I’ve written a lot about this season of Big Brother and its problems, and a few weeks ago, at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, I asked CBS executives about it: specifically, about the editing of their reality TV shows and the representation of people of color.
You can read our entire exchange here, along with follow-up questions by Eric Deggans, NPR’s TV critic.
You might also be interested to read what happened when another outlet covered that press conference and my questions and Eric’s questions. In short: They unnecessarily pointed out Eric’s blackness while ignoring my whiteness in the story.
All of this illustrates why even a dumb summer reality show matters: because these little examples of unintentional racism or implicit stereotyping pile up and become what people think of as the norm.
Here are Salon‘s TV critic Melanie McFarland’s tweets about the aftermath:
