They
call it “reality TV”, and you hear things like “real life”, “real drama”, “real
talk” and so on. But what does “reality TV” actually mean? The last couple of
weeks we have been studying media framing, class, reality TV shows and what
people may not realize about the “real” in reality. TV shows like Real
Housewives, Honey Boo Boo, and Duck Dynasty are three shows that we focused on
in class. The media industry is a corrupt, manipulating and addicting aspect of
our lives, and it often results in a false consciousness, or false views of the
world and the way things “really” are. The lifestyles of the rich and the
famous are almost always unattainable by most and viewers everywhere are receiving false
information about the celebrity world and how they get to where they are. The Real
Housewives convinces viewers that they are hard working, dedicated, and real,
but in reality, they are lazy and get paid and praised for spending money in “disgusting
ways”. The average housewife lives nothing like the ones on the TV shows and
that is as obvious as it gets, yet, for some reason, we still tune into watch
these outrageous, boring lives of reality TV stars to what? End up creating unrealistic
expectations of what our lives will never be and therefor lowering our satisfaction for what we do have?
From
one extreme to the next, we can go from watching absurdly rich women, to
carnival like hillbillies in the shows Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo. These
shows are insulting these families by adding dramatic music, providing close
captions when they speak, emphasizing their accents, and showing their gross
behavior on TV. They stereotype these families and humiliate them in a way that
the can be describes as “in good fun”, but what people don’t realize with these
shows is that, in reality they are not only dirt poor, filthy, hillbillies as
they are depicted on TV, but are actually pretty well set in terms of money and
literacy. The Duck Dynasty members are very wealthy and can afford to take
trips to Hawaii, but media is sure to show them as out of place in such
scenarios. The wives in Duck Dynasty are all beautiful, well-dressed, thin, sophisticated
women and that shows that they are living a more glamorous lifestyle than we
may think.
The
point is that reality television is deceiving and can lead the viewers to have
false assumptions of the lives of housewives, or hillbillies. People need to be
more aware and notice what media framing is doing to our perception of others so we to don't create lies or stereotypes about people.
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