Contexts

Through in-depth projects that explore social issues, Sebastiao Salgado’s photography parallels the field of sociology. As the winner of the American Sociological Association’s 2010 Award for Excellence in Reporting Social Issues, Salgado shares his thoughts on social analysis and photography.

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TV shows have piqued public interest in forensic work and how crime is done. But the attention hasn’t necessarily been good for those who work with corpses in real life. Medical examiners’ daily work remains mundane, misunderstood, and underappreciated.

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Despite being marketed as the first black princess cartoon, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog fails to challenge gender and race stereotypes. Charania and Simonds provide detailed commentary and illuminate how the film merely reworks and disguises old, familiar themes.

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High profile tales of marital infidelity may give the impression that cheating is on the rise. Young people do have more flexible views on infidelity than older cohorts, but survey data reveals that attitudes toward infidelity have become more negative and rates of cheating have remained stable.

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Studs Terkel’s knack for interviewing led to a prodigious career shaping America’s oral histories on topics ranging from work, race, and social change. His legacy provides lessons in how to blend sociology and social critique.

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Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle on Studs Terkel

Check out a discussion on the Contexts Podcast of Studs Terkel's legacy by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, collaborators on a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working.

A little over a decade ago, ASA past-president Herbert Gans embarked upon an intriguing and, to our knowledge, unprecedented study of bestselling books written by professional sociologists.

On the heels of his presidential campaign to make sociology more visible and influential to the lay public, Gans believed such a study would help us better understand the general reading public’s interest in and understanding of sociology’s knowledge, information, and insights.

The main results of Gans’s study, published as a featured essay in our sister publication Contemporary Sociology, weren’t particularly encouraging. He found that only one book (David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s classic The Lonely Crowd) had sold over the benchmark of a million copies and only two (Tally’s Corner by Elliot Liebow and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater) had sold over 500,000. In the 50-year period Gans examined, only 53 sociology books had sold over 50,000 copies. Gans concluded that sociology had “a long way to go before it makes a significant impression on the general public” and, if that was the goal, trying to write bestsellers was probably not the way to make that impression.

But Gans’s study had a silver lining: it provided clues as to where and how sociology was best suited to contribute to the public. Books about inequality (like William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim) and about family, children, and relationships (like Lillian Rubin’s Worlds of Pain) topped the list. There were also several big, synthetic analyses of American society—for example, Robert Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart or Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man—whose social impact was easily matched by their sales numbers.

Going further, Gans pointed out several stylistic characteristics shared by the books. Top sellers did not use jargon, tended to have a strong narrative or storyline (rather than simply reporting research results), and took an interdisciplinary approach.

Recent changes in the publishing industry and the popularity of books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers inspired us—the Contexts graduate student editorial board—to update Gans’s seminal study. Tackling this challenge, we gathered data from the publishing industry’s largest provider of retail sales information to take a new look at recent bestsellers written by sociologists and bought by the public.

Although we couldn’t directly replicate Gans’s study (for reasons discussed below), our results echo some of his earlier findings and conclusions. However, they also reveal some shifts in the landscape. Books about crime, media, and race do remarkably well, but we found very few broad, societal-level interpretations of American life. Using our new data, we speculate on some findings and expand on Gans’s concluding reflections about how best to collaborate with others to bring sociology to broader audiences.

Searching for Bestsellers

Setting out to replicate Gans’s study, or even to gather comparable data, was no small task. First, our method for gathering sales data diverged from Gans’s. In his study, Gans gathered sales figures through a questionnaire mailed to authors and presses. From this self-reported data, he grouped books based on numerical intervals of total books sold (for example, The Lonely Crowd sold over 1 million copies, whereas Howard Becker’s Outsiders and Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans sold between 100,000 and 150,000).

Initially, we tried to replicate Gans’s approach by requesting sales numbers from more than 70 academic and popular presses that publish sociology texts. Unfortunately, while some presses generously shared their sales information, others did not respond or were unable to provide actual sales numbers. Plus, even if all of the presses had responded, self-reported data is notoriously problematic. As more than one publisher told us, authors and presses may inflate their own sales numbers or keep them secret for strategic reasons. (Indeed, Gans ran into similar roadblocks in a recent attempt to replicate his own study.)

Further, we chose to focus specifically on retail sales and exclude institutional sales and course adoptions (as well as introductory textbooks). Using retail sales alone captures the public’s interest in sociology, while course adoptions and bulk academic sales to institutions are more likely to reflect only what sells well in academic circles. Because Gans was unable to distinguish between retail and institutional sales in his study, our data comes closer to his original intent. That said, our list likely overlooks books primarily assigned in courses or purchased by libraries (though this has declined dramatically since Gans’s study). The result is that our two lists cannot be directly compared.

To get our numbers, then, we had to find other sources for more accurate sales information. We combed through ten years of New York Times Non-Fiction Bestsellers lists, but did not find much. Books by sociologists simply do not make the list (and the list itself is, as one reviewer pointed out, determined by editors and not sales). Then we tracked Amazon sales rankings for fifty or so popular sociology titles, but learned that Amazon captures, at best, fourteen percent of the consumer market and industry insiders suspect the rankings themselves are skewed for marketing purposes.

Finally then, because we were primarily interested in retail sales, we contacted BookScan. The largest national provider of retail book sales data, BookScan was launched in 2001 by Nielsen, the television tracking company that has been measuring ratings for more than fifty years. To track books instead of broadcasts, BookScan collects and tallies sales data from major book retailers like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon. The company claims to capture 75 percent of the retail book market in the United States, and, according to an article by Daniel Gross on Slate, it’s become the primary source of reliable sales information for authors, editors, and agents in an otherwise mysterious, shrouded market.

For our study, BookScan generously provided annual sales data for the top 10,000 social science books sold in each year from 2004 to 2008. We selected the top ten to fifteen books sold each year that were written by authors with either an advanced degree in sociology or experience teaching in sociology departments. We then supplemented the list by including all sociologists who had cumulative sales in the top 1,000 social science books in the five-year period.

Assembling our numbers, we focused only on the most recent bestsellers (in particular, books published since Gans’s study), omitting any bestselling books originally published before 1995 (for example, classics such as W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, both of which had high sales numbers in our data). So, since we only had data since 2004, and because retail sales tend to drop significantly just a few years after publication, our findings likely favor newer books.

Top 37 Bestselling Books

Our search yielded a list of 37 bestsellers in sociology, reported in grouped numerical intervals. (Though our list resembles Gans’s, we warn again that it should not be compared directly due to different data sources, methods, and time periods.) Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear was the only book to sell over 50,000 copies in the five-year period. Michael Eric Dyson, who does not have an advanced degree in sociology but is currently a sociology professor at Georgetown, has five books on the list (his Is Bill Cosby Right? being his single biggest seller on the list), and Dalton Conley, Joel Best, and Peter Phillips each have two. Other top-selling authors include Annette Lareau, Elijah Anderson, Sean Patrick Griffin, and Louise Brown.

The books on our list sold an average of 10,100 copies between 2004 and 2008, with the strongest years being those just after initial publication. Although we don’t have the data to provide much insight into why some books sold better than others, we do offer some speculations. For example, some books, such as Culture of Fear, probably benefited from social and political events unrelated to the book itself. In Glassner’s case, for instance, his book was featured in the 2002 Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine. The popularity of some methods books, such as Robert Emerson et al.’s Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes and Michael Patton’s Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, on the other hand, may stem in part from the rise of “cultural studies” and the desire for methods texts in these areas. As sociologist Michael Schudson has noted, gender studies, African American studies, and media studies all dwarf sociology sections in university and retail bookstores.

As mentioned above, our list is likely biased against older books. Yet, many books published before 2004 have continued to sell well in recent years, comprising about a third of our list. Sales for books like Anderson’s Code of the Street, Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, and Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, as well as methods books like Emerson et al.’s Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, all of which were published before 2004, increased sales for at least three of the years in our study. More generally, though, sales for the majority of the books on our list declined after the first year of publication. This appears to be a trend across the social sciences—of the top 1,000 social science books in our dataset, two-thirds experienced drops in sales after their first year on the shelves—and for non-fiction as a category. According to a Publisher’s Weekly report last year, fewer than ten non-fiction books sold more than one million copies in 2008.

Despite these cautions, some sociology does sell extraordinarily well, even if professional sociologists aren’t the ones writing it. Physiologist Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, which combines sociology with geography, history, and ecology, consistently ranked as a top performer in the social sciences with annual sales of more than 200,000, and journalist Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma sold more than 250,000 copies in 2008 alone. In contrast, the top-selling book written by a sociologist in 2008 sold fewer than 10,000. Books from other disciplines were closer to the books on our list. Political scientist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone sold more than 50,000 copies across the five years, and Race Matters by Cornel West, the esteemed African American studies professor and public intellectual, sold more than 40,000. We also suspect Gladwell’s Blink and Outliers (which was reviewed by Joel Best in Contexts last year) to be top-sellers, as well as Naomi Klein’s No Logo or psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, but their books do not appear in our BookScan data.

Interestingly, we note that commercial presses still dominate the publishing of sociology books, even in light of declining sales. Of the 37 books on our list, commercial presses like Perseus, Random House, Sage, and Macmillan, as well as some smaller independent and non-profit presses, publish three-quarters of them. Gans had speculated that the interest of commercial presses in sociology books would diminish over time due to their low returns. But, as one academic publisher reminded us, some academic and non-profit presses like Oxford actually outperform many commercial presses. Indeed, Oxford, along with California, Chicago, and Harvard, published the remaining quarter of the books on our list.

Anatomy of a Bestseller

So, what helps a sociology book become a bestseller? Reviewing the books on our list, we see clear commonalities in the style of writing, topics engaged, and overall scope that may speak to the particular retail markets in which sociology texts sell well. While a content analysis of these books can’t give a definitive formula for generating a bestseller, we’ve distilled some common characteristics that likely resonate with the broader book market.

Writing. Gans found bestselling books to be generally jargon-free, narrative-driven, and interdisciplinary in the sense they were accessible across academic disciplines. Most of our books seem to fit this description. For example, The Culture of Fear was applauded by top media outlets in part because of its combination of sociological analysis with an engaging journalistic writing style.

The books on our list also include clear characters and vivid personalities such as the single mothers and suburban families in Unequal Childhoods and Hassan, the Greenwich Village vendor who appears in the first few pages of Sidewalk. Gans speculated that a jargon-free writing style and memorable narratives helped authors build loyal readerships, which facilitated the success of their future books. The repeat appearances of Dyson, Conley, and Best on our list certainly lend support to this idea.

Not surprisingly, a number of authors on our list are themselves interdisciplinary. Conley is an adjunct professor of community medicine at Mount Sinai University and the Dean of Social Sciences at New York University, while Dyson has held appointments as a humanities professor in top universities and seminaries and is a frequent contributor to television programs, magazines, and websites.

Topics. While clear writing makes the work comprehensible, not all topics seem to resonate equally with a broader public audience. Gans found sociology was on the cutting edge of the American public’s interest in poverty and racial inequality in the 1960s; books like Tally’s Corner, Blaming the Victim, and Worlds of Pain tapped into the current. Gans also found books that focused on family, children, or friends (such as Lillian Rubin’s books) sold particularly well.

Similarly, we find books about race, ethnicity, and inequality continue to take top spots. In our list, BookScan identifies eight as books about ethnic studies, race relations, and African American studies. Religion and media are also popular subjects. Unlike Gans, who found very few criminology books, we found three. Including Anderson’s Code of the Streets, Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books, and Griffin’s Black Brothers, Inc., would bring our criminology total to at least five. The success of criminology books not only reflects a widespread societal interest in crime, but also the rise of criminology as a subfield within sociology.

Only two books address issues related to children, marriage, or family, and even fewer address politics or social movements. One way to interpret this finding is to suggest that these areas may have dropped off the public’s radar since Gans’s study. Instead, since these subfields clearly remain vibrant in the discipline, we suspect that many readers have turned to other experts in political science and cultural studies, or perhaps television pundits, for insights into these areas. If sociology hopes to make a bigger impact on the public, reclaiming some of these topics might be one place to start.

Scope. We also notice fewer books (though there are some notable exceptions) that claim to offer a “big picture” take on American society and culture writ large in the manner of Lonely Crowd. Sociologists seem to be writing fewer books offering broad commentary on American life, tending instead toward increasing specialization and a focus on difference rather than community. This is certainly the case in the journals. Sociologists are now producing work as experts on fine-grained topics like the role of media in producing unfounded fear, the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina, the red-light districts of Pakistan, or an African American crime syndicate in Detroit.

This is not to say that all books are so specialized, and we are not sure whether increased specialization is to the benefit or detriment of sociology’s public voice. In fact, fewer “big” books on our list may simply reflect a trend in the book market writ large. According to one publisher we spoke to, “There has been a fragmenting of all markets. That’s why people like Oprah are so important—there are so few single channels that attract so wide a population. There aren’t the chances that one book like Habits of the Heart would sell as well today. It’s much less likely for it to happen today than it was 20 years ago, and that’s part of the larger, general fragmentation that is occurring throughout all of society.” However, a subtle shift toward specialization indicated by our list does signal that sociologists are unlikely to be the public’s go-to experts for insightful social commentary on a broader scale.

Looking Forward

While our list is by no means definitive or exhaustive (not only because it represents just 75 percent of the retail market), it nonetheless provides a starting point for thinking about where sociology has made (and might make) an impact on public life. Some of the reviewers suggested other methods for collecting data, such as surveying some of the top-selling authors on our list to check for discrepancies in the BookScan data and solicit reflections on why some books sell and others do not. We encourage future studies that combine data from multiple sources, including authors themselves, in order to move toward a more comprehensive bestseller list. We hope our list can be a reference or signpost for these studies, much like Gans’s list was for our own.

If there is an argument resting in the data we have gathered, perhaps it is the same one Gans made over a decade ago—to the extent that sociology hopes to impact public life, writing bestsellers may not be the best way to do so. Of all the books on our list, a small minority sold more than 10,000 copies. On the other hand, books like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun undoubtedly sell better than the “sociology” books on our list, but they share some of the same characteristics, such as style, tone, and subject matter.

Perhaps the incentive structures within academia have changed so that writing bestsellers is no longer an ambition of sociologists (and maybe it never really was). Indeed, one publisher lamented to us that sociologists, perhaps more than other academics he works with, are reluctant to promote their published works with the public and even view the idea of competing in the book marketplace with “hostility.” He went on to say, “If you want to be an author that sells well… you had better be the quintessential salesperson to drive that book’s success.” Authors in all fields and for all types of publications and presses are now expected to act as their own promotion agents, setting up Facebook accounts and hustling at readings and book signings. That convention may deeply unsettle some sociologists.

If the institutional and cultural incentives have changed within sociology, then we might at least expect some of the classics—written at a time when engaging the public was maybe more of a premium—to still be going strong. However, when we checked to see how some of the books on Gans’s list fared in the retail market today, we found mixed evidence that they were still selling. While some titles, such as Habits of the Heart and Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, continue to fare well, most, including Lonely Crowd, sold less than a few hundred copies in five years.

If writing a bestseller is not the best way to reach the public, then writing opinion pieces, magazine articles, or working to get our work covered by journalists might be the next best option. Gans cautioned against giving away too much to journalists, but even Riesman had journalists like William H. Whyte and Anthony Lukas in his midst, and they helped shape sociology for the better. This is not to say that Freakonomics, the product of a curious yet compelling collaboration between an economist and journalist, should be the model for bringing sociology to the public. But it is in our interest to promote and encourage bestsellers that think and read sociologically, whether or not they are written by our colleagues. Of course, much as the books on our list, that idea might be a hard sell.

Recommended Resources

Herbert J. Gans. “Best-Sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study.” Contemporary Sociology (1997), 26: 131-135. A foundational piece for obvious reasons.

Laura J. Miller. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (University of Chicago Press, 2006). An excellent treatment of bookselling and consumption in America.

Publisher’s Weekly (March 23, 2009), “Facts and Figures on Parade.” Annual issue reporting sales figures from the previous year’s shipped-and-billed numbers as confidentially reported by publishers. Available online.

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A little over a year ago, our Minnesota graduate student editorial board began discussing a project to better understand and promote Contexts’ mission of bringing sociology to broader public audiences and influence. Among their formative readings was Herbert Gans’s generative 1990s study of books by sociologists that had sold well and been distributed widely—his so-called bestsellers study.

Our board was intrigued by this piece and, with Professor Gans’s blessing, began exploring options for updating and reassessing his findings. After several fits and starts, they found a well-suited data source and were off and running on the piece that appears in this issue. All of the students on last year’s board contributed to the project, but those listed as authors took the lead in seeing the paper through the external review-and-revision process to fruition on the printed page. It is, we believe, a fascinating (if only partial) glimpse into what the general reading public looks to when it looks to sociology and what kinds of sociological research and writing circulates best. (Hint: while subject matter may change, accessible writing never goes out of style.) We thank these students and Gans, who graciously agreed to write a commentary for our back page, “One Thing I Know” column.

While formulating this project, we were often reminded that making sociology public is not the exclusive purview of professional sociologists. In fact, we may not be the ones who do it best. Think of writers like Malcolm Gladwell, Barbara Ehrenreich, or David Brooks. They regularly engage sociological topics and, perhaps more importantly, write from sociological orientations. Though they aren’t professional sociologists, one can’t help but see their sociological insight and analysis shining through—whether in calling attention to otherwise unseen trauma and inequity, exhibiting their ethnographic eye for detail and the power of experience, or situating people and problems in broader social context. We don’t need to feel badly about their successes or threatened by them. Rather, we professional sociologists should try to learn from their expertise and maybe even try to work with them more closely.

This insight became something of an organizing theme for much of this issue, anchored, in many respects, by a retrospective on Studs Terkel, one of the great non-academic public sociologists of all time. The piece is illustrated with art from a new book by one of the unsung iconoclasts in this camp—Harvey Pekar, he of American Splendor fame. And then there is our exchange with rock critic Chuck Klosterman. Though distilled from an extended conversation with our culture editor Dave Grazian (complete podcasts are available), it’s a wonderful example of the potential of dialog between sociologists and sociologically inclined writers.

Putting a sociological perspective on the world around us and the everyday, we heard the word “quotidian” more than a few times in assembling this set of features and reviews. Along with the everyday, though, sociology brings needed perspective to extraordinary issues and events, such as the murder of an abortion provider understood within a larger trend in abortion access. We hope that this issue of Contexts underscores once again the power and importance of well-presented sociological information and analysis no matter what or whom the source.

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Writer and pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman talks with Contexts culture editor David Grazian about authenticity, celebrity, and the limits of interviewing as a means to understand others.

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Listen to the Interview

Listen to the complete conversation between Chuck Klosterman and David Grazian on the Contexts Podcast!

• Part one contains a discussion of music, authenticity and identity.
• Part two turns to celebrity, irony and reality television.

Reality Television

In addition to listening to Klosterman and Grazian discuss reality tv, be sure to check out Grazian's culture review in this issue on the subject: Neoliberalism and the Realities of Reality Television.

Reality TV has brought new opportunities for ever greater numbers of people to grab and extend their fifteen minutes of fame. The landscape of reality television has expanded since its advent in the early 1990s. From dating shows to makeover programs, talent contests to reality sitcoms (and celebrity versions of all of them), there are now multiple reality genres available to those seeking attention and notoriety. Everyone, often despite little talent, can market themselves and their identities to a wider audience. But what happens when your fifteen minutes of fame aren’t of your own choosing? More precisely, what if your parents choose to make you famous?

Kids and reality TV are a growing—and volatile—mix. Throughout 2009 it was difficult to escape news coverage of “reality families” like Jon and Kate Gosselin and their brood of eight, “Octomom” and her dozen-plus, and the almost universally reviled Heene family who convinced their children to lie about a balloon stunt designed to help them secure their own reality show. But the media don’t often talk about children and reality TV as a genre—or the economic, legal, and psychological consequences of the pairing.

One of the first examples of kid-centered reality TV was Bug Juice, shown on the Disney Channel in the late 1990s. The series, which aired for two seasons, followed a group of adolescents at sleep-away summer camp, documenting their friendships, crushes, and heartbreaks. The show aroused little to no media attention, presumably because of the positive gloss of the Mouse Network.

Fast forward about ten years to CBS’s Kid Nation, which definitely produced an outcry. Kid Nation focused on 40 children, ranging from eight to fifteen years old, who were thrown together in a deserted town in New Mexico and told to create their own society, without “adults.” Media watchers railed about the safety and education of the children, given that the show was filmed during the school year and some of the kids were injured while cooking and working in their “society.” Entertainment insiders, like Paul Peterson of the non-profit A Minor Consideration, an organization focused on protecting young “performers,” highlighted issues of compensation, contractual obligations, and the labor the children contributed to this television show. As most critics pointed out, it was no accident that Tom Forman Productions selected New Mexico as the site of the show, as at the time it had very lax child labor laws, which have since been revised. A second season was called off amid criticism and less-than-stellar ratings.

These issues surrounding the exploitation of children featured on reality television became part of the public discourse in a tragicomic way with the highly publicized reality TV show Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht. In 2007, Figure 8 Films shot a documentary about the Gosselin family—a mom and dad, their twin daughters and their sextuplets (three boys and three girls)—that first aired on the Discovery channel. Subsequent specials were so popular that the cable channel TLC made it into a weekly show that aired for five seasons before being canceled in 2009 amidst family turmoil and concerns about the children’s well-being. Kate’s tantrums and odd hair, Jon’s behavior, the children’s personalities, the freebies the family received (including a tummy tuck and hair plugs), and even the family dogs became tabloid fodder, water-cooler gossip, and dinnertime conversation. TLC had a bona fide hit with one of the highest viewed television shows on cable TV.

The success of Jon & Kate showed how a cheap-to-produce reality show (eight of the ten “stars” weren’t individually compensated) could spawn an entire marketing franchise, complete with adult and children’s books, DVDs, and other products sold with the Gosselins’ names and faces. The family has been so effectively marketed and sold to the public that both Jon and Kate quit full-time employment to focus on branding their family and making as much money as they could. Presumably hoping to replicate their success, TLC developed other reality series featuring kids and their unique families like Little People, Big World, 18 Kids and Counting, and Table for 12.

Enter the Heene family. Richard Heene met his wife Mayumi in a Hollywood acting school. A few years and three sons later they appeared on an ABC reality TV show called Wife Swap—not once, but twice. In 2009, Richard Heene pitched his own family to TLC as the subject of a reality series; he understood how lucrative, both in terms of fame and money, family reality shows had become, especially given the Gosselins’ experience. The now infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax of October 15, 2009, was an ill-conceived attempt to bring the family media attention and increase their chances of landing their own reality show. The youngest participant in the hoax, six-year-old Falcon, let the cat out of the bag on The Larry King Show. Not only will his slip, “You said we did this for the show,” live on through YouTube clips, but so will his appearance on The Today Show the next morning, when he threw up on live television (some speculated out of exhaustion, while others went so far as to suggest his parents had drugged him). For little Falcon, his fifteen minutes of tears and vomit will play out forever on the Internet—all in the service of his parents’ pursuit of fame and money, which instead ended in jail time.

Of course, child performers have long produced outrage and concern. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer explains, in the efforts to eradiate child labor in the United Status during the Progressive Era, child actors presented a particular challenge. Many adults said that these little performers were not actually working since their theatrical experiences were educational and fun. Others, who wished to outlaw all child labor, countered that parents were simply taking advantage of their children and turning them into a business so they could live off of them. The compromise solution to this debate was to allow child actors to continue to work, but with restrictions both in terms of the number of hours worked and the compensation structure. The Coogan Law, passed in 1939, established that 15 percent of all earnings must be kept in a trust for child performers until they turned 18—this after child actor Billy Coogan’s parents left him penniless on his own 18th birthday. These restrictions remain in place today.

However, because of the nature of reality television, children appearing on these shows are not, by law, considered performers or even laborers. This is actually true for almost all those who appear on reality shows, especially programs like Survivor and The Amazing Race, which are officially classified as game shows. One notable exception is American Idol,, where, once contestants reach the Top 12, they become members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (AFTRA) and receive union compensation and protection. But the Coogan law and AFTRA protections do not apply to the little Gosselin children, or the Duggars, the Roloffs, or other kids providing storylines and images which line the pockets of their parents and television executives.

While there have been attempts to introduce Coogan-type legislation federally and in Pennsylvania, where Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht was filmed, they have not been successful (note that Nadya Suleman, aka “Octomom,” does have Coogan accounts for her children, because the as-yet unaired reality show about her family is being filmed in California, which has the strictest Coogan laws). It’s clear that the Gosselin children worked long hours, often under poor conditions; a clip of one of the older Gosselin girls begging for, and being denied, water during a press junket for the series made headlines and became a viral clip. Not surprisingly, given their long work hours, the Gosselin kids often missed school. The media reported that in order to capitalize on the paparazzi attention around Jon and Kate’s marital woes, Figure 8 paid for Kate and the kids to vacation in the Outer Banks, where the children missed many of the last days of the school year. On top of this, while there are trust funds for the children, that money can be accessed by their parents at any time—and, unfortunately, the new house and cars purchased by Jon and Kate suggest that the kids’ college funds may not be as large as they could be. Overall, it is unclear who is protecting the needs and rights of children like the Gosselins when it comes to reality television.

It’s also important to think about how reality TV forces its child stars to perform exaggerated versions of themselves to please their parents and other adults. Given parents’ apparent willingness to allow others to edit and shape their children’s “real” identities for a larger public in pursuit of status and financial benefits—even the greatest child star of all time, Shirley Temple, only ever played fictional characters—how might reality TV participation impact the kids’ on- and off-screen presentations of self? In a sense, parents are taking away their children’s ability to shape how others will see them, both now and in the future. Falcon Heene will probably always have the stigma of being “Balloon Boy” and getting sick on national television. Yet producers seem to have no problem finding parents to sign waivers allowing their children to be on shows like Kid Nation, Bravo’s NYC Prep, or even a VH1 competitive reality show whose title says it all: I Know My Kid’s a Star. It’s also interesting that, for the most part, these reality shows are not packaged for children’s consumption. Instead, they’re largely produced for an adult audience, an audience which, of course, includes the parents themselves.

It appears that 2010 will only extend the reign of children on reality TV. Mark Burnett, the man who created Survivor, developed a game show for Fox featuring kids and their parents called Our Little Genius. The New York Times reported on January 6, 2010, that the show would give kids the chance to “win life-changing money for their families” by answering trivia questions correctly. (The next day, the AP reported that the show had been pulled because producers discovered some improprieties, presumably with parents feeding answers to their kids.) The long-standing NBC series Law & Order has also weighed in on parents’ over-zealousness to use their children to get their own fifteen minutes of fame in an episode entitled “Reality Bites,” which aired in October 2009. The episode featured a husband who killed his wife because she refused to sign the waivers allowing their children to appear on a reality show. The wife’s character had voiced concerns over the kids’ portrayal and how their friends would see them now and in the future—and, of course, suspicion about her murder first fell on an Octomom rip-off who was competing for a reality series on the same network. The timely episode and all of these reality shows raise questions that’ll remain unanswered for years: Will these kids be proud of the fifteen minutes they got at age five? Will they resent their parents for exposing their potty training to a general public? How will this notoriety affect their own views of themselves and how they present themselves to others in public? Let’s just hope that some of the profits that have been earned off of these children’s on-camera performances will be there for therapy, or at least a getaway car, if either proves necessary for the next “big” little reality stars someday.

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Coming Soon

Listen to the Contexts Podcast for an upcoming interview with Hilary Levey!