Saturday, September 21, 2002

Political 'Reality': Viewers to Pick 2004 Candidate By Lisa de Moraes Saturday, September 21, 2002; Page C01 Rupert Murdoch has finally found a way to get what he wants in Washington. His cable network FX announced yesterday it has bought a TV series in which it gets to select a candidate for the 2004 presidential election This Washington Post story is over the top.  Then again, it causes one to think.  There were more than 100 million votes cast on American Idol (guess that goes to show that democracy can work from the sofa proving we are too home bound to exercise our freedom to vote).  But, if a network can nominate a president, why not the blog community (course, I'm finding more factions in the blog world than Carter has pills)? Is it ironic that a network thinks it can get advertisers to pay for a show when the same advertisers won't support the standard networks attempts to air the nominating process of the two traditional parties on television?  Will there be a serious deliberation or will we be subjected to titillating discussion of how the "cast" gets along.  This could bring whole new meaning (and countless entenderes) to the show called "Big Brother" -- or we could revive the old idea of letting the candidates fight it out (Survivor). Better yet, let's bring back Foghorn Leghorn as a candidate -  he certainly has enough sayings to keep us entertained! Geesh! I guess this had to be expected once political hacks started getting their own tv shows it was only a matter of time before tv producers got into politics.   8:48:00 AM