The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy

American Idol and Shark Tank are significantly influencing how Americans think about the economy, according to this eye-opening debut study from Columbia University political scientist Kim. To get to the bottom of why crushing income inequality hasn’t significantly deterred Americans’ faith in upward mobility, Kim drove “a big box truck equipped with a media lab” to New Jersey and Pennsylvania farmers markets to test her hypothesis that reality TV had something to do with it. Piling volunteers into the truck to watch clips from a slew of popular reality TV shows—from MasterChef to The Great Christmas Light Fight—featuring “everyday Americans” making “visible financial gains” as a reward for high-quality work, and following up the viewings with surveys, she found that “watching a rags-to-riches program, even just for 5 minutes” made people “6.8 percentage points more likely to believe in the prospect of upward economic mobility.” Kim astutely compares reality shows’ persuasive power to that of Gilded Age dime novels, notably Horatio Alger’s “tales of personal triumph,” in which protagonists rose “from obscurity to prosperity” by doing good deeds. She also takes aim at her field, asserting that political science’s “echo chambers of scholarly assumptions” have led it to ignore how political belief is affected by supposedly “apolitical” media. The result is a troubling assessment of propaganda in pop culture. (May)