Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Mark Burnett

In 2000 Mark Burnett aired “Survivor” which changed the way game shows were played. Formerly a contestant would win a game show by having the most skill at whatever task the game required. “Survivor” changed that, in “Survivor” the winner didn't have to have any skills in surviving, or even win the challenges. They just had to convince the rest of the people to not vote them off.

It was a novel idea, and if it had stayed in just one TV show it would have been fine. However, Mark Burnett pushed the concept onto a dozen other TV shows. It is now the standard for Reality TV. If it stayed there we would just have horrible TV and more and more people would tune out until a new model of TV shows came along. But Fox News picked up that model and applied it to politics, and the other networks followed along.

The candidates for President aren't being covered on what they want do as President, but how their campaign strategy is working.

If a candidate like Rick Perry, P-Rick, takes a pants crapping insane stance on an issue, like saying Climate Change is a conspiracy of scientists, the news reports on how the issue is working for his campaign and if it will help his run. They don't report on the fact that 97% of climate scientists believe global warming is man made, the other 3% argue over how much is natural vs. man-made, and 98 (not percent, 98 people) that are in a field relevant to climate science believe it is all due to nature.

If the news reported on how batshit crazy the P-Rick's stance is, they would report that the roughly 50,000 living scientists in fields related to climate science is nearly four times the amount of people that had direct knowledge of the Manhattan Project the biggest secret project ever carried out. If you add in all the scientist that have been studying it for the last 60 years that's well over 100,000 scientists.

They would also report that those 100,000 scientists need the support of colleges and universities around the world to carry out this “hoax”. The research done on non-secret science in universities is made to be super redundant to catch errors, so it would take several million people to be in on this “hoax”.

In the last century you could get away with just a few million people to carry this out, but now the evidence of global warming is easily noticeable in most areas. Plants that could barely survive as they were at the edge of their cold tolerance are blooming and growing like weeds.

The amount of people that it would take to sneak into everyones gardens and flower beds to warm these plants up so they bloomed unnaturally would be in the billions.

Some the effects of global warming could be achieved by just paying off the people involved. The western ranchers could be paid to make it look like they are suffering billions of dollars in damage from the drought for an amount two or three times that.

The news could also report on P-Rick's reason why they are doing it, to get that sweet, sweet, grant money so they can travel to exotic locations like Antarctica and go out in small research boats to the north Atlantic in the winter. With that type of reward it is no wonder they would get billions of people involved and spend trillions of dollars.

But instead of reporting on how a conspiracy that the people who think NASA faked the moon landing would shake their heads at and say, “That's f-ing crazy”, the news talks about if this is a good issue for Rick Perry to run with.

So to Mark Burnett, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, by expanding your concept of making a game show where the focus is not on the results but how the contestants play the game far beyond where it should ever go, you have made it so the most pants crapping insane, batshit crazy, loony conspiracy theory can be looked at as a legitimate political issue.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE