by Niteen Borge

Created on: April 05, 2009

People have their loyalties. The most bitterly defended and heroically challenged everyday-loyalties are usually over choices of sport, sporting team, or political allegiance. Perhaps it is a part of being human to constantly need to check oneself up against the next person as a way to learn more about how reasonable one's beliefs are. Rivalry, petty or significant, completely pervades the human experience; and sometimes it can be fun too. There is a trivial and harmless kind of loyalty that people practice and promote as much as they can: their loyalty for TV shows and the personalities in them. Somehow, it is easy to convince oneself that there is a major principle at stake trying to uphold the moral superiority of one's choice of programming.

Reality television shows have been on the air for several years now; you would think by now that the camps that love this television concept, and the ones that loathe it would have marked out their territories and have settled their differences. There is no such luck though; the posturing over the merits of the concept or the lack of them brings as much animated debate now as it ever did. The show Fear Factor may have ended ages ago; but the show touched a nerve somewhere outraging some people with its theme of the degradation of some for the entertainment of many. The show has somehow earned a reputation for itself as the very embodiment of all that is wrong with the modern world and it is even today a frequently-quoted whipping boy among critics. Another defining television invention in this genre was the Donald Trump show, The Apprentice; this show put in front of audiences the cutthroat tactics that are the staple of high finance and high business. People who proudly oppose the reality concept claim that it minimizes the dignity of human effort by placing everything on the entertainment pedestal; they may have a point. But it is difficult to dismiss out of hand an idea that touches millions of people.

Entertainment is not perceived by people all in the same way. Conservative attitudes to mass entertainment such as television might have a point here with their concern for the well-being of a society exposed to seamy thoughts and ideas. These things can only be truly judged though by evidence of the way things are played out in the real world. There has been no evidence of any conclusive variety that pedestrian entertainment has ever led society or young people astray.

What does this mean then? Is it a tenable defense

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