LIFESTYLE TV – SERBIAN PERSPECTIVE

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The aim of this paper is to inquire into the phenomenon of lifestyle TV programmes as a specific segment of reality TV. The corpus of this paper are the shows from two commercial foreign TV channels: Fine living and HGTV, as well as two shows of the Serbian public broadcasting service RTS – S Tamarom u akciji and Prva bašta Srbije. The units of analysis are these TV shows. The theoretical starting point of the paper is The Uses and Gratification Theory. The analysis has shown that the American lifestyle reality programmes, under the influence of media popularization, present only one style of home renovation, with the obligatory elements such as specific types of furniture or house layouts and do not accept anything differing from that particular style. It can be noticed that such a home style is expected when people purchase or renovate homes in other parts of the world (Europe, Central America and Canada). The analysed Serbian TV shows are entirely different from the American, since they have humanitarian or competitive character. 

MEDIA PRESENTATION OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ABOLITION OF REALITY PROGRAMMES IN SERBIA

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The popularity of reality television programmes, combined with the non-ethicality of the production of most of reality shows, has prompted several citizen initiatives for the abolition of this format, widely labelled as “voyeuristic”. The fact that the last such initiative from 2019 managed to collect 50,000 signatures, justifies validity of the research objective to deconstruct the techniques of presenting this phenomenon in the media, together with the discourse strategies of online platforms users when presenting their views about the reality programmes and the petitions to abolish them. The basic investigative method was critical analysis of the discourse, combined with the descriptive method. The corpus consisted of 110 texts, and 236 accompanying comments,sourced from the Google sites, placed over a period of five years: from the beginning of the first campaign until the last and the most effective one (2015-2019). Results of the investigation are the following: there is a small critical mass of media literate citizens in Serbia who are capable of identifying all the negative as well as the positive aspects of this format; only those media that can be labelled as professional and critical did follow the campaigns; the texts about the reality programmes contained evaluation of the format as well as public debates about enforcing limitations for broadcasting of such programmes, based on the violation of the Serbian Journalists Code of Ethics. The evaluation also referred to the process of collecting signatures, which is the reason why those texts were posted occasionally and not continually.The media were focused mostly on the “scandals” that accompanied reality shows. It is also important to emphasize that the online media were not additionally engaged in offering support to the campaign for the collection of signatures in favour of a better regulation of reality programmes in Serbia.