MEDIA PRESENTATION OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ABOLITION OF REALITY PROGRAMMES IN SERBIA
Text topic: Reality Programmes in Serbia – A GLOBAL OR NATIONAL PHENOMENON
Text author: Дубравка Валић Недељковић
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.
