TRASHY OR TRANSGRESSIVE? 'REALITY TV' AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CONTROL
by Laura Grindstaff
"Trash TV," "confrontainment," "dirty minded teleporn," "cultural junk food"--there's a new breed of TV out there and the old guard doesn't like it a bit. Cheap to produce and popular enough to play the ratings game, Trash TV covers a broad range of contemporary "reality-based" television fare including police and emergency rescue shows, the syndicated tabloid newsmagazines, daytime talkshows, and programs like I Witness Video and America's Funniest Home Videos. The idea is simple: make "real life" incidents as dramatic and entertaining as possible.
While there has been little scholarly inquiry into the growing phenomenon of Reality TV, the more established news media have been swift to condemn it. Decrying both the anything-goes-as-long-as-it-gets-an-audience attitude of producers, and the audience who will, apparently, settle for anything, critics are up in arms over what they see as the tabloid attack on conventional standards of television journalism. Once upon a time, laments Harry Waters of Newsweek, TV news was "high-toned" and respectable. Now, "this pristine structure has been invaded by a new kind of journalistic sensibility with its own audience-grabbing philosophy ... Showbizzy hucksters [are] bent on pandering to the most basic urges of the broadest possible constituency with a product as down and dirty as the censors will stomach."1
According to Waters, the hosts on shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy function as part reporter, part peeping tom; they're the TV trashmen. "Dirt does pay. Check out the weekly rating lists, and there's bound to be at least one seamy exploration of life's sleazy underside floating near the top."2 Likewise, America's Most Wanted offers viewers vivid recreations of rapes, shootings, and stabbings in slo-mo and freeze frame, while NBC's I Witness Video serves up "lurid gobs of real tragedy" under the aegis of the network's news division. Of course, Waters concedes, horrifyingly graphic camcorder footage frequently surfaces on the traditional nightly newscasts as well, especially CNN's. The difference is that CNN records legitimate news events, like an earthquake, an act of terrorism, or the beating of Rodney King, whereas I Witness Video uses amateur footage solely for the voyeuristic predilections of prime time audiences.3
The line between the two kinds of coverage is increasingly difficult to draw, however, as the tabloid "virus" -- previously confined to the fringes of syndication -- gradually "infects" primetime network programming. As Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz puts it, "all mass media are now part of this indistinguishable tabloid ooze that has driven our collective reputation into the gutter."4 Network executives defend the trend, citing stiff competition and the pressure of ratings, but critics are worried Trash TV is threatening the very moral fabric of society. Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times considers the unholy alliance between respectable media and the tainted tabloids to be the media scandal of the 1990s, having dubbed it "Tabloidgate."5 National Public Radio commentator Steven Stark describes it as the pornographification of American culture, a metaphor employed by others as well. Waters says I Witness Video is an "exercise in necro-shock" from "the pits of the porn trade,"6 while a recent essay by Sirius and St. Jude in Wired magazine describes the essence of daytime talkshows as a masturbatory encounter between outraged audience and sacrificial guest resulting in a "G-rated money shot."7
If Trash TV is the lowest form of television, daytime talk is the lowest form of Trash TV. Rosenberg is downright nasty when discussing talkshows. After describing Jane Whitney's show as "near the bottom of the food chain," he adds, "trying to fix NBC's feeble daytime schedule by adding Jane Whitney and Leeza is like trying to make Quasimodo prettier by grafting on another hump."8 Talkshows are said to exploit real human misery and exhibit a steady parade of side-shows freaks for the titillation, contempt, and amusement of viewers. Guests appearing on these shows are complicit in their own degradation, presumably drawn by the promise, however brief, of celebrity exposure. "These days it has become standard for all sorts of people to flaunt not just their physical oddities but their stupidity, vulgarity, or sinfulness as well," notes Kurt Anderson of Time magazine. "They volunteer, in exchange for attention or a few bucks, to suffer sneers and outright ridicule, so long as the medium is sufficiently mass."9 As Jeff Jarvis of TV Guide puts it, daytime talk is a "forum for trashy people to act trashy, exhibiting their bad manners, hard hearts, and filthy family laundry before millions of viewers."10
By all these accounts, it seems Trash TV plays on our voyeuristic desires, as well as our newest basic instinct: wanting to appear on television. Programs ranging from Candid Camera to Cops and America's Funniest Home Videos are said to be popular precisely because they pander to both urges. Whether cop, criminal, or suburban housewife, the possibility of being on camera is considered seductive because self-exhibition is a validation of existence. One in every six American families now owns a camcorder, and, as the critics observe, it seems as if all of them want their tapes on television. The producers of America's Funniest Home Videos receive more than 2000 tapes each day11 and local news stations have begun flashing video hotline numbers at the end of their newscasts. "Amateur videophiles lurk everywhere," Waters complains, "no wonder humorist Art Buchwald has unearthed a movement to register all camcorders -- or at least require a seven-day waiting period between purchase and delivery."12 Sirius and St. Jude look forward to the 7-11 Channel, "with home shopping opportunities interrupted by live-feed robberies." Far from avoiding stores equipped with elaborate surveillance systems, they say dedicated robbers will "drive half-way across the state to make their debuts, maybe whipping up costumes, snappy dialogue, and pornographic stunts for a moment of stardom."13
Some observers link the popularity of reality-based television to a spreading sense of powerlessness among the general public rather than voyeurism or exhibitionism. 
Todd Gitlin, who believes that such programming negatively impacts on public discourse, nevertheless suggests that "people don't want the old-fashioned kind of news because they know there is nothing they can do about it. But these new shows offer them the chance to get involved. They can call a number. They can make a difference."14 In other words, unlike more traditional news and public affairs programs, Trash TV invites viewers themselves to actively intervene in limited ways, by becoming part of the Greek chorus of the studio audience, submitting a videotape, or giving information on a wanted criminal suspect. Conversely, Neal Gabler suggests Trash TV does not so much mitigate as confirm an increased sense of powerlessness; for him, it's an entirely rational response to what he calls "the democratization of perversion." After decades of poverty, terrorism, war, and changing sexual and social mores, the new narratives of the tabloid media convey, and reinforce, the lack of purpose and control Americans now feel about the world -- "a world gone mad, a world beyond shock, a world swirling in a moral void."15
Whatever the presumed motivation for engaging Trash TV, critics claim the effects on viewers will be disastrous because it blurs conventional boundaries between fact and fantasy -- thereby confusing audiences and manipulating their sense of reality. In a recent U.S. News & World Report special feature on Tabloid TV, the authors acknowledge that the line between news and entertainment has never been as firm as purists might wish, however, reality television obviates the distinction altogether, news becoming merely the raw material from which entertainment is crafted.16 News veteran Fred W. Friendly is particularly irked by the dramatic reenactments used in shows such as America's Most Wanted and A Current Affair; they are fraudulent, he says, and cross lines that never used to be crossed.17
This anxiety over boundaries has marked the discourse on Trash TV right from the start. Richard Zoglin of Time magazine warned back in 1988, "a new batch of shows is playing ever faster and looser with the line that separates fact and fiction ... As the real and the fake get harder to tell apart, ethical and aesthetic questions get trickier."18 Dan Gringwold, journalism professor at USC, calls it the "blur effect," meaning viewers find it increasingly difficult to separate real life from imaginary events.19 The result, according to Gringwold, is that people are being desensitized to reality -- an observation apparently supported by the findings of two social psychologists who appeared recently on Oprah to discuss the negative effects of talkshows. Indeed, a long line of American intellectuals have been at pains to document the ways in which mass media texts eclipse the possibility of rational discourse by packaging information as entertainment, thereby distancing people from "real" life. Perhaps Neil Postman summed it up best when he argued, "we are amusing ourselves to death."20
Certain assumptions about both audience and its pleasures underlie every one of these critiques, specifically, assumptions that recall the early Frankfurt School writings about passive consumers manipulated by the culture industry. In Dialectics of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer oppose "mass culture" to "high art" in much the same way contemporary media scholars and critics oppose Trash TV to serious television journalism, claiming mass art is completely dominated by commodity fetishism, has no genuine content because it is essentially mimetic, and manipulates people by colonizing their minds. They are especially critical of film for its apparent capacity to render an exact reproduction of the external world: "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience ... [but] forces its victims to equate it directly with reality."21
Ironically, the very arguments used by the Frankfurt School theorists to denigrate film in relation to painting and other forms of "high art" were replicated by certain film scholars in their attempts to resist the incorporation of television studies into the academy during the late 1970s.22 Thus, while Trash TV is currently described as a "virus" infecting legitimate network programming, not so long ago television itself was considered the disease. In his essay "Candid Cameras," Andrew Ross notes with some amusement that television has been characterized by various presidential committees over the years as a "vast wasteland," an "electronic Appalachia," and a "toaster with pictures."23 Intellectuals were even less charitable, as television became the latest unredeemable "bad object" in the continuing debate about mass culture. Not only was it particularly debased ("TV stinks to heaven ... if you have to study it, hold your nose and take a bath later on") but it threatened the very stability of society ("next to the H-Bomb, no force on earth is as dangerous as television").24 The danger lay precisely in TV's ability to simulate reality, rather than merely represent it, and the inability of the viewer to know the difference -- the "blur effect" that most scandalized Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectics of Enlightenment and continues to scandalize media critics today. As Ross observes, with the rise of live television and the challenges it posed to print media, the capacity to falsely conflate TV with "the real thing" had supposedly increased a thousandfold, and with it, the increased capacity for "false consciousness" already attributed by intellectuals to the mass TV audience.25
For Ross, this represents the latest chapter in an old war of persuasion waged around the influence of new technologies over popular taste. The war of persuasion is now further complicated by the popularity of new television genres which use footage of actual events to endlessly narrativize experience, packaging and framing real stories/real crimes/real trauma for mass entertainment, and whose pleasures lay precisely in the link between voyeurism and surveillance, freedom and control. Cameras, as Susan Sontag has pointed out, define reality both as spectacle for the masses, and as an object of surveillance for the ruling elite.26 Reality-based television muddies this distinction, inviting people to participate in their own and others' policing, to survey as well as be surveyed. Is this democracy, or social control internalized? Viewers seem to enjoy this programming; are they therefore even more duped today than in the past?
Such questions have generated many lively debates about the workings of ideology in popular culture, the ways in which media texts construct subjectivities, and the forms of resistance and strategies of subversion employed by consumers themselves. All of these developments require a re-examination of the original split between high art/low culture. Stuart Hall reminds us that the separation of elite and mass culture into preferred and residual categories is in no way predetermined by the contents of each, which may alter from one historical period to another, rather it consists of the forms and relations that sustain the distinction in the first place.27 The categories "high" and "low" remain, though the inventories change.
In this spirit, Kevin Glynn examines the bourgeois contempt for the "facile" culture of the masses in relation to the current debate over Trash TV. Arguing that the excessiveness of tabloid television can only be understood in opposition to its respectable journalistic counterpart, he charts the ways in which divisions between elite and mass culture have always centered most crucially around matters of class and taste, and further, the ways in which "taste" is not merely gustatory and aesthetic, but intensely sexual as well (hence the tabloid emphasis on sex and the pornography metaphor employed by critics). Glynn insists that in producing a nightly inventory of abnormality, the tabloids cultivate a kind of camp sensibility which defamiliarizes conventional modes of news presentation and poses a challenge to the normalizing function of "straight" journalism.28 Although less celebratory overall, media scholar Philip Weiss agrees that the tabloid assault on sobriety and self-seriousness is refreshing, and that some of the criticism reflects a certain elitism and class bias. Weiss appreciates the fact that tabloid TV, in scavenging the magnetic tape universe for inspiration, is open to the "democracy of video" in a way that few other commercial programmers are. And while he admits the sociopolitical implications of stories are often suppressed, he says many of the pieces "confirm a Dostoyevskian view of existence" in which small-town ignorance is mocked, authority figures are revealed as wickedly hypocritical, and the family itself appears untrustworthy.29
Many feminist scholars have a particular investment in these debates, given the tendency of critical discourse to gender mass culture and "the masses" as feminine. The association of women with mass culture and men with "authentic" or "high" culture was most pronounced in the nineteenth century, with the rise of industrialization and cultural modernization; however, as Patrice Petro notes, even today theoretical discussions of art and mass culture are frequently peppered with gendered metaphors linking the "masculine" values of production, activity, and attention with art, and the "feminine" values of consumption, passivity, and distraction with mass culture."30
Such metaphors are perhaps most pronounced today in discussions of daytime talk, which, whatever its faults, is one of the few forums incorporating "ordinary people" into the regular machinery of television production -- particularly those normally denied representation, such as sexual and racial minorities. Talkshows are seen to constitute a "feminine" discourse, not only because they air during the day and employ more women behind the scenes than any other television genre, but because they focus predominantly on sexuality and familial relationships, and privilege emotion, confession, and personal experience in the production of "truth" and knowledge. In other words, daytime talk makes public issues of putatively private events and it does so in a manner that has stereotypically been associated with women's ways of knowing. Consequently, it can be read as challenging traditional (gendered) boundaries separating public from private, news from entertainment, reason from emotion, objectivity from subjectivity, and expert knowledge from common opinion -- the very binarisms that distinguish "high" culture from "low" culture.
The intention here is not to valorize talkshows or other forms of Reality TV. I do not find it particularly innovative, refreshing, transgressive, or democratizing. In fact, I would agree with those who argue talkshows turn crucially on questions of policing and social control, articulating the limits of acceptable behavior and the consequences of transgression -- a dynamic they share with the seemingly dissimilar reality-based cop shows. Both genres can be read as attempts to re-inscribe social norms and "family values" through ritualized degradation ceremonies in which "deviance" is subjected to a disciplinary apparatus such as the LAPD or a studio audience. And while the "masculine" cop shows suggest the crime "problem" can be solved by getting tough and cracking down, daytime talk suggests therapy and self-help are the answers to everything, from a troubled marriage to homelessness to racism.
At the same time, however, the tendency of media critics to characterize Reality TV as trashy, dirty, sleazy and even pornographic raises important political questions about the relationship between class, gender, and popular culture. It also raises important epistemological questions about the nature of "the real." Especially tiresome are complaints about the confusion between news and entertainment, spectacle and politics, not only because the two have always been inseparable historically speaking, but because they presuppose a binary framing that prevents us from recognizing the reality in fiction and the fantasy in fact. Those who lament the "distorting" interpretative framework of Trash TV ultimately have a conception of other forms of electronic media as neutral. But all television images are constructed, no matter how "live" they might be.
Denouncing Trash TV for distorting the truth and corrupting the masses -- and all in the name of "reality" -- is more than a little disingenuous. As Weiss observes about the establishment media response to tabloid TV, "for all their ranting and raving against the tabloids, mainstream newscasters haven't exactly set a noble standard,"31 a point Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue have made repeatedly in interviews. Indeed, Rivera and Donahue argue that much of the criticism aimed at the talkshows and tabloids smacks of hypocrisy and elitism, not only because journalists and anchors from more prestigious venues tackle many of the same issues and, in some cases, employ similar dramatic storytelling techniques, but because their hysterical response to Tabloid TV is every bit as sensational and audience-grabbing as the material they condemn.32
Even the tendency of daytime talk to privilege simple, individual solutions to complex social problems like racism, poverty, and sexual violence (a trend I find more disturbing) is by no means the special province of talkshows or Trash TV more generally, but a characteristic of virtually all mainstream media texts, including programs like Nightline and 60 Minutes. Indeed, its challenge to traditional dichotomies (public/private, information/entertainment, reason/emotion, etc.) notwithstanding, there are many significant parallels between talkshows and "serious" journalism. Sociologists have documented in rich detail the ways in which news organizations personalize issues and events, showcase "expert" voices, maintain "objectivity" by balancing opposing viewpoints, seek to entertain audiences as well as inform them, and emphasize conflict and violence over normal consensual relations33 -- all formal strategies of the daytime talkshow.
True, Cops and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol highlight certain criminal activities and not others, and certain types of criminal suspects and not others. Thus we might observe on these programs that dealing drugs, stealing cars, resisting arrest (or even being black, speaking Spanish, or receiving welfare) are far worse "crimes" than trading arms for hostages, embezzling public funds, polluting the oceans, or dropping "smart bombs" on Baghdad. This might be a disturbing message, but we get pretty much the same one from the news on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and PBS, bastions of respectable journalism. True, we might learn from Jenny Jones or Sally Jesse Raphael that social problems have individual, therapeutic solutions, that race, gender, and sexual orientation really don't matter because underneath we're all "just people," or that male violence and social conflict result from low self-esteem and a wounded inner child, but you can learn the same thing from The Cosby Show, Beverly Hills 90210, or your latest course in miracles. If intellectuals want to trash Trash TV, they need to do more than complain that it lacks realism or that it signals the triumph of technofascism over the mass (and massively duped) TV audience. They should avoid castigating "the masses" for their popular pleasures, particularly when we don't even know what those pleasures are. As Steve Fore suggests in an essay on America's Funniest Home Videos, hopefully we can avoid leaping to the conclusion that the quality of those pleasures--easy access to emotional expression, for example--are suspect just because the quality of the show may be.34
There is, of course, a way in which Trash TV, for all its claims to depict real life, is about anything but that. There is room here for an analysis of fantasy, for a reading of Trash TV as an expression of what our culture lacks and therefore desires: a world in which race, gender, and sexual orientation don't matter, where complex social problems have individual, therapeutic solutions, where deviance is easily recognizable, swiftly and justly punished. Or, more significantly perhaps, where the desire to connect with other human beings at whatever level generates an elaborate, mythical electronic space in which no detail is too small to reproduce, no story too personal to tell. At the end of their essay, Sirius and St. Jude speculate, "maybe there's some evolutionary force pushing us towards a complete exteriorization of our individual psychic landscapes. Clearly we are wiring ourselves, each to the other. We seem to be creating through media and communications technology what some have called a species-wide nervous system."35
Notes
1. Waters, Harry F., with Peter McKillop, Bill Powell, and Janet Huck. "Trash TV," Newsweek, November 14, 1988, 74.
2. Waters, Harry F., et. al. "Trash TV," 72.
3. Waters, Harry F. "America's Ugliest Home Videos," Newsweek, June 15, 1992, 59.
4. Quoted in "Tabloid TV's Blood Lust," U.S. News & World Report, July 25, 1994, 48.
5. Rosenberg, Howard. "How TV News Spiraled Into Tabloidgate," Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1994, F1.
6. Waters, Harry F. "America's Ugliest Home Videos," 60.
7. Sirius, R.U., and St. Jude. "The Medium is the Message and the Message is Voyeurism," Wired, February 1994, 48.
8. Rosenberg, Howard. "More Cheap Chatter on Daytime TV," Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1994, F1.
9. Anderson, Kurt. "Oprah and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy," Time, October 11, 1992, 94.
10. Jarvis, Jeff. "Ricki Lake," TV Guide, v42, n27, July 2, 1994, 7.
11. Zoglin, Richard. "Fact vs. Fiction on 'Reality TV,'" Time, May 16, 1988, 97.
12. Waters, Harry F. "Ugliest Home Videos," 60.
13. Sirius, R.U., and St. Jude. "The Medium is the Message," 49.
14. Quoted in Waters et. al. "Trash TV," 75.
15. Gabler, Neal. "A Sign of the Times: When Only Entertainment Has Value," Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1993, M3.
16. "Tabloid TV's Blood Lust," U.S. News & World Report, 51.
17. Quoted in Munson, Waye. All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 65.
18. Zoglin, Richard. "Fact vs. Fiction on 'Reality TV,'" 97.
19. Quoted in Waters, Harry F. "Whose Real Life Is This, Anyway?" Newsweek, February 25, 1981, 47.
20. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
21. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectics of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury Press, 1972, 353.
22. Petro, Patrice. "Mass Culture and the Feminine: The 'Place' of Television in Film Studies," Cinema Journal v25, n3, Spring 1986, 5-21.
23. Ross, Andrew. "Candid Cameras," No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989, 106.
24. Ross, Andrew. "Candid Cameras," 105.
25. Ross, Andrew. "Candid Cameras," 105.
26. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
27. Hall, Stuart. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular,'" People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 234.
28. Glynn, Kevin. "Tabloid Television's Transgressive Aesthetic," Wide Angle, v12, n2, April 1990, 22-44.
29. Weiss, Philip. "Bad Rap For TV Tabs," Columbia Journalism Review, v28, May/June 1989, 38-42.
30. Petro, Patrice. "Mass Culture and the Feminine..." See also Huyssen, Andreas. "Mass Culture As Woman: Modernism's Other," Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986, 189-207.
31. Weiss, Philip. "Bad Rap For TV Tabs," 42.
32. See "Geraldo Rivera: Bloodied But Unbowed," Broadcasting, December 19, 1988, 43-48; also Unger, Arthur. "Phil Donahue: "I Cannot Be the BBC in an MTV World!" Television Quarterly, v25, n2, 1991, 31-43.
33. See Sigal, Leon. Reporters and Officials. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1973; Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1978; Tuchman, Gaye. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1978; Gans, Herbert. Deciding What's News. New York: Pantheon, 1979; Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; Hartley, John. Understanding News. London: Methuen, 1982.
34. Fore, Steve. "America, America, This is YOU!" Journal of Popular Film and Television, v21, n1, Spring 1993, 44.
35. Sirius, R.U., and St. Jude. "The Medium is the Message," 50.
