All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It’s Halloween time, and you know what’s really scary?

Depending on what happens between now and the stroke of midnight on Halloween [cue the spooky organ music] we may be facing ... a winter of reality television.

The clock is running out on the current contract that the Writers Guild of America has with Hollywood. And the new media landscape is the battleground, as reported in Time magazine:

Screens may not dim, but first TV and then the movies will look different if the two parties can't come closer together. The deal-breaker in the negotiations between the WGA and AMPTP is new media content. Those pithy webisodes of The Office and Battlestar Galactica? Someone wrote them, and wants to get paid when you play them on your iPod. In order to avoid a strike, said WGA West President Patric M. Verrone in a statement, "What we must have is a contract that gives us the ability to keep up with the financial success of this ever-expanding global industry." AMPTP says new media is still too new, and revenue is too unpredictable to set up a compensation package that resembles the one used for TV shows, in which writers get paid every time their rerun of Golden Girls airs.

So what happens if the writers and the studios can’t hammer out details? Yes. You guessed it. Reality shows, with their unofficial slogan of “We don’t need no stinkin’ writers!”

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So it’s not quite Capulets versus Montagues or Crips and Bloods, but the little spat we have here at Public Eye continues to escalate.

As I reported last month – with the derision I felt it deserved – KTYX, a station in Tyler, Texas has hired a swimsuit model/pro wrestler with no journalism background to be their new anchorwoman. The woman in question, Lauren Jones -- you may remember her from her being the official model of HaterWear clothing -- is going to film her misadventures for an upcoming Fox reality show. I considered it “pathetic” and “sad” and a naked attempt to “exploit its anchorbabe for a handful of extra ratings points.”

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Everything's Fine: If you're planning to zip over to Zimbabwe to do some reporting, you might want to make sure you've got your papers in order. A British reporter for Time magazine was arrested in the south of the country last week for working without a press card. Alexander Perry was picked up for lacking accreditation by the Orwellian-sounding Media and Information Commission, and he has pled guilty and been convicted and fined. The good news? The fine is 100 Zimbabwe dollars – about 40 cents.

Pet Causes: Writes William M. Hartnett: "If you are a newspaper editor who has not been playing every single one of these [pet food recall] stories on your front page, you've been f'ing up, big time…Short of the very air that we breathe turning toxic, no other story affects a greater number or range of people than news about our pets." Take that, Pizzey.

Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real: Hey, snobs – it may be time to start watching reality TV. According to Michael Hirschorn, you don't know what you're missing. He writes: "[R]eality TV is also the liveliest genre on the set right now. It has engaged hot-button cultural issues—class, sex, race—that respectable television, including the august 'CBS Evening News,' rarely touches. And it has addressed a visceral need for a different kind of television at a time when the Web has made more traditionally produced video seem as stagey as Molière."

And now, for a story that sounds like an especially bad "Saturday Night Live" skit. Here’s the tagline: “in a nation skidding toward civil war, putting Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis and Christians under a single roof to ‘play house’ might literally end up as a contest for survival of the fittest.” That’s how the Los Angeles Times describes the latest in reality television programming in Iraq. It’s called “Playing House,” a series that has aired every night for the month of Ramadan, one of a new swath of reality shows available on several newly independent television channels in Iraq.

It’s a bit “Survivor,” a bit “Big Brother,” writes the Times. “…a dozen contestants from regions as disparate as Baghdad, Hillah, Diyala and Kirkuk gather to live for about a month in a small inn-turned-ultramodern living space outfitted in magenta and chartreuse.” They perform tasks like Spin-the-Bottle, building a barn or loading cargo. The losing team nominates two losers and the audience boots one off the island. The winner gets $3,000. Of course, the program doesn’t take place on an island, or in certain other locations in Iraq: “Naturally, none of these activities are carried out in downtown Baghdad, where venturing alone into the wrong neighborhood can land you in the morgue."

"Instead, the creators of ‘Beit Beut’ flew the whole cast up to the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, in the scenic hills above Sulaymaniya."

And for all it's similarities to Western television, there are still pretty substantial differences. Said the show's director: "We are from a conservative society, and we respect and protect our traditions and norms. No romance!"

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