Written by Line Jensen

In terms of how to know where the moral line is drawn when it comes to ethics in reality television, there is a lot of factors to keep in mind. The documentation in process is never the same as what is shown on our national television channels. There will always be a script, some sort of planned schedule and a production plan to start off with, which is a necessity when making any sort of media. However in every step of the way of creating a media piece you find a few different key moral issues. In the production process, you go through three main stages; preproduction, production, post production, and sub stages; transmission and post transmission.

​
This article will now delve in deeper detail how all of these stages in the production process touch base on a few moral and ethical issues and also how lifestyle reality television, like that of The Biggest Loser has tendencies to breach ethical boundaries.

When researching on the moral key issues in producing a reality television program I came across loss of personal space a few times; humiliation, loss of control and manipulation. Examples of these are noticeable through multifarious lifestyle reality television programs; the ‘villains and heroes’ created in My Kitchen Rules, or the objectification of surf life savers dealing with death in Bondi Rescue.  The increasingly popular sub division of lifestyle reality television that concentrates on aesthetics especially has concerns when considering what the treatment of physical image communicates to audiences. The Biggest Loser is one such example, as it is a program focusing on body-image, health and lifestyle it is a very personal journey for the contestants. It was the impact of such ethical consideration, or lack thereof that made me want to investigate further into the making of the show.



“A substantial number of ethical issues partly or entirely pertain to the extra textual context as such are not wholly discernible in, or reducible to, the confined spaces of the screened program or text. Every television product is the outcome of comprehensive and standardized creative process that unfolds within a television industrial complex” (Gitlin, 2000).

This production apparatus, which lies behind the screened sequence of events, usually remains largely hidden from the viewer, the occasional self-conscious references or behind-the-scene glimpses notwithstanding. Such ostensible ‘demystifications’ are more often part of a self-promotional strategy (Allen and Hill, 2004) or a stylistic marker of distinction than a truly reflexive moment on the part of the television professional. So, usually, there is little to learn from the screened program about the pre-production stage, and the day-to-day realities of the actual shoot and the measures of (pro-filmic) management and power relationships that are invested in this process, which largely happen off screen and/or are edited out in the post production phase that itself remains elusive for the common viewer. Finally the stage of distribution and exhibition raise moral questions of their own, which typically pertain to the profile or public image of the broadcaster, the marketing surrounding the show, the implications of the programs place in the television schedule (prime time or not, the watershed, block-programming) and the timing of transmission. (Winston, 2000)
Besides the moral questions that may emerge from what lies behind the screened program, a substantial part of the ethical debate relates to what comes after transmission. A central issue here is the fall-out of media exposure, which befalls anyone who enters the distinctive space of the media world. Surely the impact of publicity will vary along the ‘hype’ or ‘event’ character, or just plain audience figures, of the series, and will be more or less met with regret depending on the personal aspirations of the subject who finds him/her in the limelight.



Preproduction:
In the first stage of producing your piece of media you’ll develop your program, plan and organise the content and contrast. What you often find happening in that stage is misrepresentation, stereotyping or type casting where the person/persons being casted  become faced with subtle coercion and generalisations. Misrepresentation could here, involve the production team leading the prospective participant-subject astray as to the true set-up by purposely omitting vital pieces of information, presenting things in a more favourable light or just plainly telling untruths. After successfully getting the participants on board, in most incidents they will then be asked to sign away any personal rights or legal rights.



Production:
The production period is more or less based on getting material; image and sound. As a contestant at this stage, you’ve already signed the papers needed for them to proceed in their personal gain of your private, intimate sphere. The term intrusion implies, here, in terms of infringements of other people’s sense of autonomy or self-determination and control over those areas of their lives considered private. Our interpretation of privacy aligns with Hodge’s definition (2009), which relates the idea of privacy to concentric circles of intimacy and the measures of control that the subject has over these areas, including
those who have access to it innermost, most intimate sphere.



Post-production/ transmission:
In the post-production stage all the editing together of images and sounds finds place. The key moral issues that may or may not emerge in the process of post-production, are the misrepresentations with distortion through manipulations, omissions and supplementations during post-filming. There will be a degree of subject participation & control and misrepresentation as fraudulent claims to a authenticity of pro-filmic state of affairs.

Lifestyle Reality Television ethics;
The Biggest Loser.
Located within a superficially depoliticized ‘more government’ predicated on the technocratic embedding of routines and institutions of neo-liberal governance, reality television operates as a ‘cultural technology’ concerned with the conduct of conduct, or more specifically, with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behaviour to certain ends. Concentrating on physical fitness and weight loss, we focus on the globally successful reality TV format, The Biggest Loser (TBL), as a highly politicized space that educates subjects and disciplines the non-compliant: part of a moral economy that differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. We read TBL as a powerful public pedagogy that circulates techniques and provides the platforms for a government of the self, a component in the neo-liberal reinvention of ‘welfare’ that promotes choice, personal accountability and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship. While, at the same time, masking social forces that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism. Contributing to the ‘biopedagogies’ of weight, TBL classifies the obese, overweight and physically unfit as personal moral failures, immoral and irresponsible citizens, socially, morally and economically pathologized outsiders.
While there are a number of differential formats, including TBL ‘Military Wives’ or TBL ‘Couples’, the basic menu is the same: ‘unhealthy’ contestants (which in the ‘logic’ of TBL means ‘fat’) are educated, trained and encouraged by ‘expert’ trainers and put through physical work-outs to lose weight and thereby transform their bodies and thus (again as the ‘logic’ of TBL goes) their health and their lives.

We explore TBL as a typification of lifestyle reality television that operates as a ‘cultural technology’ concerned with the conduct of conduct, or more specifically, with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behaviour to certain desirable ends (Palmer 2003). We interrogate TBL as a highly politicized and contested space that educates subjects, disciplines the non-compliant and becomes part of a moral economy that differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. TBL is a source of powerful public pedagogies of ‘self and lifestyle transformation’ (Ouellette and Hay 2008b: 471) that circulate techniques for a government of the self – a component in the neo-liberal reinvention of ‘welfare’ that promotes choice, personal accountability, consumerism and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship while, at the same time, masking social forces (Ouellette and Hay 2008a, 2008b) that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism.

As mentioned earlier, some of the key ethical issues that emerge in reality TV for the contestants are intrusion; loss of personal space, humiliation and misrepresentation. This paper will investigate further into if and how these moral issues are breached in such a popular tv-show as The Biggest Loser.

By repeatedly distinguishing, defining and attributing moral value – middle-class values at that (Palmer 2003; Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008) – to specific practices, reality television makes the schema of moral value apparent as it identifies people in need of transformation: predominantly working-class populations (Skeggs and Wood 2008) Within this context, cultural technologies such as television, which have always played an important role in the formation of idealized citizen subjects, become instrumental as resources of self-achievement in different and politically significant ways then, reality television has emerged in a context of deregulation, welfare reform and other attempts to reinvent government as the quintessential technology of citizenship of our age – enacting experiments in governance and providing ‘civic laboratories’ for testing, refining and sharpening people’s abilities to conduct themselves (Ouellette and Hay 2008a). As the proliferation of the genre itself may suggest, responsibility for self and family development and control on television is separated into its constituent parts (cleaning, caring, education, eating, exercising, manners) and subjected to surveillance and judged accordingly (Skeggs and Wood 2008). Indeed, the genre of reality television is itself derived of any number of overlapping sub-genres. Reality television does not often venture into the territory of serious illness; yet, it isolates the travails of drinkers, smokers, junk food addicts, the overweight, the sedentary: those who can be seen as victims of their own lifestyle choices (Redden 2008). Following those in disciplines such as medical geography and public health, it is important to take a critical and interdisciplinary approach to thinking about obesity lest we reify and legitimize the stigmatization, medicalization and labelling as deviant of some bodies, spaces and places (Evans 2006; Jutel 2005).

Previously, scholars such as Mosher (2001) and Sender and Sullivan (2008) have suggested that when larger people are portrayed on television, fat women are frequently figures of fun, occasionally villainesses, often ‘bad examples’ of people with no self-control or low self-esteem(take e.g. Maggie’s mother in the film Million Dollar Baby). Conversely, fat men tend to appear in situation comedies (Drew Carey, The King of Queens) in which the impotence of patriarchal power invests male fat with an effeminacy or ‘sensitivity’ against the dominant heterosexual masculine ideal. Despite the perversity of focusing on television – so castigated for both its ‘fatty’ commercial content and its role as a sedentary social technology– our interests lie in addressing how a programme that lauds physical activity discursively constitutes ill/health. Somewhat rearticulating Palmer (2003), how does reality television centred on weight loss organize discourse that forms the subject-citizen? NBC’s TBL ‘allows’ its contestants, and also the viewing public, to ‘take charge’ of their health and lose weight. Via an established reality television series and comprehensive media convergence ,individuals can attend boot camps, post diet blogs, attach pictures to TBL gallery, learn recipes from the new Biggest Loser cookbook, listen to The Biggest Loser workout mixes, join the Biggest Loser club, ‘like’ the Biggest Loser on facebook, ‘follow’ the Biggest Loser on Twitter, access the Biggest Loser meal plan, purchase from the Biggest Loser store, sign up for the Biggest Loser weight loss League, stay at the Biggest Loser ranch and resort spa at Fitness Ridge, Utah, play the Biggest Loser on Wii or Nintendo DS consoles, subscribe to receive weight loss text alerts direct to a mobile

The programme is highly structured, offering a narrative flow that fragments each episode into a series of distinct scenes (a structure repeated in every episode). The first scene of each episode starts by introducing the viewers to the contestants and giving them a heartfelt, emotive, recap on their background. The second segment centres on exercise sessions, meal times and weekly weight loss and physical challenges. The climactic conclusion– the money shot (Grindstaff 2002) – is the dramatic ‘weigh in’ where the weight loss of each contestant is revealed and the problems of the self are solved through a quick and simplistic solution (Sender and Sullivan2008). Understanding the ethical considerations of humiliation and degradation in an Australian context is thought-provoking. As the obesity rate in Australia raises, and consistent discussions of citizens body image concerns are voiced the depiction and manipulation of how overweight Australians are presented is a major ethical and moral decision. In saying this although the morality of the shows may communicate overweight contestants as negative, the show does simultaneously promote healthy eating and lifestyles. This illuminates the possibility for these styles of lifestyle programs to argue positive lessons rather than portray negative representations. This decision though is completely ethical and only through further criticisms and continued discourse on the production process of lifestyle reality television will more positive messages be prompted.