"He Is a total sweetheart": UK Reality TV and technologies of populist publicity

Sobande, Francesca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4788-4099 2024. "He Is a total sweetheart": UK Reality TV and technologies of populist publicity. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63 (2) , pp. 156-161. 10.1353/cj.2024.a919197

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Abstract

The relationship between celebrity culture, politics, and reality TV is a complicated one that plays out on screens around the world—from the depiction of political disagreements on throwback shows such as The Real World (MTV, 1992–2017) to the controversial inclusion of politicians in competitions including I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (ITV, 2002–). Although the pairing of politics and entertainment media is well established in the twenty-first century, the collision of these worlds still sparks fears. Namely, moral panic continues to be catalyzed by the prospect of politics, celebrity culture, and reality TV as functioning in many co-dependent ways. Then again, there are also legitimate societal concerns about the socio-political implications of reality TV, such as the harmful effects of who such programs platform and how those people who are platformed are positioned and promoted. It is helpful to consider how these matters are impacted by an insidious gendered and reductive oppositional binary of serious/sincere (politics) versus silly/trivial (reality TV), which masks the messiness of how both politics and entertainment media unfold.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Michigan Publishing
ISSN:	2578-4900
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 March 2024
Date of Acceptance:	14 February 2024
Last Modified:	05 Apr 2024 12:09
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/166851

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