Reality tv has its structural faults, but damning the entirety of the genre for the Fiore/Jenkins is kind of overboard, kind of like saying that comics are infantile and misogynistic power fantasies. While that charge has an element of truth, it wipes away everything else the genre/medium has to offer, and in the case of reality tv, you need to know that the term "reality tv" applies to an extremely wide variety of subgenres now, and you can pretty easily cleave them all into trashy/predatorily voyeuristic and, well, not classy per se, but something that doesn't necessitate gaping psychoses. In fact, the former category typically draws far smaller audiences and is relegated to cable (or else FOX) -- their screening processes are more lax either by financial necessity or because they're aiming at a certain trashiness -- while the network shows tend to have more rigorous screening. (EW has an article on this, can't seem to find it online though.) [Ed Note: I also looked for a link to this piece, but it's missing, or EW hasn't put it up on their website yet. Get on that, guys.]
What's more, the predatory shows have a built-in viewer ceiling, as you can't sustain a large audience over time when you only offer them the dregs of humanity. In fact, the reason why the genre/super-genre has lasted is because of certain internal standards, which will give you some innocuous trashy hilarity, or stuff that approaches traditional notions of art.
I'm not going to lie, I still have a lot of difficulty with watching reality television, stemming in large part by viscerally intense reactions to watching people embarrass themselves. Kat and I have been talking some recently about the changing definitions of, and avenues into, fame, and that's something we have yet to fully reckon with as a society. I have a hard time watching people humiliate and damage themselves simply because they want a shot at being very widely recognized, but I also don't think I have a right to tell them not to want that, or that they don't have a right to pursue it.
But given that, I think there need to be some regulations: an adequate standard for background checks, and sufficient staffing to meet that standard; guaranteed access to psychiatric
medication or care that people were prescribed before starting to participate in a show, or that they were prescribed by an independent practitioner during a show's production; rules governing how producers provide alcohol and treat its consumption. If folks have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. I don't think the gold-standard, competition-oriented reality shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Project Runway, America's Got Talent, etc., would suffer under a code like that. Susan Boyle might have done a lot better if she'd received proper psychiatric treatment during her reality run, and the show might have been better for it. We regulate workplaces in the United States, and there's no reason reality television sets should be exempt from appropriate and relevant regulation (and for the record and to be perfectly clear, I don't think Leee is arguing against regulation).
And if a code like that killed off some of the lowest-common-denominator show Leee singles out in his last paragraph...well, I'm not sure I'd regret that (and as he notes in his second comment, he wouldn't either). Law & Order's always playing somewhere, and we can take our dregs of humanity stylized and fictionalized, rather than captured from a million angles on implanted cameras.