ABSTRACT

“An academic inquiry of the edit room” describes how in an increasingly commercially driven broadcast landscape, reality television is merging with the traditional documentary form into the new subgenre “factual program.” In the process, television and film editors are faced with ethical challenges in practicing their craft, oscillating between representing facts and reality and following producers’ and broadcasters’ demands for entertainment value and story. This tension fundamentally affects the editor’s relationship with participants and audiences. Without having an ethical code and guidelines to articulate shared standards, editors are rarely empowered to push back against exigency with principle. This chapter will also connect the phenomenon of reality/factual TV programming with the media ecology scholarship and media ecology school of thought. I define some key terms used throughout this chapter, provide a theoretical framework by which I analyse the editors’ responses, and draw out some key themes such as how editors perceive their work, the ethics they deploy, their understandings of the role in society at large, and the importance story plays in exercising their craft. In this introduction, I set the stage for the book’s central question: how do editors of factual programs, both in traditional documentary forms and reality television, address those ethical challenges beyond ad hoc decisions and expedience, and manoeuvre the contentious space between representing the real, based on facts, and building story, as determined by the entertainment marketplaces.