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| Brad Blog August 19, 2007 |
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| Tuesday, 21 August 2007 | |
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"Kid Nation" Bad, But the Parents Are Worse
By Brad Hirschfield
To be sure, the new CBS show "Kid Nation," scheduled to premiere in a few short weeks, is the products of gross irresponsibility and greed on the part of network executives. How else are we to understand sending 40 kids ranging in age from 8 15 into the New Mexico (a state which at the time of filming had no child labor laws covering things like maximum allowable work hours or minimum hours of schooling for the young "actors") desert for six weeks with little or no supervision?
I guess the folks at CBS didn't understand that Lord of the Flies was meant to scare folks, not provide a model for how we want to see kids raised! No, the only possible explanation is their willingness to sink ever lower into the social gutter for ideas that they hope will engage us. And should they turn out to be correct, and the show becomes a hit, then I will be back with a piece that calls us to task for buying the trash they are pedaling. But I have hope that it will not be so. What's really disturbing about this is that parents signed their own kids up for this sick Darwinian experiment in social evolution. Why? For the five thousand dollars? For the chance to win a twenty thousand dollar bonus? For the desired fame which has become the crack cocaine of our decade marked by people who are famous for being famous? But wait, it gets worse... One parent, has written a formal complaint to New Mexico authorities complaining about "abuse and neglect" of the kids on the set -- the set on which she put her kid, from which she could have pulled her at any time, and only after they completed shooting and she collected the money on behalf of her minor child! And I thought that the story of killing your parents and then demanding mercy from the court because of being an orphan was only a story!! Is there any sense of personal responsibility left in the world? Is there any accountability for having put one's own child into that position? Is there any sense that if in fact this woman and her child are victims of an abusive show, they ought not to profit from it? No, why would we expect any of that. Instead, let's make a new show about parents who try and gain wealth and notoriety by placing their kids in bad situations and then complain about what was done to them by others. But if anybody steals this idea, I'm suing. |
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