Exploitation

This item happened to catch my eye over at Memeorandum. CBS is under fire for a reality show involving kids. Specifically, it looks like the producers of the show intentionally set out to avoid laws meant to protect children from exploitation and abuse. So that they could exploit and abuse children for fun and profit.

The ads promoting “Kid Nation,” a new reality show coming to CBS next month, extol the incredible experience of a group of 40 children, ages 8 to 15, who built a sort of idealistic society in a New Mexico ghost town, free of adults. For 40 days the children cooked their own meals, cleaned their own outhouses, formed a government and ran their own businesses, all without adult intervention or participation.

To at least one parent of a participant, who wrote a letter of complaint to New Mexico state officials after the show had completed production, the experience bordered on abuse and neglect. Several children required medical attention after drinking bleach that had been left in an unmarked soda bottle, according to both the parent and CBS. One 11-year-old girl burned her face with splattered grease while cooking.

The children were made to haul wagons loaded with supplies for more than a mile through the New Mexico countryside, and they worked long hours — “from the crack of dawn when the rooster started crowing” until at least 9:30 p.m., according to Taylor, a 10-year-old from Sylvester, Ga., who was made available by CBS to respond to questions about conditions on the set…….

…….A New Mexico official whose department oversees licensing of congregant child-care settings said in an interview that the project almost assuredly violated state laws requiring facilities that house children be reviewed and licensed.

The official, Romaine Serna, public information officer for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, said Friday that CBS had never contacted the agency. If the department had known of the parent’s allegations when the incidents occurred, she said, “We would have responded and would have assured the children’s safety.”

CBS officials say they broke no laws. “We feel very comfortable that this was appropriate from a legal point of view,” Ghen Maynard, the executive vice president for alternative programming at CBS, said in an interview Friday.

Jonathan Anschell, who oversees CBS’s West Coast legal office, said that a state labor department inspector visited the set of the show unannounced during the production. But Carlos Castaneda, a spokesman for the state labor department, now known as the Department of Workforce Solutions, said that the inspector was not allowed on the site and left without inspecting anything.

New Mexico was chosen specifically because it has no labor laws aimed at protecting kids in the entertainment industry as California does. The first thing that comes to mind here is that the parents of the children were out of their minds to allow this in the first place. But the production company looks like it really did its level best to avoid laws designed to protect children. CBS and the production company both jumped the shark here.

I think it may be that reality television is finally reaching the end of its run. There have been too many revelations of fraud for it to maintain any sort of a good reputation. Abusing kids for "entertainment" is going one step too far.