Send Snoop to the Convention: What Political Media Can Learn From the Olympics

The Olympics are always a blast, but they’ve seldom seemed as fun and engaging for as many people as they’ve been this year. And as great as the athletes are, pommel-horse guy, Turkish air-pistol guy and Simone Biles are only part of the reason why. The other reason is the non-sports celebs who have been popping up all over viewers’ screens. Comedians Kenan Thompson and Kevin Hart, cracking up their offstage crew as they recap Olympic highlights. Saturday Night Live star Colin Jost, doing wry surfing commentary from Tahiti (until he was sidelined by a stepping-on-coral injury). Podcasting star Alex Cooper, watching women’s gymnastics in an Uncle Sam top hat. Snoop Dogg, who is everywhere — in the soccer stands, taking in dressage with Martha Stewart , swimming laps with Michael Phelps.

Celebrities have been central to NBC’s 2024 Olympics programming strategy, in part to beat the dismal viewership of the pandemic-delayed, eerily crowdless Tokyo games, and in part because of the cross-promotional possibilities. (In the fall, Snoop joins the cast of The Voice .) But their presence, supplementing NBC’s traditional sports coverage, has turned out to be more than just a ratings play. It’s also a vibe play. An alternate entry point. A way to sidestep the conventions of sports reporting — the clinical critiques from technical experts, the “how does it feel” questions from sideline reporters — and channel the odd exuberance of fandom. And there’s a lesson here for the networks as they cover the next big endurance event: the presidential campaign.

Let’s face it, political TV is in a rut. Nine years after former President Donald Trump burst on the scene, upending every political convention, his behavior has become familiar, and the countdown to the next election has started to feel stultifying for many voters — especially after months when Americans seemed bored by the most recent iteration of a race between the same two old white guys. Now, there’s an opportunity to build on the energy of Vice President Kamala Harris’ entrance in the campaign — and perhaps make the coverage of the next few weeks even livelier and more revelatory than before. As programming executives plot out their sprint to November, why not take a page from NBC’s Olympics coverage and bring celebrities into the fold?

Yes, yes, there’s no shortage of celebrities in politics already, from the barnstorming liberal cast of The West Wing to conservative Lee Greenwood, who sang “God Bless the U.S.A.” on two different nights at the Republican convention. And yes, politicians have submitted for decades to the gentle mocking of highly paid late-night TV hosts. But NBC is using its stars in a different way: not as partisans with agendas or glib-but-safe TV comics, but as highly watchable stand-ins for an audience that otherwise might not care.

Take Cooper, whose Call Her Daddy podcast, full of relationship discussions and frank sex talk, draws about 5 million listeners weekly, most of them twenty-something women. Though she’s done some traditional studio interviews for NBC this summer, her live interactive “watch parties” feel more like a YouTube experience: Cooper is a head in the top left corner of the screen, expressing herself with facial reactions as much as with words (and many of her words are “oh,” “my,” and “God”). In one episode, she draped herself in an American flag and gushed over Simone Biles’ Olympics floor routine . “Oh my god, she’s so good it’s nasty,” Cooper said after a tumbling run. “It’s literally inappropriate how good she is.”

This is not the normal language of sports commentary. But if the purists don’t like it — and some don’t — a certain coveted audience is hooked. “Alex Cooper is Hosting an Olympics Show and It’s The Only Way I Want To Watch The Games,” blared a recent headline in The Everygirl , an online magazine aimed at Gen Z professionals . The writer praised Cooper for filtering soccer coverage through Taylor Swift eras and Love Island tropes, and for balancing just enough expertise (Cooper played Division I college soccer) with just enough honest ignorance. “If there’s one thing I really can’t stand,” she wrote, “it’s being mansplained to.”

To draw in viewers like her, political coverage would certainly require some … changes. There’s good reason for the gravitas that permeates the major news networks; the stakes are enormous, from Medicare to the nuclear codes. But while campaigns have changed dramatically — because of the explosion of new media, and because Trump amped the natural theatrics of politics to stratospheric levels — TV news often still operates like it’s in the 1990s. It’s an expert-driven affair, saddled with the weight of decades-old media habits and traditions. The self-serious anchors in skyboxes. The somewhat-balanced talking head panels. The eat-your-vegetables policy coverage and the horse race-tracking bluster. And the mainstream commentariat, which alternates between pearl-clutching and ostrich-in-the-sand normalizing and both-sides equivocating, still hasn’t fully figured out how to cover Trump’s eruptions or capture the mood of his voters.

But the celebrities at the Olympics are all about mood and eruptions. In their wisecracking, Los Angeles-based highlights show — which has drawn praise from the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal — Hart and Thompson curse prodigiously, burst taboos and channel what some viewers are surely thinking about sports that seem obscure or out-of-reach. “When it comes to fencing, it’s impossible to understand what I’m watching,” Thompson quipped in a recent installment. “It’s like jazz. People say it’s good, but there’s really no way to know for sure.”

Imagine if Hart and Thompson had been in a skybox at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee — what they might have said about the White-House-on-steroids backdrop to JD Vance’s speech, or the silent appearance of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Or imagine the twenty-something women who would never think to turn on TV coverage of the Democratic convention — and might not even own TVs — but would watch Alex Cooper in a Statue of Liberty outfit, giving live commentary on Harris’ footwear.

Stars would be useful interviewers, too: Freed from the constraints of the media narrative and the pressure of gaining access, they could shake politicians out of their talking points. And with celebrities asking the questions, it would be harder for pols to fall back on their standard complaints about media bias. Even Trump might have to change his don’t-tread-on-me approach; it’s one thing to lash out at ABC’s Rachel Scott for asking a tough question at the NABJ convention, but quite another if it’s Snoop behind the mic. For better or worse, politicians — and Trump himself — are likelier to defer to beloved celebrities than they are journalists, whom Americans, for the most part, don’t really seem to like .

And celebrity interviewers might be able to get better, more honest answers because, at a time when politicians seem to crave publicity above all else, the stars can give them more of what they want. As a result, politicians might be less likely to filibuster, evade or push back with rudeness. Look no further than comedian Ziwe Fumudoh’s YouTube interview with George Santos last December — in which she called him “a messy bitch who lives for drama” and he basically agreed. Let Marjorie Taylor Greene go next.

This isn’t an argument for doing away with the standard political coverage. Olympic watchers still need experts to walk them through the intricacies of the pole vault; government, more than ever, needs a responsible fourth estate. But politics also sometimes needs a reality check. Just as NBC’s celebrities might hook in viewers who suddenly discover the joys of speed climbing, stunt political coverage could draw casual voters into a process they used to ignore. And viewers could use figures who channel those voters on the couch — the ones who don’t scrutinize every poll or spend hours glued to Fox or MSNBC, but still have firm ideas and strong impressions that might be illuminating. At the least, they’ll be entertaining. Let the games begin.