The Dark Side of "Reality TV": Professional Ethics and the Treatment of "Reality"-Show Participants

Authors

  • Jelle Mast Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Keywords:

reality TV, professional ethics, hybridity, television production

Abstract

This article proposes an inventory of key ethical issues emerging from the production of reality TV shows, with a primary focus on participants’ rights/interests and program makers’ responsibilities. The analysis is structured according to four categories of potential harm (intrusion, humiliation, misrepresentation, and appropriation) and different stages of the production process, integrating theorizations on media, documentary, and image ethics with insights derived from 48 semistructured qualitative interviews with reality professionals and participants and several contracts. It is argued that professional practice needs to be informed by ethical considerations and accountability measures, touching a middle ground between incident-centered and all-encompassing critiques and between structural factors at industry and genre levels and (situational) measures of agency and differentiation.

Author Biography

Jelle Mast, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Jelle Mast currently works as an assistant professor of journalism studies in the department of Applied Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. As the coordinator of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU), and an affiliate member of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) at University of Antwerp, his main research interests are in the areas of visual communication, journalism practice, genre hybridization, and professional ethics. From June 2010 until May 2012, he served as Secretary of the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association (ICA), the largest organization in the discipline.

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Published

2016-04-27

Issue

Vol. 10 (2016)

Section

Articles

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