a Reality Bites Back investigates reality TV series that aired from 2000 to 2010. For simplicity’s sake I often use the present tense, even when referring to shows that aren’t still on the air. For a listing of the debut year and original network for each series analyzed in this book, see
RealityBitesBackBook.com.
b Nielsen ratings, which determine TV ad rates, analyze the habits of sample viewers. Nielsen defines a rating as “a percent of the total universe, either of total television households or total number or persons in a given demo,” and a share as “the percent of households or persons using television at the time the program is airing.” By “universe,” they mean total number of households that own televisions.
4
c Who wasn’t a real estate investor, as Fox claimed, but a failed comic actor and B movie writer of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
d Darnell’s boss, the chairman of Fox Entertainment Television, swore, “I’d rather fail with quality than succeed with garbage.” Then he approved the sleaze-fest
Temptation Island.8
e ABC aired fourteen seasons of The Bachelor by 2010—each Prince Charming was white, as were the vast majority of women pursuing them.
f See Prime-Time Programming Lineup by Network, on page 282.
g He eventually became president of alternative entertainment, reportedly “free to greenlight reality series pilots and specials,” with “creative control” over Fox’s lineup.
10
h Commander in Chief averaged 16.5 million viewers and was the number one show on Tuesdays in 2005, until it went up against
American Idol. ABC shelved it for months. In a new time slot it drew between 6.5 and 8.2 million viewers—not stellar, but not abysmal. Verdict? Canceled. In 2002, Fox chose the Friday night ratings graveyard for
Firefly, an intricately written show from Joss Whedon, creator of cult hit
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They aired episodes out of order, making the premise and characters hard to follow. Yet an average of 4.7 million viewers still managed to find it every week; more would have if the network hadn’t undermined it. Verdict? Fox canned it after eleven episodes, never airing the final three. Outraged fans sent DVD sales soaring, and a feature film,
Serenity, followed. It remains a much-missed favorite, featured on numerous “Best of the Decade” lists.
18
i Silverman was one of the masterminds behind The Restaurant, which was produced and funded entirely by advertisers, who offered the program for free to NBC.
j Schadenfreude is a German word that means “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.”
k Deciding which shows to monitor versus omit was a difficult process. In the end, I chose to focus on series potentially available to the widest audiences: shows airing between 2000 and early 2010 on the free broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, and the now-defunct UPN and WB), several cable networks available to most media markets (VH1, MTV, Bravo, TLC, Style), and a few entries on three “women’s programming” networks (Lifetime, Oxygen, and WE). Additionally, I have not monitored the parenting, youth, mental health, addiction, crime and law enforcement, cooking, travel, and celebutaunt reality subgenres.
l Who sits at the top of this mega-merged heap? Find out with
Columbia Journalism Review’s interactive “Who Owns What” guide at CJ R.org and the media ownership charts at
FreePress.net.
m The distinctions between what is “real” and what is not, between creative story and commercial pitch, are especially blurry for children, who are less likely to be aware of production tricks, selective casting, and editorial deception in reality TV—or manipulative practices in advertising and other forms of media. This is why media literacy education, discussed in chapters 10 and 11, is crucial.
n Participants are made to read line-for-line ad copy, though.
o Named defendants in these lawsuits included Fox, ABC, CBS, WB, TBS, and five production companies, including Darnell’s longtime collaborators Rocket Science Laboratories and Fleiss’s Next Entertainment.
38
p It wouldn’t be fair to call just any reality show participants “star fuckers.” But on any given episode of Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, young women and men willingly jump through humiliating hoops just for the “prize” of being momentary “best friends” with the paparazzi’s muse.
q Every once in a while a show doesn’t even bother to hide it. For example, challenges on VH1’s The Pickup Artist involve teaching socially awkward and unattractive guys how to “run game” on—translation: lie to—women to get as many numbers from or make out with as many babes as possible within a designated time period.
r Even then, the “fairytale” was beyond twisted. After ABC spent months hyping Bachelorette castoff and single dad Jason Mesnick as a family-minded wife seeker who “found the love of his life,” viewers did see this Bachelor propose to Melissa Rycroft, who agreed to become insta-stepmom to his four-year-old son—only to watch him dump her and get back together with previous dumpee Molly Melaney on the live reunion show that aired literally one hour after the finale. ABC televised Jason & Molly’s Wedding in 2010, like they did with Bachelorette Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter’s nuptials in 2003, as “proof” that their nineteen-season franchise “works.”
s Incidentally, if Tacori wants to “symbolize forever” in the minds of the potential ring-buying public, the company might want to reconsider branding itself as the bling of choice for a franchise that’s one-in-thirteen (The Bachelor) and one-in-five (The Bachelorette) where weddings are concerned. DeAnna did accept the costly rock, oh yes, but “forever” translated to roughly four months: They split shortly after their “we’ve set a date!” announcement on ABC’s reunion episode—and far before most couples would have finished paying off the ring. That’s still about three months longer than the lifespan of the engagement of Bachelor number 12, Matt Grant, to aspiring actress Shayne Lamas. But while The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire, and their ilk don’t tend to reward participants with true “happily ever after” endings, these shows definitely deliver fairytale-esque windfalls for advertisers who ♡ free PR for their products and services.
t But not to keep. The luxury jeweler’s product placement deal with ABC involves bachelorettes only donning such baubles on screen as free promotion for the brand. I’ve never been able to figure out why, season after season, the women swoon over these limited-time offers. Okay, quick question to my male readers: If you surprised your girlfriend or your wife with a gorgeous necklace as a gift but then said, “It’ll look beautiful on you when we go out to dinner, but you’re going to have to return it to the store before we go home,” level with me—aren’t the chances good you’d be sleeping on the couch?
u The resemblance to the shopping scene in the classic “hooker with a heart of gold” flick, Pretty Woman, was uncanny—and not just because host Chris Harrison called Tessa a “pretty woman.” There was Andy doing his best impression of Richard Gere’s rich john buying fashions for—and affection from—Julia Roberts’s prostitute, Vivian, updated by Tessa twirling for her bachelor’s approval. Viewers are supposed to come away with warm fuzzies about how “lucky” Tessa was to be cast as a “real-life” Pretty Woman. We’re just supposed to forget that Vivian was a call girl, and that it’s not exactly the epitome of romance when a wealthy egotist trades cash for a hooker’s body and eventually her heart. At least Richard Gere knew to limit expectations when he gave Julia Roberts a $250,000 choker to wear for just one evening: “I don’t want you to get too excited. It’s only a loan,” he said.
v Viewers responded just as Disney hoped they would. “I just watched an incredible television special on the Disney Dream Wedding and I just have to share the great information in this with you!” a rapt viewer blogged. “I honestly cannot think of a better way to spend your living fairytale than in the one place where fairytales and dreams come true every day!”
8
w Of course, the costar of many lesbian and bisexual women’s “one great love” fantasies is another princess. But just like Disney, reality TV producers—with only a couple of cable exceptions—prevent lesbians and gays from participating in the classic romantic fairytale. We’ll get to that in a moment.
x Grimms-turned-Disney classic Sleeping Beauty wins the love of her prince—and gets jogged out of a curse-induced coma—simply by resting prettily in her glass coffin. At least her slumber was the result of a spell, not something she chose for herself. In Disney’s “modern” fairytale The Little Mermaid, heroine Ariel willingly—literally—gives up her voice to mutely woo her beloved with her “feminine wiles.”
y Of course, even the categories of “woman” and “man” themselves are limited. As discussed in chapter 8, reality TV hews extremely closely to the “gender binary,” which does not encompass the many variations in gender presentation and gender identity present in the human experience. For tips on how to combat media bias against transgender people, see Julia Serano’s suggestions in chapter 11.
z Though
Playing It Straight reveled in homophobic stereotypes about gay men, it also unintentionally crystallized how cultural expectations of masculinity—both gay and straight—are all performative rather than innate. Unfortunately, producers squandered the opportunity to explore culturally constructed gender presentation, instead creating a narrative that “ultimately served the interests of the heterosexual” status quo by reinforcing stereotypes, othering gay participants, and “maintaining heterosexuality’s dominant status.”
11 (RuPaul’s
Drag Race offers a much more compelling look at gender performance.)
aa This was a scene recycled from a Joe Millionaire episode filmed at a horse stable five years earlier, proving that in the reality TV universe, the image of women knee-deep in shit never goes out of style.
ab Humiliation is also among the top payoffs on shows like America’s Next Top Model (when formerly confident women finally break down in a mass of self-doubt after repeated denials of their beauty) and in talent competitions like American Idol (where low-income young women—single moms who work at places like Wal-Mart are series staples—are mocked for dreaming that music might help them escape a dismal economic future).
ac For more discussion of gender roles in fairytales—and more egalitarian models—see Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England and the 1970s-era Free to Be . . . You and Me recordings and books.
ad The Miss America Pageant began in 1921. It aired on ABC from 1954 to 1956, CBS from 1957 to 1965, NBC from 1966 to 1996, and ABC from 1997 until its final network broadcast in 2005. As this book goes to press, ABC is in talks to potentially broadcast the pageant in 2012.
ae TLC aired Miss America again in 2010, without a reality series attached, and with Rush Limbaugh as a judge.
af My snark is aimed at the message the televised pageant has sent about beauty and about what it means to be a woman—not at its participants, who often compete because it’s their only route to a higher education. The Miss America Organization is the world’s largest provider of scholarship assistance for young women. In 2009 alone, they made $45 million in cash and scholarships available to more than twelve thousand young women—but only those considered attractive enough to compete in beauty contests.
ag A search of broadcast transcripts in the
Nexis.com news database conducted in September 2009 showed 993 and 985 stories referencing Serena and Venus Williams, respectively, compared with 1,643 stories mentioning Anna Kournikova.
ah An ad for Imadeen skin-lightening pills pictures a lovely Asian model sprawled in bed, saying, “My secret to beautiful skin? I swallow.”
ai Here, the pendulum swings to the objectifying extreme, portraying Black and Latina women’s asses as the most significant thing about them. Whole segments of Flavor of Love 2 were devoted to winner London “Deelishis” Charles’s booty, complete with slo-mo video and cheesy Barry White-sounding narration as she walked. After appearing on the show, she released a line of jeans for curvy women, recorded a music video for a song called “Rumpshaker,” and charges $19.95 per month for online access to photo galleries of her nude, oiled-up ass.
aj Denise’s body wasn’t as much an issue for the couple as Fox intended it to appear. In fact, it was her faux-fiancé’s penchant for female passivity that caused the friction. Stephen told producers that he’d be attracted to her if she just let him Be A Man and make all the moves. But editors emphasized Denise’s body image insecurities to fit into reality TV’s “average-size women are pathetic” narrative, blaming her appearance—rather than Stephen’s subscription to 1950s notions of “appropriate” sexuality—for their lack of chemistry.
ak Let me be clear: It is not okay to hurl insulting epithets at male reality stars, either. Juvenile bullying is offensive regardless of the target’s gender. On the majority of dating shows, however, male stars have been spared the harsh, appearance-based judgments leveled against their female counterparts, aside from a few notable exceptions (i.e., Average Joe, The Millionaire Matchmaker, Beauty and the Geek).
al “I just want her to be as natural as possible in the glitz pageant,” the mother of a seven-year-old Black girl says, as her daughter’s teeth are chattering and bikinied body is shivering in a spray tanning booth. While this would be questionable in general, why a Black girl would “need” a tan is particularly perplexing.
am Morbid obesity can carry negative medical consequences, but reality television often slaps the label of “obese” onto people who are only mildly overweight, further confusing the public as to what a dangerous weight is and isn’t. The body mass index is used by the Centers for Disease Control to determine general “underweight,” “normal,” “overweight,” and “obese” ranges. As Kate Harding points out at Shapely Prose, it calculates only height and weight without regard for other health factors such as diet, exercise, addiction, or illness. Though imperfect, the BMI is the most common tool health professionals use to initially assess what is and isn’t considered a “healthy weight.” According to the CDC, a 5’10”, 158-pound woman has a BMI of 22.1, within the “normal” or healthy weight range for her height. At 124 pounds, a woman of the same height has a BMI of 17.8, which is considered unhealthily underweight. A BMI of less than 17.5 is used as an informal indicator to diagnose anorexia. ANTM contestant Elyse, the 114-pound model called “terrific” on the scale, had a BMI of 16.4; the CDC considers a BMI of 16 to be a potentiala indicator of starvation. It’s possible that Elyse was naturally that thin with no ill health effect. Most women would not be.
an The Biggest Loser rakes in $100 million annually from merchandising. Ten million viewers per week watch people shed hundreds of pounds on the program, which claims to be about helping obese men and women get “healthy.” Yet its extreme regimen—severe restriction of calories coupled with workouts that can last six hours per day—has led contestants to collapse, suffer dehydration or heat stroke, urinate blood, and be hospitalized. Unaffiliated physicians call the show exploitative and unsafe, and no wonder: Participants have to sign contracts stipulating that
TBL does not guarantee “the qualifications or credentials of the medical professionals who examine me or perform any procedures on me . . . or their ability to diagnose medical conditions that may affect my fitness.”
17
ao Jaslene has strongly denied that she has an ED.
ap Where were Keenyah and co. when ANTM transformed them into “sexy little animals”? That would be Cape Town, South Africa. We’ll discuss the racial implications of this in chapter 6.
aq In my capacity as executive director of Women In Media & News, I’ve worked with hundreds of young women in media literacy workshops, and thousands of students have seen my multimedia presentations on images of women in reality television. I can’t remember conducting even one lecture or workshop in which at least one girl has not admitted that America’s Next Top Model has had some impact on her, either on her body image, on her perception of others, or on her perception that the way she looks will determine her chances for success romantically or professionally.y.
ar Cowell’s comments often wander into overt bigotry as well. On one audition show, “after failing to understand that an Asian woman’s name was ‘Fong,’ he called her ‘ping-pong, or whatever your name is.’” a
San Francisco Chronicle blogger notes.
28
as Ah, liberation. Isn’t it nice that after four decades of feminist and gay rights activism, ABC is finally letting plastic surgery “come out of the closet” on national TV?
at In 1994, Margaret starred in the sitcom All-American Girl, for which ABC demanded she lose weight to play a character based on herself.
au Gender essentialism is a philosophical belief—often confused with biological “fact”—that “all women are” this way or that, and “all men” are bound to behave one way or the other. Essentialism privileges nature above nurture, genetics above culture, as the primary determiners of identity and behavior. Gender roles are assumed absolute and immutable, and deviation from “feminine” characteristics for females and “masculine” traits for males is considered “unnatural.” Gender essentialist thinking has often been the basis of conservative, antifeminist attacks on women’s advancement in education, sports, business, and politics—the argument being that women’s essential natures are not predisposed toward successful participation in those arenas. At times, this form of thought in science and media has even posited that sexual assault is a “natural” act born of men’s evolutionary development.
1
av A rose equals a promise of potential love from the series’ stud; don’t get one, and your chance for happiness shrivels like a dead bouquet.
aw A close, critical reading of Toddlers & Tiaras (like WE TV’s Little Miss Perfect) could reveal the disturbing psychological effects of pageant participation on youth over time. It’s almost as if the multiple children on each episode are not distinct individuals but representative of a universal Pageant Girl at different stages of her young life. Like a kiddie-horror version of A Christmas Carol, we see a time-lapse projection of their potential mental and emotional development. Viewers watch three- and four-year-olds, all smiles and sweet as can be, trying desperately to look pretty enough to please mommy, juxtaposed with the “bitchy” antics of older kids like Tootie, framed as demanding and spoiled. Interviews with judgmental parents convince us that for the foreseeable future, these girls will be valued primarily for how convincingly they wear fake eyelashes, fake tans, fake hair, fake teeth, and other artificial beauty “enhancers.” They’ll spend their childhoods commanded to “shake your booty” and “win for mommy.” We’re left to assume that these gentle, earnest kindergartners will inevitably become narcissistic, entitled ten-year-olds jaded before they reach third grade—just like Tootie. These shows would almost be cautionary tales . . . if the producers and networks didn’t take such glee in demonizing not only the parents but also the children themselves.
ax In chapter 5, we’ll hear about the “Angry Black Woman,” another virulent facet of reality TV’s “catty bitches” trope.
ay The same tactics used to produce the genre’s oh-so-important “drama”—sleep deprivation, restriction of food, controlled environments that disallow communication with the outside world, and abuse of alcohol—are often used as elements of torture.
az With dire headlines such as “MY BOSSES FROM HELL—AND THEY WERE ALL WOMEN,” newspapers warn us that “The deviousness of a woman’s mind hell-bent on destroying an employee is something to behold” because “Bitch Bosses . . . undermine other women, at every opportunity.” Even women’s magazines such as
Marie Claire instruct readers that if they find themselves in a position to choose between a male or female employer, “your answer should most definitely be a man.”
9
ba A Nexis news database search shows 1,930 stories using the term “mommy wars” between June 27, 1989, and November 11, 2009.
bb And oh, how the tabloids love to slap those fears onto the perfectly chiseled features of Evil Seductress Angelina Jolie, whose mere existence is used as evidence that even women as gorgeous and successful as Jennifer Aniston can have their lives destroyed when their husbands are powerless to resist the advances of conniving bitches.
bc For example, without talking to one another about their wages and working conditions, blue collar working women would not have been able to ban together in 2004 to file Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., then the largest-ever class action civil rights lawsuit. Representing more than 1.5 million women, the suit charged systemic discrimination against women in hiring, pay, and promotions.
12
bd Women and girls have benefited greatly from the fierce legislative struggle that resulted in passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which required equal opportunities for girls and women in sports and education. As noted in
A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, “At American colleges, more than two hundred thousand women are on varsity sports teams, up from a handful in 1971,” and compose approximately 40 percent of high school and college athletes. And according to NOW, women earned just 7 percent of all law degrees, 9 percent of all medical degrees, and 13.3 percent of doctoral degrees before Title IX, but the law’s legacy led to 47 percent of law degrees, 43 percent of medical degrees, and nearly half of all doctoral degrees being awarded to women. Despite its proven success, Title IX has been repeatedly attacked by conservatives hoping to roll back or eliminate this public policy and media outlets reporting that Title IX has waged a “War on Boys.”
13 if women grow to believe reality TV’s hype, they won’t be as prepared to work together to prevent opponents from rolling back their educational and athletic equity.
be Broadcast and cable news were just as exploitative of Smith’s death as E! was of her life. On the day Anna Nicole’s lifeless body was found, nearly every major TV outlet devoted itself to what author Bob Harris called “wall-to-wall, 24 hour, dead stoner Playmate watch.” In contrast, Harris noted the glaring absence of “some other things that happened on or around February 8, 2007, generally not covered by CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and Fox,” including North Korea agreeing to shut down its nuclear plants, a tentative peace deal between warring Palestinian factions in the Middle East, and Iran test-firing its first ballistic missile capable of striking at U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. “So you can see why Anna Nicole’s death is getting all the coverage. Slow news day,” Harris wrote.
15
bf By playing dumb as a strategic career move, Hilton and Simpson are the pop cultural counterparts to conservative antifeminist women who build lucrative professional journalism and political careers by telling average women that their place is in the home, such as Caitlin Flanagan (To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife) and Danielle Crittenden (What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman author and former staffer of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum).
bg In “Is Tyra Banks Racist? The peculiar politics of
America’s Next Top Model,” J. E. Dahl described an episode in which Banks “singled Danielle out, imitating her delivery and demonstrating the difference between an acceptable black Southern accent, and an unacceptable one. . . . Perhaps Tyra was simply trying to toughen Danielle up: The fashion industry is run by white people, many of whom may think ‘black’ or ‘country’ accents are uncouth, a mark of poor upbringing. But shouldn’t Tyra be using her clout to challenge this stereotype?” Dahl asked. Yes. She should. Unfortunately, her actions rarely match her rhetoric. We’ll hear more about Banks’s internalized racism, sexism, and other fashion industry legacies in chapter 6.
17
bh Veronica Arreola, director of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, put into context Summers’s new role in the Obama administration. “Could the man who sold America on change seriously be considering appointing a man who suggested that Malia, a, Sasha and all of our daughters have a genetic disposition for not being able to [do] math? Sadly yes,” she wrote.
19
bi Apprentice fans with good memories may recall that Donald Trump fired Ivana, the second-season “job applicant” who showed male passersby her undies so they’d buy her candy bars, because he said she was no better than “a stripper.” Yet in that same episode, Trump had no problem with Ivana’s teammates Jennifer and Sandy dressing in tight little matching tops and heels to get men to “buy some candy from the eye candy.” This, and a great many instances like it over the course of eight seasons of The Apprentice, was considered good business strategy . . . since women, we’re meant to understand, need such schemes to compensate for the sort of inferiority Larry Summers says is our natural impediment.
bj This stunt casting by CBS says as much about sexism in the media industry as it does about the cross-promotional degeneration of broadcast journalism and hypercommercial entertainment programming. As KYTX president and general manager Phil Hurley said of the controversy surrounding the show, “I’m still surprised at all the attention around the country on the journalism/entertainment issue. I’ve been around a long time and it’s always been that way. It’s entertainment, and we just weren’t cutting any new ground here.”
20
bk We’ll hear more about this Bagram Air Base kitchen supervisor in chapter 5.
bl Executive Producer George Lucas was so embarrassed by his involvement with the widely panned Howard the Duck, directed by Willard Huyck in 1986, that he disowned the film. The 1995 cinematic failure Showgirls, directed by Paul Verhoeven, has become a camp classic, so bad that people looking to make fun of it while sloppy drunk can buy a DVD version packaged with shot glasses and drinking game instructions. Glitter and Gigli, built around Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez, respectively, were directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall in 2001 and Martin Brest in 2003—not even Mariah’s voice or J-Lo’s curves could save these eminently mockable flicks from being counted among the worst films of their decade.
bm The stereotypes reality TV does its best to revive are based on longstanding social biases. For example, the gender essentialist questions reality shows raise about women and work were at play in early 2010, when the New York State Bar Association announced that their annual meeting would feature a “distinguished panel of gentlemen from the legal field [who] will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of women in . . . their legal work.” Originally titled, “Their Point of View: Tips from the Other Side,” the planned all-male panel was revised to include female speakers. However, that didn’t change its core idea that (unlike men) women are a monolithic group within the legal arena, and any obstacles they face are attributable not to systemic factors but to individual women who need “tips” to overcome their “weaknesses.”
21
bn The Apprentice shares another element with
Mad Men: Both series include entire storylines devoted to selling the merits of specific name-brand airplanes, food, clothing, and other sponsors’ products.
24
bo So memorable was this “gold digger” that Trish landed at number five on
TV Guide’s “Top 10 Reality TV Villains” list in June 2008.
25
bp Oddly, the real twist of the show was that they did tell the guy about the money, giving him just as much motivation to choose among the women based on finances rather than feelings—yet his motivations were always assumed pure, while theirs were always presumed selfish.
bq Reality programming (or “participation/variety,” as Nielsen calls the genre) is among the most popular entertainment options for teens, with American Idol being their top program in 2008—“as it was for everyone else,” Nielsen notes.
br The Apprentice portrays extreme wealth as the key to professional, personal, and spiritual fulfillment. Trump is cast as the ultimate role model, with no acknowledgment that he has driven multiple companies and casinos into bankruptcy and has been sued for fraud.
bs Fox debuted The Simple Life in 2003, early in the life of reality television. Paris and Nicole were dispatched to cities across America without benefit of their no-credit-limit platinum cards, where they had to interact with “real Americans” in trailers, small homes, farms, and factories—sort of like The Beverly Hillbillies in reverse. Producers used the spoiled heiresses’ exaggerated disrespect for the middle- and low-income people they met as a twofer: Producers positioned the “dumb blonds” as ignorant, privileged brats, while viewers were encouraged to laugh at the blue-collar “yokels” framed as the “opposite” of Hilton and Richie.
bt To be sure, men are subjected to humiliating commentary on American Idol as well, with judges poking fun at male singers’ voices, personalities, clothes, and haircuts. In many ways, Idol is an equal opportunity exploiter. But there is something uniquely harsh and very gendered about the show’s harping on single mothers’ financial duress, especially when their children are also filmed—a tactic from which Idol has usually spared low-income fathers.
bu “Self-improvement” wasn’t what VH1 was aiming for when they advertised
Charm School this way: “Hair may be pulled. Spit may fly. Fists may land. But one thing is for sure, when these ladies stab each other in the back—it will be with the proper utensil.”
8
bv Flavor of Love, debuting in 2006, became the bedrock of VH1’s “celebreality” programming focus, along with its numerous dating show spinoffs and “rehabilitation” knockoffs, including: I Love New York, Charm School, Real Chance of Love, New York Goes to Work, New York Goes to Hollywood, and Rock of Love.
bw Project Runway debuted on Bravo in 2004 and over five seasons became a flagship series for the network, a turning point for Bravo branding itself as the destination for affluent viewers. Top Chef, Top Design, Shear Genius, and the Real Housewives franchise all arose after, and can be attributed to, Project Runway’s success. After a protracted legal battle, Project Runway moved to the Lifetime network in the fall of 2009.
bx I know! Fill in your own punch line here. The brain cells that would have been responsible for offering my own joke rotted away somewhere between seeing live cockroaches ingested on Fear Factor and watching them used as runway accessories on America’s Next Top Model.
by Each of these items has been used as raw material in Project Runway challenges sponsored by these grocery, candy, and car companies.
bz On July 20, 2008, as part of “The Debt Trap,” a “series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible,”
The New York Times reported, “Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.”
17
ca Headline: “Now Casting Women Living Extravagant Lifestyles!”
cb “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” an iconic summation of 1980s economics and culture, was uttered by Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s ruthless character in the 1987 film
Wall Street. But its roots weren’t in fiction. The signature quote was inspired by stock speculator Ivan Boesky, who, in 1985, “drew applause and laughter” when he gave this advice to the graduating class of UC Berkeley’s School of Business Administration: “Greed is all right . . . greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Not long after, Boesky was jailed for insidertrading, a symbol of the era’s unethical excesses.
20
cc Sometimes networks and reality producers are just as unethical as the real estate industry. In 2005, ABC scrapped
Welcome to the Neighborhood under threat of housing discrimination lawsuits for violating the Fair Housing Act. On the never-aired series, a group of wealthy white families “used to a certain kind of neighbor—one who looks and thinks just like them” got to choose—based on their prejudices about race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation—which family among a group of diverse contestants would be given a dream home on their suburban cul-de-sac.
21
ce It’s galling enough that reality TV instructs viewers to “spend more” to get less. More unfortunate is the hidden fact that women actually do spend more than men for nearly every necessity of life, despite earning significantly less than men for comparable work. According to
Consumer Federation, Consumer Reports, and Congress, women are regularly charged 32 percent more for mortgages, between 50 and 60 percent more for everything from hand soap to pain reliever, and between 22 and 50 percent more for health insurance.
22
cf It’s worth mentioning that the show’s “spend more, buy less” advice can make sense for those in the position to make such an investment in the first place—but only if you actually follow the second half of that equation. If you plan to buy only a few items of clothing and wear them for many years until they are threadbare, then you’d probably be well-served purchasing a few classic, extremely well-made pieces. Such items will tend to be more expensive, but they will also generally last longer than the cheap (often sweatshop-produced), disposable fashions promoted every few weeks in glossy women’s mags. But makeover shows like Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style and WNTW present the act of shopping as an art, a passion, and a means of self-realization. To decide not to buy new clothing for several years would be considered not only sacrilege, but self-abuse. The goal of these shows is to get you to spend more money and shop more often.
cg WNTW almost always focuses on women, though very occasionally, perhaps 5 percent of the time, the stylists redo a man’s wardrobe.
ch I speak from experience: As a resourceful nonprofit staffer, I’ve managed to collect a closet full of gorgeous, way-out-of-my-price-range Betsey Johnson dresses, Nanette Lepore jackets, and other curve-friendly designer duds via eBay and clothing swaps for just a few bucks each. My budget is intact, and I avoid financially supporting companies using sweatshop labor.
ci Withheld from viewers? The fact that Jessica’s participation on the show—and her promotion—were probably publicity stunts for her boss, an author and business coach who charges between $10,000 and $17,500 a pop to teach “the unspoken secrets of workplace success.” Here’s how Frankel promoted the episode online: “Corporate Coaching International’s very own Jessica Vaughn is the ‘star’ of ‘What Not to Wear’ . . . Others in our office serve as ‘supporting cast members.’”
24
cj A similar problem plagues CBS’s 2010 postrecession
Undercover Boss, in which rich CEOs pose as workers in their own corporations, observe mistreatment and labor abuses, feel bad, then promise their employees things will improve. Packaged as a populist fantasy in which greedy bosses finally Do The Right Thing, producers woo viewers by appealing to their job frustrations, then mollify them with the notion that since the suits at the top really mean well, everything will be okay in the end . . . no need for any pesky labor organizing. Each episode is a full-length commercial for companies such as Hooters and GSI Commerce. So when Larry O’Donnell, President and COO of Waste Management, Inc. gets emotional, promotes an administrative assistant, and promises to form a committee to address workers’ concerns, viewers get a feel-good happy ending—never learning that Waste Management, Inc. has a history of union-busting. Corporate officers’
feelings don’t result in institutional change—adopting pro-labor policies does.
27
ck America’s Next Top Model participants rarely achieve supermodel status, though plus-size model Toccara Jones’s success stands out as a positive exception. The show seems to be a better stepping-stone for short-term to midlevel entertainment gigs.
cl This is particularly offensive in the context of the show’s treatment of African American contestant Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, whom we’ll meet in the next chapter.
cm Before Flavor of Love.
cn For the viewers, it was bad. For VH1, it was the biggest hit they’d ever had, as we’ll soon see. And KFC? Their product placements featured prominently.
cp In season 6,
Bachelor producers told Byron Velvick “he made a bit of history, as the first guy to choose a black woman among the final dozen contestants.” To put this in context, the “final dozen” is usually the second episode of the series.
1
cq Her real last name is Nguyen.
cr Mary was arrested for punching him and splitting his lip in 2007; they broke up in 2009.
7
cs The ethnic homogeneity of The Bachelor and other network dating shows, like the stock racial characters on The Apprentice and other series described below, created the mold from which women of color would be represented on network reality television. All the shows I’m discussing as BF debuted before Flavor of Love first aired, but some of the examples given below are from their later seasons, as well as from AF cable series such as Charm School and I Love New York.
ct A penchant for provocative attire seemed to be a job requirement for most of the women selected to compete for The Donald’s professional attentions.
cu That’s all we saw, though in postshow interviews Omarosa told reporters that she reacted so strongly because she’d been called the “N-word” off-camera. Producers denied the slur was used. Without access to Mark Burnett Productions’ proprietary tapes, it’s impossible to know which side was lying. But the press had a field day, insisting she “played the race card” and issued “false accusations” to cover for her professional inferiority. Some outlets used the incident as an excuse to trot out the corporate media truism that naming racism is as bad—or worse—than experiencing it.
12
cv Profilescontributed to viewers’ confusion about the differences between Afghanistan, where the “show” was set, and Iraq. This confusion was already instigated by op-ed writers, broadcast news anchors, pundits, and policy wonks who falsely claimed that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction, supported al Qaeda, and was responsible for 9/11. The more TV news Americans watched, the more likely they were to incorrectly believe such inaccuracies, according to a 2003 study from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Holding such misperceptions was directly correlated to a person’s likelihood to support the war, meaning that corporate media bears major responsibility for U.S. involvement in Iraq.
16
cw I can see the recruitment poster now: “Uncle Same Wants You . . . to trim those thighs, tubby!”
cx Shoshana Johnson was shot and held as a POW in Iraq in 2003, during the same famous ambush in which pretty, blond Private Jessica Lynch was captured. While Johnson’s story went mostly untold in corporate media, a falsified version of Lynch’s rescue was plastered all over print and broadcast headlines. Lynch later said she believed she was used as a propaganda tool by the press and the Pentagon.
19
cy ANTM has also used blackface and other ethnic props (Native American headdresses, grass skirts for Polynesians, etc.) to make models “become another race” in photo shoots.
cz Black women have been far more present within reality TV than Latinas and Asian women, while Native American and Arabic women have been virtually invisible.
da ANTM practices similar co-optation within America: A photo shoot at a homeless shelter used actual homeless youth as background props in contestants’ pictures.
db Compare this to his comments to Carmen, a pretty blond teen, during that same season. A bright-eyed Britney-in-training, she sang off-key often enough to make an average listener cringe. Yet after one such pitch-poor performance, the usually critical Cowell remarked, “Carmen, I don’t think that you are the best female singer in this competition. But, I think you are the most commercial of the girls left. And I thought that was one of your better performances. I liked it.” She was “commercial” because of her pop star package—light skin, blond hair, thin figure, youthful glow. Whether she could actually sing? Irrelevant.
dc Malkia Cyril made this statement during a keynote about the risks butch lesbians take when choosing to live openly in a hostile culture. Yet her point can very much apply to representation of “othered” communities within corporate media.
29
dd BTW, that’s the exact number of Rs used when his quote was captioned on screen to hammer this racial distinction.
de Seriously, that’s the phrase media outlets from
The New York Times to
Entertainment Weekly used to describe the show.
31
df Non-Black contestants were often given nicknames that othered them, such as “Miss Latin” for a Latina, or “Red Oyster” for an East Asian.
dg Such descriptions of women of color were extremely common on FoL, and throughout its legion of spinoffs. In Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, filmmaker Byron Hurt notes that the misogyny and violence in mainstream hip-hop is due to the corporate takeover of the musical genre. Before the corporate music industry bought up indie labels and chose to emphasize gangsta rap and video vixens, hip-hop was an organic voice of Black musicians who rapped about racial injustice and community power.
dh FoL’s influence was felt on network TV, too, with previously whitewashed shows recruiting more people of color—sometimes with problematic results, as when
Survivor’s thirteenth season divided competitors into segregated Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian “tribes.” Still, some producers continue Herculean efforts to maintain ethnic homogeneity. Take MTV’s
Maui Fever. Census data documents that Maui residents are 31 percent Asian, 10 percent Native Hawaiian, and 22 percent mixed race. Whites, just 33 percent of the local population, were 100 percent of Maui Fever’s horny, hard-partying cast. Locals protested that the show “gives viewers a skewed impression of their island,” and a petition circulated.
40
di Snow was the head of a girls’ self-esteem foundation, a divinity grad student, and a Baptist minister, but viewers didn’t know that because she wasn’t filmed studying, preaching, or mentoring girls.
dj Masters needed no legal justification: Since slave women were considered property, there was no law against sexually assaulting them.
dk In New York Goes to Work, viewers voted for Pollard to attempt different jobs each week. They selected work that would maximize her humiliation, including pig inseminator, nudist resort employee, and—in a particularly meta media moment for VH1’s favorite Black female jester—circus clown.
dl Producers didn’t want them to display too much self-respect: As DeShawn Snow learned on RHOA, Charm School students who didn’t perform diva antics—like Courtney, an intelligent aspiring comic—were sent packing.
dm Should the women have walked off FoL’s set when the nicknames were first proposed, backing out of their signed contracts? Perhaps—but it’s more relevant to ask why producers assigned them in the first place. What purpose did those nicknames serve, and why have nicknames become mandatory on subsequent VH1 and MTV shows? Women’s willingness to do degrading things on reality TV shows is often used to justify the biases built into content. Why people choose to play by reality TV’s rules is an interesting sociological question, but if we care about media’s role in shaping social and political discourse in America, we should keep our analytical focus on the ways reality TV is structured, the messages these shows send, and the industries that produce and profit from them.
dn It’s no coincidence that VH1 would turn to Nasheed to teach the women “Relationship 101.” He wrote
The Art of Mackin’ to help men score, based on “what he learned from older hustlers he had encountered on the streets of Los Angeles.” The book made him a nationally recognized “game advisor,” and “laid the foundation for the modern ‘seduction’ industry.”
44
do T.I.’s Road to Redemption didn’t rely on a game show format but attempted to portray a sense of gritty realism. There’s nothing wrong with showing mentors coaching youth to strive for healthy possibilities for their careers and their lives. Still, it’s important to ask why an “inspirational” show for youth of color should star a convicted Black man and frame his history as a drug dealer as A) the result only of his own poor choices with no consideration of institutional factors such as education, poverty, law, or public policy and B) a cautionary tale for kids of color, who were assumed to all be potential delinquents. Michael Hirschorn’s Ish Entertainment could have created an “inspirational” project following activists fighting to improve their communities, or youth of color achieving great successes in music, education, business, and political leadership. But that’s not the kind of ish Hirschorn’s interested in.
dp The CW completes the “Big Five” broadcast nets.
dq Asking Anchal to discuss beauty standards in the United States versus those from her “own country” is typical of ANTM. The show both normalizes and others immigrants, portraying them as an unmistakable part of the beauty that is America, while constantly implying that they are less authentically American than those born here.
dr Close, but no cigar. Fashion photographer and ANTM judge Nigel Barker (who passes for white) isn’t Indian, he’s British and Sri Lankan. Just another instance of Top Model playing the all-Asians-are-alike game, as many other reality shows do.
ds Lighter-skinned African American and biracial girls such as cycle 4 winner Naima Mora and second-season finalist Mercedes Yvette have often escaped this frame. In this way, the show plays to intraracial beauty hierarchies in media, advertising, and political history positing that the darker a woman’s complexion, the nastier her personality. Such hierarchies continue to cause pain within communities of color.
4
dt Tiffany never really had a chance of winning
ANTM, lacking the “girl next door” image demanded by program sponsors CoverGirl and
Seventeen, which use the winner in their ads. Producers raised her hopes for nothing; they only had her return because they knew she’d be a ratings draw. She was one of the most talked-about contestants on the third season, even though she lasted only one episode. “Bitch poured beer on my weave!” became an iconic quote, repeated on hundreds of fan sites and used as a
Vanity Fair headline.
5
du Seems Tyra needed Tiffany’s anger management course more than the model did. Faced with the privileged judge screaming in her face, Tiffany remained calm and in control. With an even voice, she told the cameras, “I’m not gonna break down for you or nobody else. You ain’t did shit for me but bring me here and put me through hell.” As the credits rolled, we heard her say she’s glad that Tyra cares about her, and that will inspire her to be a better person. Two years later, Tiffany finally revealed her honest reaction to the incident on an E! True Hollywood Story exposé about ANTM. “Before, in all of my interviews . . . I would always tell people, ‘Oh, Tyra loves me. I feel like the reason that she yelled at me was because she loved me.’ That was bull. So let me tell you how I really felt. I feel like if she loved me, she wouldn’t have showed it the way she showed it. Like my grandmother said, ‘If you love someone, you won’t humiliate them.’”
dv To convince the public to roll back the social safety net for the poor, 1980s and 1990s conservatives waged a war in the media against poor women. In addition to the derogatory “welfare queen” said to be “popping out babies for checks,” African Americans and Latinas in particular were labeled “immoral” “brood mares,” and even called “public enemy number one” by ABC’s Diane Sawyer.
Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter went further, insisting that “every threat to the fabric of this country—from poverty to crime to homelessness—is connected to out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy.” Riddled with inaccuracies, these reports nevertheless helped turn the tide of public opinion, enabling Democratic President Bill Clinton to pass a punitive welfare reform package in 1996 that resulted in hundreds of thousands of women and children falling deeper into poverty.
6
dw Banks has regularly encouraged Black models to put up with blatant bigotry she herself would never stand for. For example, on an episode in Spain, a male model disparaged African American contestant Jaeda Young, saying he didn’t like Black women and didn’t want to kiss her in a commercial they had to film for Secret deodorant. Editing emphasized how shaken she was by his racism, which could have led to a denunciation of bias in the industry by the judges. Instead, they eliminated Jaeda for making “excuses” and having poor chemistry in her ad.
dx Curious George, the inquisitive monkey of children’s book and PBS Kids fame, has been interpreted by literacy and culture scholars as a slave narrative. In the original story, The Man with the Big Yellow Hat kidnaps George from the African jungle and brings him to America, where he gets thrown in jail, escapes, and ends up behind bars in a zoo.
9
dy This is not to say it doesn’t exist: During and after the 2008 election, media outlets such as Fox News, along with conservative news sites and blogs, circulated artwork, political cartoons, and protest imagery of President Barack Obama photoshopped as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose, wearing a tribal headdress.
12
dz According to journalist Claire Sulmers, “The black-woman-in-the-African-wild theme . . . has been in vogue since the press pegged Somalian-born model Iman as a goat herder discovered in the jungle. She was, in fact, a university graduate and the daughter of a gynecologist and a diplomat.”
13
ea Stockholm syndrome is popularly defined as a psychological condition in which kidnap or abuse victims form attachments to and identify with their captors.
eb Banks quit high fashion for Victoria’s Secret fame when she realized that curvy adulthood isn’t welcome on couture catwalks.
ec She also signed a three-book deal to write a YA fantasy series about girls at a magic model school—sort of a Harry Potter-meets-Top Model franchize—to start being released in the summer of 2011.
ed Incidentally, if the officer Campos groped hadn’t practiced self-defense, the laws of probability make it likely that a far more serious crime would have transpired, since most aggressive, drunken sexual assailants don’t stop midassault unless they’re physically prevented from doing so. As self-defense instructors often say, “Behind every headline about an ‘attempted rape’ thwarted is a woman who did something to get away.”
ee Let me be clear here: I’m not accusing Mark Philippoussis of rape. Nor am I saying that a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl doesn’t have the right to consent to sex—while I believe every act of forcible or coercive sex should be treated as criminal abuse, I find statutory rape laws extremely problematic when applied as an attempt to police teen girls’ consensual sexual behavior. But my own beliefs are not the point—in many states, an adult in his late twenties who has sex with a minor under any circumstances is considered guilty of statutory rape. Considering these legal realities, NBC’s show runners had fertile ground to at least investigate the potentially thorny implications of their star’s relationship history before calling him a prince among men. Yet there’s no indication that this question was ever even considered by anyone associated with
Age of Love.
12
ef Actually, that’s not what “beaver” means . . . but a proper grasp of vocabulary is the least of this guy’s problems, so let’s not quibble.
eg My sense is that the producers’ real problem wasn’t with Mr. Grabby’s actions, it was simply that he wasn’t part of their planned story arc.
eh When I describe Top Model contestants as living mannequins, that’s not just snark. In one cycle 3 challenge, the girls were instructed to “look alluring . . . look interesting, but [not] cheap and slutty” while posing in the teeny-tiniest of overpriced La Perla bras, thongs, and G-strings in the high-end lingerie designer’s New York store window. While passersby gawked and sleazy onlookers snapped cell phone photos, ad-copy-esque voice-overs from the girls informed viewers that “Everybody knows La Perla is it in lingerie. It’s just [makes kissy noise] mwah—beautiful!”
ei To rationalize their gruesome = gorgeous themes, Top Model sometimes concocts backstories in which women are supposedly the culprits committing the abusive behavior, either against one another (in the “beautiful corpses” episode, for example, each of the women was said to be fictitiously killed by another model) or via self-abuse (for example, in photos where they pose as bulimics midpurge or junkies midfix). The implication is that these shows are not actually promoting violence against women because men aren’t always the fictional perps. It’s a shallow argument: Violence is violence no matter who commits it, and the psychological and sociological impact of Top Model pumping out gory-as-glam images of women in pain, in jeopardy, and in “eternal rest” is the same regardless of such rationalizations.
ej Four other first-woman-leader barriers were broken in 2006: Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson became president of Liberia, Michelle Bachelet was elected president of Chile, Portia Simpson Miller was elected Jamaica’s prime minister, and Han Myeong-Sook became prime minister of South Korea.
ek Tina and Kanisha were the only Black women on Tough Love season 2. Extra creepy points to VHI for presenting African American women as subservient to a patriarchal white man asked to “control” their fates.
el Show runner Mike Fleiss initially hesitated to give a woman the appearance of romantic control in a spinoff. He eventually relented, but the franchise has remained heavily weighted away from queen bees. By March 2010, ABC had aired fourteen seasons of The Bachelor and only five of The Bachelorette.
em Punctuated, of course, by enough testosterone-fueled brawls that viewers remember that they’re real men.
en Though she reprimands male clients for seeking women young enough to be their daughters and pays lip service to how much she “hates ageists,” Stanger tells viewers that it is “age appropriate” for a fifty-year-old to date women in their late thirties. When a redhead in her early to midthirties said that a fifty-year-old millionaire is “too old” for her, Stanger screamed that she’ll be single forever because of her bad attitude.
eo Some of Bravo’s Real Housewives have jobs. Many of their husbands are presented as afterthoughts (itself problematic). More positive is the MTV series Run’s House, which profiles pioneering hip-hop ar tist Rev Run (Joseph Simmons, formerly of Run-D.M.C.), his wife, and their kids. Justine and the Rev are portrayed as having a mostly egalitarian marriage, making joint decisions and treating one another with respect.
ep Wife Swap’s most famous misogynist is Richard Heene, a bizarre storm-chaser who spent the hour cursing at and castigating his “new wife” as “a stand for every man in America.” If Heene’s name sounds familiar, you were probably one of millions worldwide who watched news reports about a missing six-year-old boy, Falcon Heene, who supposedly floated away in his family’s homemade balloon. Worried that he fell to his death, the National Guard and local police conducted an expensive, high-profile manhunt, only to find Falcon hiding in his attic. As it turned out, Richard Heene orchestrated the “Balloon Boy” hoax in attempt to get his own reality show. Instead, he got a ninety-day jail sentence.
eq The Swan, which gave unnecessary surgeries and quasi-abusive “therapy” to unstable depressives, was the most sadistic.c.
er It’s especially offensive to lure viewers with the promise of seeing kids “that way” when we consider that 27 percent of women and 16 percent of men report being sexually abused as children.
13
es Can you think of a more certain recipe for eating disorders, therapy, or a future seat on the stage of the Maury Povich Show?
et On The Millionaire Matchmaker, Stanger’s #I rule is “no sex before monogamy.” Women who disobey are called “cheap,” “not virtuous,” and told they’ll “pay the piper.” Once they’ve got a guy on lock-down, though, Stanger instructs them to use sex to keep him happy, not experience it for their own enjoyment: “A good BJ goes a long way, baby. You can actually watch television and do it at the same time,” she told viewers.
eu When it comes to sex work, choice is a loaded concept in a country in which women are disproportionately poor but the sex industry is always hiring.
ev Both Kozer and McFakebucks himself, Evan Marriott, confirmed to media after the fact that the scene was “staged.”
ew Since she’s an unstable tabloid-chaser, it’s never quite clear how much of what Tila says is embellished. Yet her claim that
A Shot at Love was rigged maps closely to the way the show’s content was framed. Her description of producers’ behind-the-scenes machinations would also explain why straight women pretending to be bisexual were cast on both Tila’s and the Ikki Twins’ seasons.
16
ex Much has been written on the differences between sex and gender, though they are too often confused in both the media and the public imagination. Simply put, sex refers to biology or physicality (for example, genetics and genitals), while gender is a social construct that prescribes standard, static ways to “be a man” or “be a woman.”
ey Coined in recent years, the term cisgender refers to people content with their birth gender.
ez LOGO’s
Transamerican Love Story tied with
I Want to Work for Diddy for the GLAAD award.
TransAmerican Love Story Star Calpernia Addams, an activist and actress who prioritizes media education about transgender issues, accepted alongside Laverne. Her viral videos run the gamut from snarky monologues to patient, academic explanations.
17
fa In the end, When Women Rule was scrapped around the time when the Writers Guild strike caused widespread programming upheaval. A version of the series later ran on the U.K.’s Channel 4, promising “Backstabbing, bitching, [and] all-out physical violence” when men have to learn how it feels “being the weaker sex.”
fc Chrissy Barker’s ad-spewing monologues were lengthier than her lashes. Under the guise of offering contest rules, she told viewers that “of course” CoverGirl mascara will “help you stand out by stretching your lashes to extreme lengths that last without flaking or breaking,”
fd If young women viewers longed to be as glamorous as their favorite ANTM contestants, they could turn to the “In Stores Now” page of Wal-Mar t’s website. There, they’d find the winner’s picture, and learn that “Only one can be America’s Next Top Model but you can have what’s in her makeup bag.” The site urges shoppers to use “CoverGirl essentials to create the clean, fresh, natural CoverGirl look” that will make any girl “runway-worthy. . . . Start at the same place the America’s Next Top Model contestants went to fill their makeup bags—Wal-Mart.”
fe National Amusements, Inc., which owns and operates approximately fifteen hundred movie screens in the United States, U.K., South America, and Russia, has voting control of Viacom and CBS through NAI’s founder, chairman, and controlling shareholder, Sumner M. Redstone. And as this book goes to press, cable giant Comcast is angling to acquire NBC Universal from General Electric, in an attempt to control media across all distribution platforms, from broadcast to Internet to cable. While corporate news media are reporting the merger as a done deal, the Department of Justice announced in January 2010 that it would lead a review of the deal to evaluate it within the context of antitrust laws. By June 2010, media justice activists were still pressuring the FCC and the Obama administration to reject Comcast’s bid as an antitrust violation.
2
ff Consider that the next time Bravo’s Tim Gunn tells you that you can buy a winning
Project Runway design on
Bluefly.com.
fg Comparing four shows on the same network, Jackson found that, “The WB’s
Felicity draws similar numbers of 18- to 49-year-olds as the net’s two highest-rated black series, the
Steve Harvey Show and the
Jamie Foxx Show. But last season,
Felicity commanded more than twice as much money per 30-second commercial than either show ($80,000 vs. less than $40,000). In the first week of the new season,
The Steve Harvey Show pulled in 500,000 more viewers than
Dawson’s Creek; but
Dawson’s Creek gets $63,000 more for a 30-second. . . . How can that be simple ratings?”
5 Simple: It’s not.
Felicity and
Dawson’s Creek focused on angsty white students and were watched by young viewers who looked like them, while
Harvey and
Foxx featured Black people and drew a more diverse audience—one devalued by advertisers because of its racial makeup.
fh For now, it’s allergy meds on Harlem Heights. How long until future reality series are created to push Prozac, Zoloft, or other antidepressants? After all, Bachelor producer Mike Fleiss has professed his love of “getting girls to cry” on his shows. As culturally corrosive as reality TV has been, how much more dangerous could it be if women sob about their bodies on The Swan, their love lives on The Bachelor, and their addictions on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, only to emerge the picture of health and contentment after popping some strategically placed happy pills? I’m not joking. Since reality TV allows embedded advertis-s-ers to avoid regulations governing traditional medical marketing—and flout industry standards around advertising in general—this is a serious potential concern.
fi Miss Seventeen was indeed all about branding, marketing, and eyeballs—it just wasn’t remotely interesting. The show spanned one season in the winter of 2005, after which Seventeen abandoned cable to integrate themselves into an already-proven hit among their target young female demographic: America’s Next Top Model. Since then, for seven seasons and counting ANTM challenges have revolved around Seventeen photo shoots, and every ANTM winner has appeared on the cover of the magazine.
fj In 2008, the top ten broadcast network programs with product placement activity featured a combined 29,823 embedded ads. Only one scripted show, CW teen drama
One Tree Hill, made the list.
The Biggest Loser led with 6,248 placements, while
American Idol had 4,636,
EM: HE had 3,371, and
Top Model had 2,241.
13
fk “We will use a diverse array of entertainment assets to break into people’s hearts and minds. In that order. For this is the way to their wallets,” Coca-Cola’s CEO announced at an advertising conference in 2003, shortly after they began embedding their brand in
American Idol.14
fl In 2007, Silverman became cochairman of NBC Universal’s entertainment division, promising to force “the creative community” to kowtow to embedded sponsors. “If you’re making broadcast television, you better get the joke: We get financed by advertising,” he told
TV Guide. Silverman personally supported replacing five prime-time programming hours with
The Jay Leno Show at 10:00 p.m. The former
Tonight Show host got Silverman’s joke, making his new show the number one user of product placement in prime time for 2009—but was a programmatic failure in every other respect, helping to drive the ailing fourth-place network further into the ground.
20
fm At the time, the Solstice had a base price of $19,995 plus a $575 destination charge. That would put the value of those first one thousand Apprentice-generated orders at $20,570,000. According to Automotive News, the results were “spectacular,” with thirty-six thousand additional web visitors expressing interest in purchasing the vehicle.
fn If just a few minutes of reading ad-heavy fashion magazines increases girls’ and women’s body hatred, what impact might fourteen seasons of America’s Next Top Model have on viewers?
fo When would-be brides get jilted by The Bachelor and fleet-footed celebs are voted off of Dancing with the Stars, you can tune in to ABC’s Good Morning America for their postgame interviews. Similarly, when The Biggest Losers lose their spots in their casts and Apprentices get fired, they show up on NBC’s The Today Show the next morning. During the height of Joe Millionaire’s ratings extravaganza, a Fox news affiliate in New York hired the show’s British butler to do a puff piece on the women known to have dated Mayor Mike Bloomberg—or “Mike Billionaire,” as he was dubbed in the segment.
fp I’ll come clean: It worked on me, too. By the week before that first season’s finale, I’d never seen an episode of Survivor, yet I knew the names of competitors Richard Hatch and Susan Hawk because I read newspapers and watched TV news. So I gave in and watched the finale, knowing so many people I knew would be talking about it the next day.
fq Translation: reality TV provides viewers with the appearance of “editorial” integrity, which does not actually exist in the genre. This is one reason why embedded marketers prefer unscripted programming: because its practices are allowed by networks to bypass FCC regulations for advertising, as the Writers Guild of America, Commercial Alert, and FIT Media have noted.
36
fr Fox may earn more than $60 million annually from embedded advertisers, but just as with Popstars, the contestants themselves are product placements for American Idol CDs, videos, concert tickets, and merchandise sales. The show does make some young performers famous, but the draconian contracts discussed in chapter 4 ensure that the bulk of the profits from their careers go directly to the producers, not the performers.
fs As part of their ongoing attempts to unionize reality workers and protest product placement, the WGA once hired the
Upright Citizens Brigade, Amy Poehler’s improv comedy troupe, to perform guerrilla theater outside an
Advertising Age conference. Spoofing
The Apprentice’s excessive product placement, the comics impersonated hosts Donald Trump and Martha Stewart, designating various parts of their bodies as advertising space.
39
ft From the 1970s to the 1990s, for example, M*A*S*H*, All In the Family, Maude, and Roseanne weaved uncompromising messages about war, racism, feminism, and poverty into their comedies. While some contemporary cable series like HBO’s The Wire and AMC’s Mad Men tackle tough political topics head-on in nonexploitative ways, it is now almost unheard of for network shows to do so. + Ad man Don Draper is Mad Men’s slick, sexy central character.
fu As recently as the 1980s and ’90s, TV networks self-regulated this threat. In a letter to the FCC, Korby Siamis, one of the original writers of
The Cosby Show and executive producer of
Murphy Brown, wrote: “During my career, there was a clear distinction between art and advertising. On occasions that we used a product name, we would receive notices from the network Standards and Practices department. If the reference were necessary for the joke, it would stay. Otherwise we would take it out. And under no circumstances would a product be named if the network knew that there was a commercial for that product scheduled to run during the airing of the episode.” The idea of being forced to embed products into content would have been seen as “beyond ludicrous” and “the worst kind of assault on our creative process.”
43
fv Channel One beams advertiser-influenced “news” (plus commercials) into middle and highschools across the United States, wasting teaching time while indoctrinating the next generation of consumers.
44
fw See chapter 11 for many ways you can take action!
fx And for men, and people of color, and the economy, and love, and sex ... and while we’re at it, the genre ain’t so great for sheer common sense, either.
fz Don’t mean to imply that’s all in the past. I can sing almost every lyric to the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer musical episode by heart, and I hope Amy Poehler’s idealistic public servant Leslie Knope lives on for many more seasons of Parks and Recreation.
ga I’ve heard of drinking games where people take a shot whenever “the bitch they hate gets eliminated.” That’s the opposite of media literacy, in that players are buying into these shows’ manipulative framing and editing, rather than questioning it. As most comedians know, there is a fine line between humor that shines light on injustice and jokes that simply prey on the weak and bolster the powerful. You’ll have more fun, and a more edifying experience, if you choose rules that debunk rather than reinforce bias.
gb A twenty-point
Top Model drinking game on Racialicious, a critical pop culture blog, would have you sloshed five minutes into any given episode.
1
gc I don’t believe parents should forbid their kids from watching all TV. Not only will that make them want to watch it more when you’re not around, it also leaves them vulnerable to deception and bias in advertising and media. It is much healthier to watch with them and talk with them about what they’re seeing—on a regular basis. That said, limiting the number of hours of media consumption per day is a healthy practice—and television may not be appropriate for extremely young children who have not gone through the developmental stages necessary to decipher truth from fiction, reality from representation.
gd “Seriously, you need to turn that shit off.” In
Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body,2 Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby advise readers to “stop watching television, or at least seriously reduce [y]our TV consumption” because televised images of women’s bodies are so consistently unhealthy and demeaning that they can’t help but affect our self-perceptions. “While you’re at it,” they suggest, “lock your women’s magazines away,” too. While I believe it is more empowering to learn how to actively deconstruct disturbing media than to reject it completely, I understand and respect their “media diet—the only kind of diet we recommend,” as it can be psychologically freeing.
ge The digital divide is a major concern, as many low-income people, especially of color, have no Internet or cable TV access at home. (This is one of the many reasons why “net neutrality” provisions are crucial.) If you don’t have a computer or can’t get online at home, chances are good that you can do so either at school, at work, or at your local library, community center, or cable access center.
gf Many of the organizations and websites listed in the resource guide can help you make your own media.
gg “The queering of on-screen relationships is especially important for LGBTQ fans who have so few options of characters to identify with in mass media,” Kreisinger writes. You can watch
The Queer Housewives of NYC at Pop Culture Pirate:
http://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/, and see the next chapter for Kreisinger’s quick-tips guide to making remix videos.
gj Reel Grrls staffer Maile Martinez discusses how you can make your own films—or encourage young people you know to do so—in the following chapter.
gk See the resource guide for contact information.
gl In response to citizen and consumer advocacy groups’ demands, a petition by Commercial Alert, filings from the National Writers Guild, and bipartisan pressure from key members of Congress, the FCC proposed rule amendments in 2008 that would: 1) specify the size, duration, and placement of Sponsorship Identification notices to ensure that they are salient to the audience; 2) extend disclosure rules to cable and satellite programming; and 3) ban product placement in programs for children under twelve. As of this writing, the docket is open and pending. And in 2009, facing increasing public pressure, the FTC (which monitors deceptive advertising both on TV and in media that fall outside FCC rules and jurisdiction, such as movies, songs, music videos, video games, and novels) revised its Truth in Advertising Guidelines and for the first time extended the rules to require disclosure of paid endorsements in blogs and other Internet sites.
3
gm See the resource guide for the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and other groups working on these issues.
gn Digital inclusion initiatives seek to enable all people to become expert in the use of electronic communications tools for enhancing social, economic, and political power. Digital inclusion has three aspects: universal, affordable broadband access; digital literacy; and a participatory Internet, providing culturally relevant information to all people as well as the means to produce and distribute one’s own content.
go Fair Use is one feature of copyright law that, under certain conditions, permits quotation from copyrighted works without permission from or payment to the copyright holder. Remixes are highly eligible to be considered a Fair Use due to the transformative nature of the work, but what constitutes a Fair Use and what is considered copyright infringement is a case-by-case judgment call. Remixers can help make their case based on the Center for Social Media’s Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.
gq If the advocacy areas described in this chapter don’t speak to you, scan through the resource guide—or see
RealityBitesBackBook.com for more media justice organizations, media producers, and media associations that can offer you additional avenues toward change.