The Reality TV Controversies

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Excerpts

In 1926, John Logie Baird demonstrated the first television (TV), a black and white model, which marked the beginning of a communication revolution in the world. Regular scheduled telecasts first began in England in 1936. The TV market grew at a healthy pace in the late 1940s. By 1949, there were over 100 TV stations and over one million families owning TV sets in US. By 1951, the number of TV owning families in the US increased to over 100 million. After color TV was launched in the 1950s, the TV market grew quickly across the world...

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Reality TV constitutes non-fictional programs that supposedly provide a realistic account of current or historical events or situations. Various reality TV programs comprised interviews and talk shows; news and public affairs programming; documentaries; entertainment-news and review programs, portrayed as a re-creation of real world events...

According to experts, TV has a great influence over morality of viewers, as they tend to match their own judgments of what is good and bad with the value system created by TV programs. This could create moral and ethical conflicts in the viewer...

In late 2001, a survey conducted in the US by Adweek revealed that 50% of the surveyed people had become more selective to the kind of programs they watched. Around 57% of the surveyed people indicated that they were less willing to watch reality based programs...

Exhibit I: Genres of Reality TV Programming
Exhibit II: Most Popular and Criticized Reality TV Shows