The Frankenbite: Ethics and Reality in the Post-Production of Factual Programming

Many scholars question the lack of formal appropriateness, transparency, and ethical consideration of reality television, as it applies techniques that compromise a truthful representation of real events for entertainment purpose. Editing, or the craft of rearranging video and audio to create new meaning, is one of those techniques. What makes the subgenre of reality television different from the traditional documentary form in the publics perception is that the former is solely intended to entertain, while the latter is expected to be guided by the motivation to inform and enlighten. For this dissertation, I mobilized scholarly and artistic lines of investigation in tandem, choosing a topic that emerged from my own practice as a documentary maker and editor. Working on documentaries is what led me to consider this field a valuable subject for academic research. I began to think about the characteristics of the profession and the implications of a changing television industry. In my work, I moved beyond that dualism that either views the practices of editors as being entirely ruled by market forces or elevates the creative autonomy of the artist. I tried to build an inventory of editors experiences and opinions instead: the ethical dilemmas they experience in the editorial decisions they make, the context in which this happens, their sense of narrative coherence as a guide to storytelling, and their opinions about their responsibilities and loyalties. By examining the production experiences of editors, my aim is to show the interplay and uneasy interaction between economics and culture. I argue that increasingly both forms, reality and documentary television, have more in common with the dramatic genre, in that their rhetoric is a narrative rhetoric.

Author dc:creator

• Becker, Manfred Wilhelm

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rowland, Wade D.

• Communication

Statement dc:rights

• Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10315/38136

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:yorkspace.library.yorku.ca:10315/38136