Ethics Newsline®

Teachable moment or freak show? It depends who you ask.

LOS ANGELES
Reality televisions shows are cheap to produce and generally produce good ratings. But three stories in the world press this week question the morality behind the message:

• Newsweek examines whether the use of physically unusual people on reality TV shows is entertainment or exploitation. The piece looked at about a half-dozen shows featuring people with physical deformities, growth abnormalities, or who are extremely overweight. Debbie Myers, vice president of programming at the TLC Network, told Newsweek that the shows accentuate the positive: “It’s entertainment that softly promotes tolerance. Eventually, the differences fall away and you see what you have in common with these families.” But others wonder if the trend is simply cruel voyeurism. One man featured on a reality show about treating the drastically overweight — who was shown being removed from his apartment with a forklift and transported with a sling that carries marine mammals — told Newsweek that “people watch because they like a freak show.” The mother of two conjoined twins from Minnesota said she has stopped letting her daughters speak to the media following the debut of a documentary about them on a cable network, saying she doesn’t want the girls to grow up like “circus performers.”
• In Britain, health professionals are calling for stricter controls to protect the safety of young children to appear on reality TV shows. The Glasgow Sunday Herald reports that a program called “Bringing Up Baby” is the focus of the debate. It features a celebrity nanny employing techniques such as leaving babies to cry and putting them outside “to air,” the Herald reports. A spokesman for a group of Scotland’s health professionals said that this particular show was troubling: “It is the ethics behind using infants and children who can’t give their consent to something like this. We are just trying to put in place something more rigid to ensure that children aren’t being exploited.”
• In the United States, the NBC network is rolling out a new reality show called “The Baby Borrowers,” in which couples between the ages of 18 and 20 play parents to a series of children, from infants to teens, all in three-day periods over a total of three weeks, according to a report from Forbes. The stated intent of the program is to make a dent in teenage pregnancy by confronting young people with the reality of parenthood. ‘The Baby Borrowers,” Forbes reports, is the latest in a string of reality programs that have proven successful for the major networks, making some wonder when or if the novelty will wear off. “The press and the population are becoming a bit inured to the kind of attention-grabbing gimmickry of reality shows,” the University of Iowa’s Mark Andrejevic, author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, tells Forbes. “But people aren’t completely numb to it,” he adds. “Yet.”

Sources: Newsweek, Mar. 3 — Glasgow Sunday Herald, Mar. 1 — Minneapolis City Pages, Feb. 28 — Forbes, Feb. 5.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2007 — Related Newsline story, June 4, 2007 — Related Newsline story, May 29, 2007 — Related Newsline Commentary, Sep. 18, 2006.