Andy Dehnart

Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism

B.S., Journalism, Stetson University
M.F.A., Nonfiction Writing and Literature, Bennington College

Andy Dehnart, Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism (Stetson Class of 1999), has built a writing career out of a passion for watching TV—in particular, reality TV.  His blog, reality blurred, now in its 11^th year, offers a "shrewd and skeptical look" at unscripted television.  In 2001, it earned him a place on USA Today's list of 100 most interesting people in pop culture—at #93, Andy eked out a slightly better position than Mr. Rogers (#99) or Billy Idol (#100), but trailed Sandra Bernhard (#90), Ethan Hawke (#89), and (!?!) Vincent van Gogh (#87).  In 2005, an AP article put reality blurred on its list of "the last six blogs you should be reading" and called it "the most schooled blog on America's guiltiest pleasure."

Since then, Andy has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News.  His reporting has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered; he's a contributing writer for The Daily Beast.  He has been cited in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and a host of other publications; he has published in Salon, The Boston Globe, and the Daily Beast.  In August, he was invited to present the first-ever Television Critics Association award for Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming—in front of an LA audience that included Mad Men star Jon Hamm and the casts of Friday Night Lights, Modern Family, and the Dick Van Dyke Show.  This year, Playboy commissioned two articles, one on how reality TV impacts its real-life subjects and the other on a spin-off of Animal Planet's Whale Wars and the environmentalists profiled on it.  For the latter, Andy flew to the Faroe Islands (north of Scotland), where he spent several days aboard the Sea Shepherd ship M.Y. Steve Irwin with TV crews filming anti-whaling activists.  The trip involved, by his own report, the greatest risks he's taken to-date as a journalist—from locals hostile to the group's activities to the threat of imprisonment if the activists (and the journalists onboard) were arrested.

Andy traces his passion for "the magic of television" to an episode of Mr. Rogers—the episode in which Mr. Rogers reveals that the show's opening shot of his "neighborhood" isn't really an aerial view of a neighborhood at all, merely a camera panning over a small simulation of one.   Andy has remained interested in the lines between what's "real" and what's constructed.  Recently, he trained with and then was asked to join the SAK Lab Rats improv comedy ensemble in Orlando.  Drawn in part because of the difference between live unscripted comedy and "reality" TV, as Andy puts it, "Improv is raw and unfiltered—you never know what will happen."  Reality TV, on the other hand, through selective editing, presents a constructed perspective.

Andy may be addicted to TV, but he's no couch potato.  In 2008, he traveled to the Wonga-Wongue Presidential Reserve in Gabon, a tropical country in central Africa, to interview the cast of Survivor Gabon; there, with other journalists, he participated in a rehearsal of the show's first physically-demanding immunity challenge.  (These immunity challenges, as Andy notes in an NPR piece, generally involve "giant obstacle courses, violent brawls, complex puzzles or blindfolded mazes.")  In 2009, he flew to Samoa to interview the cast of a new Survivor season–and again joined in a trial run of an immunity challenge.  Together with other physically adventurous Stetson colleagues, Andy will compete on Stetson's Tough Mudder team in Tampa this December.  For that, he's as well prepared as anyone can be, given his Survivor experiences as well as his participation in Warrior Dash, Savage Race, and FL.roc. 

At Stetson, Andy has taught courses across a range of disciplines and programs—from Journalism and Communications to Composition, Honors, and Humanities.  He is also faculty advisor to The Reporter, which he himself edited as an undergraduate.  In his Journalism courses, he tries to teach "a foundation that will allow students to become exceptional journalists regardless of their chosen medium, platform, or content—which is especially important because by the time they graduate, the profession will have changed."  He hopes to help grow Stetson's journalism program into one that is "distinctive for a school of our size and earns national recognition for our students' work."

On Hatter Trek this past summer, while helping first-year students face their own apprehensions about a high ropes course, Andy confronted fears of his own, some stemming back 20 years to a similar challenge he had been unable to complete in middle school.  But he and the students successfully completed the course, and Andy describes the overall experience as "unexpectedly intense" and "spectacular"—in no small part because of Rosalie Carpenter's success in putting together a weekend that was not only fun but educational:  "Students found friends and connection in ways they never expected, and were beyond enthusiastic about starting school in the fall."  

--Karen Kaivola
September 2011

"I try to teach a foundation that will allow students to become exceptional journalists regardless of their chosen medium, platform, or content—which is especially important because by the time they graduate, the profession will have changed."