By Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist Published Aug 10, 2010 at 9:00 PM

The Daily Beast sent a reporter after two congressional candidates sharing something on their resume: time on MTV's grandaddy of modern "reality" TV, "The Real World."

One is New York's Kevin Powell, a Democrat. The other is Ashland County district attorney Sean Duffy, a Republican seeking the seat held for decades by Democrat Dave Obey, who's retiring.

Powell appeared on the first season of "The Real World" in New York City, back in 1992, while Duffy was on five years later, when the show was in Boston. And he's married to another "The Real World" veteran, Rachel Campos, class of '95/San Francisco.

But as the Daily Beast's Shushannah Walshe reports, Duffy doesn't want to talk "RW."

His quote:  "That was 15 years ago."

Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist

Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.

A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.

In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.

When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.