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Survivor: Regulatory Outback

November 1, 2009

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Meet Yul Kwon, new deputy chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. Kwon is immensely qualified for his new role: not only does he come to the FCC be-pedigreed with degrees from Stanford and Yale Law; he has also worked in lawmaking (as a congressional aide to Joe Lieberman). Oh, and he was one of People magazine’s 2006 Sexiest Men Alive.

Oh, and: he starred in the 2006 season of Survivor.

Yes. Which would be kind of amusing–and, you know, A Fitting Metaphor for a Culture That Increasingly Fails to Distinguish Between Entertainment and Politics–except for the significant fact that…the dude won the show. He is the survivor. And if proving yourself through a regimen of underhanded tribalism, over-the-top libelism, heat-fending, hut-mending, vermin-eating, etc. isn’t good preparation for a job in federal media regulation…I don’t know what is.

[via Mathew Ingram]

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Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.