their comfort zone is, what kinds of scenarios they find most challenging and, more generally, how likely it is that they’ll be able to perform–every day–the kinds of tasks the game requires (because they’ll certainly have to), ideally without wandering the halls late at night talking to the portraits.
• Etc. etc. etc.

It seems likely that Trumpist Republicans, in particular, will object to this format on the ground that knowledge is not the be-all and end-all of being president or holding any office, even with two scoops of grace under pressure thrown in.⁸  Of course, which is why we would never recommend a Millionaire-type format be the only one deployed in any given year–just like multiple formats are used in debates each year, the same should be true of these events going forward.  But let us make the case for why there should always be a knowledge-focused candidate donnybrook of this kind:

• While presidents have huge staffs who can tell them anything they don’t know, the more knowledgeable they are (and the more motivated they are by electoral necessity to become more so), the fewer “lifelines” they’ll have to use to get through the presidential day, and given the increasingly crushing load of the job, that’s pretty important.
  • Also, the more knowledgeable a president is, the more likely he’ll know if the advice and answers he’s getting are accurate, not just CYA BS or the product of a well-ground ax, and not get steered down garden paths we’ll all regret (see War, Iraq)
• One of the appeals of this kind of game show is that the audience can generally “play along.” In this case, this means they’ll not only likely be (a lot) more engaged than in a traditional debate, but each time they know the answer to a question the candidate can’t answer without a lifeline, or doesn’t get right at all, it will help demystify the presidency, bring the people closer to the office, cauterize unhealthy leader-worship, and hopefully lead some portion of non-rich, non-white, non-male viewers to an insight we badly need more of in this country, namely “hey, we could run for office, too!”

But in this day and age, by far the best, most important reason to include these kinds of events in the campaign mix is that:

• By definition, knowledge-based competitions help re-establish something critical we’re currently losing that’s especially existentially dangerous for a nation to lose–the accepted existence and validity of facts and a common, shared fund of knowledge.
  • Perhaps that’s something we should leave unsaid except behind closed doors, lest we spook the GOP, except that deep down, I believe all but the most extreme Republicans believe in facts and knowledge, too, and frankly, while they’d never say it, they’d heartily enjoy watching the likes of Donald Trump make a complete a** of himself in a format like this
    • Particularly given that once his supporters see how ignorant he is compared to them, it will make it all that much more difficult for him to maintain the fictional mystique that he’s a successful billionaire who always wins, thereby loosening his grip on the party enough for someone (anyone) else to seize the reins.
    • Besides what are the odds he’ll ever actually read this, even if it were published in the Times or Post, in which all the pictures we’ve included would be removed?  And how many of those still in his inner entourage actually read any more than he does?

Undercover Boss

In an era where the median net worth of a member of the House of Representatives is nearly $1 million, the median net worth of a US Senator is $3.2 million, the median net worth of a state governor is $4.9 million⁹ (and the average is $150 million+⁹), at a time when states, most of which are dominated by one party or the other, rather than polarized and gridlocked, are increasingly calling all the shots, our politicians have become increasingly disconnected from the real world the rest of us inhabit, especially when they enter into the increasingly frequent cycles of brinksmanship that have characterized the past three decades, emblematic of the old African proverb “when elephants fight, only the grass suffers.”  And frankly, the future of democracy literally depends on reversing this, before our trademark optimism curdles into the cynicism that characterizes the citizenry of authoritarian nations.

“Undercover Boss” is a reality show whose premise is exactly as it appears–the CEO of a company goes “undercover” in his own company, working in a low-level job to learn what’s really going on his (it’s usually a he) company.  In the political version, candidates would enter into a variety of environments, and voters learn not only how comfortable they are, or aren’t, when they’re really among the hoi polloi. 

More importantly, they hear from the candidates what they have and haven’t learned from the experience, and hopefully those learnings get applied when they’re actually in office to boot.  In fact, we think candidates should be required (on penalty of voter disapproval, at a minimum) to continue going under cover while in office, not only to reinforce their connection to reality, but potentially even create the closest thing we’re likely to experience to a teachable moment validating one of Jesus Christ’s most famous parables:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,  I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me… Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

Because you never know when the fellow employee you’re teeing off on might turn out to be your Congressman, Senator, Governor, or the President of the United States.

On the show, the “undercover boss” is typically undercover for a week, which is a much harder time commitment for an officeholder than a candidate to justify–literally impossible in the case of a president–though we’d argue the disconnect between the elites and people has reached a sufficient point of peril to make the case. But the reason for the time commitment for the show isn’t so that the workers around the execspion can get comfortable enough to “really open up to him” (that would likely take longer than a week, even in the most informal country in the world).  No, instead it’s so that the boss gets as full a picture of the company he’s running as possible–he typically takes on a variety of tasks within the company, and ideally does so in different locations around the country.  So sure, probably not even a Congressperson can take a week off to go undercover, but to periodically assume a position for a few hours somewhere in their district, state, or the country they “own”–is that so hard as to be unrealistic?

Then there’s the matter of security.  First of all, it wouldn’t hurt for this class of individuals, self-selected for egotism, to be told what all of us need to be whenever we feel the weight of the world too keenly on our shoulders: “you’re not that important.”  Second, the best security in the world can’t protect any politician from a skilled assassin (or group of them) if they know exactly where he/she/+ is and when.  So when and where is he/she/+ more likely to be safe?  When he/she/+ shows up to give a speech that’s been publicized well in advance to ensure attendance and coverage?  Or when he/she/+ shows up incognito and unannounced for a few hours on a factory floor in Anytown, USA?

Third, surely we’re spending enough on security to be able to get creative and figure this out, or get the Israelis, aka our other “special relationship,” to figure it out for us.  The King of Jordan did it, multiple times, in a country where he’s likely subject to more assassination and coup attempts in a year than we’ve experienced in two hundred, and surely doesn’t have security options (including options he can be sure won’t try to kill him instead) we do.

Next?

To be clear, these are just examples for the sake of illustration. You could fairly look at them and believe there’s another show you know and love whose format is even more appropriate to the task (e.g., a version of Shark Tank in which candidates compete to win over truly undecided voters–or better yet, win endorsements and/or contributions from actual big donors or organizations, so voters can see who is willing to what for support. Or a version of Fear Factor that includes the nastiest things candidates have do while campaigning or in office?¹⁰) , or conclude that a whole new politics-specific format needs to be developed. If we speaka your language when we say this, we hope you’ll share your thoughts in comments below–we’ll be sure to involve you to the extent you want to be, in the Project Reality initiative we’re developing.

In any case, with Republicans not just threatening but promising to pull out of the traditional debates, and the events themselves in the midst of a long ratings spiral into irrelevance (as shown below), in a time when the corporate media is increasingly willing to bite the hand that protects it by playing the ratings card to justify not fulfilling its First Amendment and civic responsibilities,¹¹ now is the perfect time for a change.

Living in the Fox-generated metaverse as they do, it shouldn’t be hard to convince the GOP’s powers-that-be that stripping away the protection of the “liberal” media’s pesky questions they believe the Dems have enjoyed¹³ will allow their bigger, tougher candidates to get right up into the face of the “libtards” and own them.

For their part, surely Democrats are aware of the extent to which the GOP and their Russian allies have poisoned the fountain of truth the Debates were supposed to represent, to the point where Hillary Clinton won all three of her 2016 affairs with Donald Trump in the eyes of voters, well beyond the margin of error according to every credible poll in fact, yet each time lost ground in the only poll that matters (because voters had also been convinced that her ability to crush Trump in logical, rational discussion was just further proof of her perfidy).

And the media?  We asked our Gen Z co-founder, upon whose generation the future of democracy depends, how to respond to this query if we wanted to avoid saying “you’ve got to be kidding” and still speak to his generation. You gotta be s****** us¹⁴–it would be such a ratings bonanza, there’d be bidding wars for the rights, the likes of which could fill the coffers of every voting rights, voter access, and voter education organization in the country, with enough left over to fund the GOP’s favorite core Constitutional charities,¹⁵ too (surely there’s some category of organizations postmodern Republicans love that doesn’t consider undermining the founding ideals of our country to be either its end or means to same).

Maybe more important to both parties and the media, based on the enthusiasm of my focus group of one, it could be the best way to get younger voters to tune back into this rite of political passage again. And it would take decades for (a) public interest to fade away (all of the reality show formats we’ve explored are still on the air,¹⁶ and not just because they’re so much cheaper than dramas and comedies to make) and (b) the consultant class to figure out how to game them down into sound bites and memes.  Plus the formats can be switched from election to election to potentially increase their staying power ad infinitum. But it wouldn’t hurt to give the pooh-bahs and/or others in their community a little nudge:

Kimberly/Kim Godwin President, ABC News (212) 456-1700. LinkedIn Twitter Email: Godwin@abcnews.com

 

 

Neeraj Khemlani, Co-President, CBS News, (212) 975-3247, LinkedIn Twitter Email: Khemlani@cbsnews.com

 

 

Wendy McMahon, Co-President, CBS News,  (212) 975-3247 LinkedIn Twitter Email: mcmahons@cbsnews.com

 

 

Rebecca Blumenstein, President, Editorial, NBC/NBC News, 212-664-4444 LinkedIn Twitter  Email: rebecca.blumenstein@nbcuni.com

Suzanne Scott, CEO, Fox News, 1-888-369-4762 Twitter Email: Suzanne.Scott@foxnews.com

 

 

Sir Mark Thompson, President & CEO, CNN, 404/827-1500, Email: Mark.Thompson@cnn.com ^16.5

 

 

Rashida Jones, President, MSNBC, (212) 664-4444 LinkedIn Twitter Email: Rashida.jones@nbcuni.com

 

 

Paula Kerger, President & CEO, PBS, LinkedIn Email: Pkerger@pbs.org

 

 

A couple of related notes.  We haven’t provided–and won’t provide–a form letter or script to send to these folks, because we believe that kind of campaign has become nothing but noise, and more organic letters or posts in your own words, trickling in rather than taking the conspicuous form of a tsunami, so they can take credit for the idea at any point in time, will have more impact, and because we don’t want to impose any of the formats we’ve proposed on you or them–as we say in tech, you tell a developer what you want done, not how to do it.

If we had to hazard a guess as to which networks might be most open to new formats, and therefore who would be most worth our focus, our guess would be Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS–each for different reasons¹⁷, which might be worth considering in the pitch you make–but honestly, we don’t really know.  One thing we’ve seen over and over again in new media is that it always pays to cast as wide a net as possible rather than worry about whether you’re “boiling the ocean,” and there are certainly reasons to believe ABC, NBC, and/or PBS could be interested as well.¹⁷  For all of them, it costs them nothing, and likely generates a lot of positive publicity, to throw down a gauntlet or two to the politicos and dare them to not pick it up.

The phone numbers we’ve provided are mostly general switchboard numbers, and they might as well be–nobody at this level is publishing their batphone number online, and you can be sure someone else is screening their email addresses and running their social media feeds for them.  If you want to connect directly with them, you could do worse than to hop onto LinkedIn to see if you’ve got any mutual friends who might be willing to connect you–you might be (very) surprised.  I performed this exercise myself, and learned Paula Kerger and I have at least 14 mutual “friends,” I have eight in common with Rashida Jones, three with Wendy McMahon, and two each with Rebecca Blumenstein and Neeraj Khemlani.

Of course, we’re all “connected” with people we don’t really know, so this is likely true of many of our friends as well, and even–especially–where these relationships are strong, many of us are reluctant to “use up” our connections with top people.  But this is rather different than the typical “ask”–you aren’t going to be asking anyone’s connection for a job, an investment, or anything of material value; instead all you’re doing is offering ideas that could be of value to them–in service of our country, no less.   And once you make a connection with someone in this way, well, if someday you are looking for a job or an investment, that ask is significantly more likely to meet with a positive reception than if their first impression of you is–or was–that of yet another person who wants something from them.

Furthermore, if you’ve ever developed partnerships with top organizations of any kind–and I’ve developed them with dozens over the years, including with three of these seven (albeit many years ago in the case of two of the three)–you know that the best place to start is usually not the top, but somewhere in the middle–that’s where you’re usually going to end up anyway, even if the people at the top love what you’re pitching.  So don’t limit your LinkedIn networking to the foam and froth–do searches on each of these companies, and see with whom in each company you have mutual friends–connections that are more likely to be both genuine and easier for your friends to make available to you.

I’m actually pretty introverted, a lot better at organizing things than participating in them. Chances you’re actually better at this networking thang than I am–more importantly, so are media folk–it’s a big part of the job description, after all. Yet check out what I found when I followed my own advice:

 

So if I have all these great connections, why don’t I just make this happen myself?  Because in this day and age, nobody makes anything significant happen by themselves anymore.  I laugh when I hear clients worried about the potential for “channel conflict” if two or more people in their employ reach out to the same organization or even the same person.  Just as “competitive analyses” increasingly need to be replaced by “collaborative” or “landscape” analyses, in which every other entity is treated as a potential partner until they prove otherwise, to get the attention and overcome the inertia of any large organization can take a nation of millions.

Does this make what we’re proposing impossible?  Far from it.  Even the rise and ongoing relevance of Donald Trump has a silver lining, even if it’s made of tinfoil.  What Trump has shown us, to the greatest extent any individual has in our lifetime, is that nothing is impossible.¹⁸   Largely because of him, for example, officeholders at every level are far more diverse than they were when he took office, because a lot of people who had previously been marginalized realized that (a) if that guy could get elected as dogcatcher, I sure as heck can, and (b) if I don’t do something about him, our country, and potentially civilization itself¹⁹ could come to an end.  Per the popular post-election meme at right, we grenouilles were “woke” alright, hopefully before we amused ourselves into the grave.  Post-Trump, unpresidented is the rule for political candidates; there are no others.  Frankly, Biden’s low approval rating has more to do with how boring, normal, and old he is than any objective evaluation of his administration’s performance. And let’s remember, none of us thought a presidential candidate would be caught dead playing the sax on a late-night talk show, or let us in on his choice of underwear either.

 

 

Creative Politics is the world’s first comprehensive, community-based political incubator, perpetually under construction, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All our blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit/attribution) by leaving us a comment below…

¹ Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is often referred to as “the most expensive club you’ll ever join” because of the horrific cost in money, status, and relationships the average member has to go through before walking through its doors. But Facebook–I mean Meta–is clearly giving recovering boozers the runs for their money. To date, “Zuck” has invested $13.7, I mean $36 billion in Horizon Worlds; given that the platform currently has 200,000 monthly users–down from 300,000 in February 2022–that’s  $68,500, I mean $180,000 per user.  And anatomically at least, even the basics of the platform build appear to be only half-complete.  It’s easy to see why the tech world is salivating over the metaverse–essentially it represents an opportunity to re-sell us everything we own in the real world, and then some–and some, like the co-creator of our site, believe this alone ensures that, like the smartphone and other technologies before it, the metaverse will be imposed on us whether we want it or not.  He has a point–as has often been argued by entrepreneurs seeking VC funding, for example, nobody was demanding the smartphone either (though people were definitely looking for device “convergence,” new media’s version of the singularity). But it should also be noted that the only surer way not to get funded than making this argument is to show off a chart illustrating how much money could be made “if we get just 1% of the market).  And while there’s no question the metaverse will have a big impact on some spaces, especially those with captive audiences like education, and will likely get big enough enough to be dangerous, I’d argue that the massive post-pandemic layoffs, while to a certain extent merely performative and merely in consequence of the mentality within the herd all top tech executives and investors belong to, also reflects how far removed from the pulse both groups have become (as top dogs in tech invariably become, as anyone with decades of experience in the sector knows), apparently unable to fathom or believe that, absent a deadly disease and accompanying lockdowns, most of the world’s consumers do not actually have any interest in living their lives entirely online^1a–at least not until the tech and other business elites finish the work of making the real world wholly unlivable, or at least unbearable.^1b Just as television didn’t replace film or radio, and the computer didn’t replace television, and the laptop didn’t replace the desktop, and the smartphone didn’t replace the laptop, the metaverse will take its place in the ecosystem, and no more.  Besides, as Meghan Garber of The Atlantic points out–we’re already in the metaverse we apparently want to be in, no headset or helmet required. Back

^1a To the point where it will likely be impossible to lock down countries like ours ever again.

^1b The only other game-changer I can see, and it requires a pretty strained definition of “horizon” to see it: when we can upload our entire selves into the ‘verse, including every piece of information and every configuration contained in every neuron, with enough plasticity to allow “us” to continue to develop, and thus “live” “forever.” Of course, who is going to care about presidents, or politics at that point, if we haven’t already lost them along the way? Until then, I have one word to describe Zuckerberg’s metaverse: Prodigy. Here’s another, one that means “Prodigy as created by its users:” MySpace (ouch). It’s a cardinal sin that $36 billion’s worth of top engineering talent has been flushed down the virtual commode (if they have those in Horizon Worlds) for this, on top of all the brainwidth that’s been spent over the last two decades keeping the good ship Facebook afloat atop the spaghetti code the platform was built with

² Especially if candidates of color are involved, lest they look to the less evolved among the voting population like busboys (apologies, Senator Booker & Sec. Castro!), and not in an ironic way What is ironic is that we chose Castro and Booker to represent this show format because compared to other recent candidates, they’ve likely had to get more creative on the fly making lemonade from things other than lemons, both by virtue of growing up BIPOC in America and, more importantly, who they are and where they’re from.  E.g. Castro’s mother was/is one of the founders of La Raza Unida, and Booker is the only reason the words “Newark” and “miracle” have ever appeared in the same sentence. Back

³ I’ll always believe that Obama’s reticence and reserve, both domestically and internationally, was yet another incalculable cost of racism in our country, a hesitancy built within him both over decades and acutely in his moment-to-moment political calculations (of how much boldness from a Black president could be tolerated, no matter its merits), which I cannot say were in error on his part, especially given everything that has followed, including the unending self-mutilating efforts, both knee-jerk and systematic, to erase him and his works from the history of the country. Those still engaged in this project are apparently unaware that what they’ve done to Obama and his legacy can just as easily be done to them, at great cost to our country as well. Smh. Back

⁴ Just as in football, in which teams get to choose whether to kick or receive, at the beginning of each event, each candidate (before knowing the topic the opposition has chosen for him/her/them) would be able to choose whether they want to start, for round one, with their own topic or the one that’s going to be a surprise, and just as in football, this choice, like everything else in this game, will provide insight about who they are, especially in the context of what happens in the game itself. Back

⁵ Which is one of the reasons why some of us believe the president should be replaced by a cabinet, council, or committee, but that’s a subject for another post Back

⁶ All the other formats we’ve proposed are much looser and improvisational , so while there would no doubt be tropes that emerge in each, there’s little data voters could absolutely rely on getting from every session or compare across sessions over time. To use a sports metaphor (gah!), Millionaire is more like baseball, the rest are more like soccer Back

⁷ Or, if not guaranteed (in a few cases), no worse than highly likely Back

⁸ Among other things, they’d argue, it leaves out net worth, height, good looks, flawless grooming, well-tailored clothes, a commanding, inspiring, and charismatic mien, the ability come up with new and increasingly opaque ways to give more tax cuts and corporate welfare to the wealthy while suppressing the votes of everyone else, to speak fluently in meaningless platitudes about your commitment to the conveniently silent majority, and do so convincingly enough to sufficiently distract a majority of Americans while you continue to quietly raid the Treasury on behalf of your base and, above all, the capacity to generate a suitably robust reality distortion field. Back

⁹ We compiled the governor data ourselves, and given that politicos typically treat the financial disclosures our estimates are based on as if the forms involved are tax returns they know they’ll never be audited on,^9a these net worth figures are likely very, very conservative. If you know of a publicly accessible online locale where accurate net worths of all the governors in all the states are collected, please let us know in comments below.  We were frankly a little surprised, given the current dynamics in our country, that Open Secrets didn’t have the goods.  Based on what we found  (which, in many cases, especially in red states, consisted of little more than listicle-type sites powered, in grammatically mangled English, by domains and brands we’d never heard of [except in cases where they were knock-offs]), we suspect financial reporting requirements vary wildly from state to state, with “none at all” at one end of “wild.”

Against the surely remote possibility that we’re the only ones who’ve compiled such a list, and that other members of the community might want to use and share it, here’s the rubric we followed, followed by what we found:  Rules: (1) In any case where we found an estimate from a reputable source, we used it, irrespective of what other sources might say (there was usually only one reputable source/governor, if that (2) If the only source we found was a range (most commonly $1M-$5M, which seemed to be the WAG answer for no-name information sources), we used the midpoint of the range (3) If we found multiple estimates, none from any source that was particularly reputable, we either averaged them (with each estimate receiving equal weight, e.g. if three sources estimated a governor’s net worth at $3M, this was weighted as three estimates of $3M, not just one), and/or weighed their credibility against the governor’s bio–e.g. what was his/her employment history prior to entering politics? Did he/she come from a family with money or marry into it?  (4) In general, other things being equal, we erred on the side of conservatism, e.g. in the case of the governor of Idaho, we found one estimate of $3,250,000, and another of $300M.  We didn’t average these; we just went with the estimate of $3,250,000.  We figured that the average and median would speak for themselves no matter how conservative we were, and we think we were right 😉 

In any case, with an n of 50, any inaccuracies at the margins are likely to be noise against the picture.  For example, we originally had Jared Polis, Colorado’s Governor, down for a net worth of $122.6M, then found multiple, more reliable and more recent sources who pegged it at $400M instead.  When we plugged this new number in, it only raised the average net worth from $150,600,561 to $156,148,561.  As someone allegedly once said to David Blaine, big whoop.

Back

^9a And even if the IRS or some similar entity were on the job, we live under a tax regime in which we’re compelled to believe/accept that Jeff Bezos makes almost nothing and gives away everything he does to charity–no wonder multiverse shows and movies are so popular, EEAAO in particular.

¹⁰ In addition to the shows we’ve used as examples, Shark Tank, and Fear Factor, here are a few others we think are potentially worth feasting your imagination on, in no particular order: American Idol, Project Runway, The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Extreme Makeover, Love It Or List It, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, and Last Comic Standing.  But don’t limit your thinking to what’s top of mind for us–you can jog your memory with a full list of every reality show ever aired here. Back

¹¹ The best example of this is the incredible shrinking coverage of the parties’ political conventions. Sure, like baseball, they could probably use some reimagining (and of course we have some ideas for this, which we’ll take up in another piece; for now we’ll only say we believe the Democratic roll call in 2020–in which ordinary people from every state cast the ballots for their states from the states where they reside was a significant step in the right direction), but unlike baseball, these events only last four days each, once every four years.

And yet our television networks, to whom we’ve given free access to the spectrum, apparently can’t part with any of the advertising revenue they’d have to forego on those eight days by providing full coverage, indeed resent and begrudge the “free advertising” the parties are getting (as if the D’s and R’s were just two companies “getting over” on their networks’ sales departments). Moreover, they can’t seem to understand that for four days every four years, it’s important for them to put their (selfish) commercial interests aside, and tell us, via their cameras and their own attention, that it’s time to put aside all that we ordinarily amuse ourselves to death with and focus our attention fully on the two groups of people who are going to be making a lot of decisions that affect us in the next four years, many of which will continue reverberate in our lives long beyond that, so that we don’t find ourselves sinking into an authoritarian slough of despond, b****ing like a bunch of barkaloungers all the way.

Frankly, it looks to us like corporatization of the media has turned the First Amendment into little more than a glorified antitrust exemption.  And if you want to know what we “really think,” there’s this–or more specifically, this. Back

¹² Are you experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance when you look at this chart, vs. what you’ve been told about “the record numbers” who watched the 2016 debates, and the relatively small drop off from those to the Trump-Biden debates in 2020? Those “record numbers,” like our “record turnout” in 2020 (125th best in the world) are not false, but they’re definitely misleading. For the most part, they simply reflect population growth, not “record interest.” In 1960, there were 179,323,175 people living in our country; by 2020, that number had nearly doubled, to 331,400,000, and given that we now have between 10-12 million undocumented immigrants (who don’t necessarily want to be counted) as well as the measures the Trump administration undertook to sabotage the counting of non-whites in general (who are already harder to count to begin with) in the 2020 Census that’s likely an undercount that exceeds even the Bureau’s estimates.  In 1960, an average of 21 million Americans watched each debate; that’s  11.7% of the entire population. In 2020, an average of 37.8 million watched each debate; that’s 11.4% of the 2020 population.

More importantly, this graph is intended to show the world as it appears to a network executive, not the general public.  In determining what to cover and how, the network executive doesn’t really care how many people are watching the debates in general; they care about how many are watching them on their network.  In 1960, there were only three networks broadcasting the debates; by 1992, Nielsen was tracking debate numbers across four networks; by 1996, five; by 2000, seven; by 2008, 12-13 nets were covering and covered; in 2020, 15-16 networks were considered engaged enough to be counted (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, Fox Business Network, FoxNC, CNN, CNNe, PBS, Telemundo, Univision, Newsmax, Newsy, WGNA, and VICE).  Of course, not all these networks are getting the same traction, and no doubt if we limited our analysis to the original Big Three across time (and had that level of detail available over time to do so), or a Big Seven that included Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, the graph would be less steep, probably significantly so, but the total viewership tracked would be lower, because for an event whose share of interest hasn’t changed much over time, debate coverage in the traditional format is clearly a zero-sum game, with every additional network taking viewers away from the networks already covering them.

Source Detail: 1960: The Commission on Presidential Debates, 1976-2012: AdWeek, 2016-2020: Nielsen (first, second, and third debates in 2016, first debate in 2020) and the Wall Street Journal (the second 2020 debate). Back

¹³ Of course, much of this griping is rooted more in the culture of postmodern Republicanism than reality.  For example, I can remember trying to convince a group of Trump supporters that the top fact-checking services are not, in fact, biased towards the left by showing them the many times these services have called out liberals for their lies and exaggerations. Their response? Well, of course they did, but this proves nothing because conservatives always tell the truth and liberals always lie, so unless the fact-checkers attack only liberals, they have a liberal bias.  They’ve been well-taught from the top that coming to agreement on the truth means taking and taking and taking until someone stops you, then biding your time and taking some more.

Reality?  Reality is that since the turn of the century, there hasn’t been a single question asked in a general election presidential debate about what is–nearly inarguably–the greatest challenge our nation and the world face today: climate change.  And frankly, Chris Wallace’s question in the first debate of 2020 is the exception that proves the rule–rather than asking the candidates what they plan to do about the problem, he merely asked them to what extent they believed in climate science, as if even the existence of the issue, let alone its severity, were still not settled reality.  Ditto the question posed by audience member Ken Bone–about energy, not climate–as the credits were about to roll in the town hall debate of 2016 (for which he was subsequently and roundly roasted by the media for his physical appearance).  In all likelihood, even the only such question ever actually fielded, by Al Gore, way back in 2000, was likely only posed out of media curiosity about what would happen if they poked the bear over his apparently bizarre fixation on a problem that everyone knew was fairly trivial compared to the kitchen table issues he should have been focused on.  So no, we don’t agree–at all–with the GOP’s primary excuse for backing out of the debates in their original format going forward. Back

¹⁴ Ed. note: Baker has watched The Sopranos almost as many times as I’ve watched The Wire. Back

¹⁵ By “Constitutional charity,” we mean organizations dedicated to supporting parts of the Constitution in need, in need of restoration (by cleaning off two+ centuries of accumulated anti-democratic grime) and rehabilitation back to their original state as intended by the Founders and/or the drafters of subsequent amendments. Examples: Article III of the original document. The 14th amendment. The Census clause. The creation of well-regulated militias, as prescribed by the 2nd. Back

¹⁶ Big Brother is heading into its 25th season; Survivor is working on its 44th; Chopped is in its 52nd; The Amazing Race, which has won nine prime-time Emmys as the best reality show on television, is logistically more complex and expensive than others, but was just renewed for its 35th season; Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has “only” been on the air for 22 seasons in the US, was finally left for dead in 2019, then revived, and renewed in 2020. Furthermore, the number of Millionaire episodes relative to the others–or anything other than the likes of the long-running daytime soaps–is staggering: more than 3,000 and counting, and this does not include the original British or any of the other international editions, e.g. the Hindi version memorably depicted in Slumdog Millionaire; Undercover Boss is the baby of the bunch, but has won two Emmys and steamed through 11 seasons so far; it’s not known yet whether there will be a 12th. Back

^16.5 Sir Mark was just named CEO of CNN on August 22, 2023. We assume the email address we’ve provided is accurate, as it follows CNN’s email format conventions; he does not appear to have a social media footprint (smart guy?). If you know his email address to be different, know his Twitter handle, and/or where to find him on LinkedIn, and are willing to share, let us know. If you have this info, but don’t think he would want his contact info known to the world (a pretty good bet, given how low-profile he is compared to the other media execs we’ve listed), we could always set up a way for the community to send messages to him through us–we would be willing to compile, format, organize, and exec summarize them for him before passing them on, either directly, or back through you. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide–we’ll keep digging ourselves as well. Back

¹⁷ A few quick thoughts on why each of the networks might be interested:

• Fox — Loves to put politicians on the spot, to put them in potentially embarrassing situations, likely believes conservatives would fare better in at least some of these formats, and would dearly love to change the subject and reboot its image in the wake of the revelations in the discovery phase of the Dominion suit
• MSNBC — The runt of the litter, especially now that Trump is out, the network most likely looking for ways to steal a march on the competition as a result, would likely believe progressive candidates would fare better in most of these formats, certainly better than they usually do in traditional debates, plus could easily join forces with NBC to form a powerful, complementary combo
• CNN — Has been the most adventurous of the networks in trying new news formats and developing original news-related programming over the years (and proud of it), possibly due to a combination of being the only network exclusively focused on news when it launched (and for a number of years thereafter–I’d argue it’s still more exclusively focused on news than the others, which are all organic subsidiaries of broader networks) and its huge international audience (CNN’s uniques/month dwarf Fox’s online), which can act as a buffer against partisan blowback.
• CBS — Arguably the best equipped and most likely to see the potential of the idea, having aired several of the formats we’ve proposed, very successfully, and for many years, including Survivor, Big Brother, Amazing Race, and Undercover Boss
• ABC — Was responsible for airing perhaps the best fit among our formats, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, as well as others with potential, including American Idol, Shark Tank, The Bachelor, Extreme Makeover, et al, so should be familiar and comfortable with doing this
• NBC — Has been responsible for one of the formats we’ve proposed, The Apprentice, has certainly enjoyed its share of potentially relevant reality success, including The Voice, Fear Factor, America’s Got Talent, and Last Comic Standing, plus could easily join forces with MSNBC to create a powerful, complementary combo
• PBS — While it tends to be the most cautious of the lot, careful to safeguard its valued reputation (especially in the current environment) as the least partisan, as the educational network, also likely the most open to the argument that traditional debates have devolved to the point of uselessness, and because of its reputation, the most likely to be able to get/shame candidates into participating, as well as be able to pull these kinds of events off with minimum partisan rancor in the process–and everyone knows it, including PBS itself Back

¹⁸ It would be hard to convince me that anything is impossible anyway, based on personal experience, especially where getting groups to do things that need doing is concerned. From bringing together the most extensive set of high-end partners anywhere in cyberspace, at a time when the company I worked for, AOL, was only the fourth largest, and widely expected to be an also-ran, when, furthermore, the vast majority of the target market had no idea what a modem was and all we could offer them was monofont text plus all the icons we could fit on a software disk or CD, to pulling together a coalition of 180+ education organizations and top companies, inside and outside education, in less than six weeks for a month-long online event, Connected Educator Month, that by its fourth year had become year-round, involved more than 1,000 companies and organizations around the world, was promoted or discussed on more than 7M sites, and reached 17M educators and education supporters every day via Twitter alone, all while ensuring you couldn’t walk 10 feet in the top K-12 education conferences without seeing the words “connected educators” somewhere in your sightline, I haven’t actually run up against anything in new media that actually proved impossible.  Though absent some fairly dramatic advances in technology in the next few decades, superseding mortality will likely eventually be one of them 😉  Back

¹⁹ We have Jewish friends who already consider Trump to be worse than Hitler, not because of what he’s already done,^19a but because the power of a US president (to destroy the world many times over, for example) is so much greater than Hitler and the Nazis ever had. Back

^19a Though, in my opinion, to adjudge that, we’ll have to wait and see what the ultimate cost in human life and suffering turns out to be from four years of regression on climate change–our own, and the world’s, in response to ours–and thanks to his handling of COVID and his use of the virus to sabotage his successor, he’s already responsible for the loss of millions of lives, and continues to be responsible for more. And by this I mean responsible at a very high level–his behavior has fit the typical definitions within the “depraved heart” category of 2nd degree murder, to a t, in fact: “killing caused by reckless disregard for human life” or “reckless conduct without regard for human life”)

Can anyone guess what book I was reading while working on this post?  Anyone?  No?