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I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
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