The World of Style & Entertainment

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Zoe Saldaña stuns at the SAG Awards in a one-sleeved velvet Saint Laurent gown. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)


(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

This is daring for her. I think she pulls it off. Both she and Keke Palmer wore velvet gowns. The fabric is unforgiving and both women have the shape to pull their gowns off.

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Producer Diana Madison stuns in an off-the-shoulder, draped purple gown. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Properly designed the lining wouldn't cling to the fabric like it does around her legs making the gown look wrinkled. AND IT'S TOO SMALL! The tape holding the girls in place is doing a yeoman's work

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Kerry Washington shimmers at the SAG Awards. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Meh

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Michael Urie is among the men acing their red carpet looks. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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“Abbott Elementary” star Chris Perfetti understands the assignment. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

My daughter and I argued about this look. Fashion-wise it's on point. That said I've seen the look done better.

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The unreality of reality TV: How competition shows influence U.S. politics and shape views about economic inequality
Columbia University’s Eunji Kim: “The behavioral data tells us that most American life is not political — so why don’t we study what people are actually consuming every day, however lowbrow it may seem?”
By Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com April 14, 2025, 2:44 p.m.

It was about five years ago that I first started noticing the name Eunji Kim on some interesting research. Best dissertation, best paper, best article — she seemed to be winning them all. In her (still relatively brief) career, she’s written about everything from the impact of Trump’s most repeated lies on public opinion, how political partisans choose different media at different times, how proximity to a big city affected rural Americans’ views about COVID-19, and whether the media leads the public on perceptions of the economy or the other way around.

But her most interesting work, for me, has focused on an unusual subject for political science: reality TV. Specifically, competition shows — the ones where each season brings together a talented group of real Americans to determine who is this year’s best [singer|chef|dancer|detector of cake from a distance]. Her key insight was that, at a time when Americans are consuming less and less news media, they’re still getting information about public life somewhere — like all the entertainment content they watch on their many screens. Her analysis found, among other things, that people who watch a lot of these reality competition shows are significantly more likely to believe in a rags-to-riches narrative — that economic mobility is available to any hard-working American. That belief — fueled by people like Simon Cowell! — has real knock-on implications for our politics.

So when I saw that Kim, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, had built out that work into her first book — The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy — I wanted to chat. (It’s out on May 6.) We had a wide-ranging conversation about her reality TV research, how non-political YouTubers have political influence, and how Chinese (and American) propaganda fares in Africa. I started by asking to give her elevator-pitch description of the book; here’s a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Kim: The book is about what happened when America stopped making 60 Minutes the most popular show on television. People don’t believe me when I say it, but 60 Minutes was the No. 1 show on TV as recently as the 1990s. [60 Minutes was No. 1 from 1991 to 1994 and in the top 10 for 9 of the decade’s 10 years.] And then America turned into a nation where American Idol was No. 1 — and that’s the 2000s.
The book is about the political consequences of people getting tuned out of news, because they suddenly had many more choices than they used to. They started to get information about the world not through news, but through entertainment media, particularly reality TV shows, which typically carry with them a dominant narrative about the American dream — the rags-to-riches story of upward mobility.

Benton: So what kinds of shows are you talking about, specifically?
Kim: These are shows that have three elements. One, the presence of ordinary people. Two, the show promises some sort of economic benefit to the participants. And three, an emphasis on hard work and struggle in the narrative. So for example, The Bachelor doesn’t fit. It has ordinary people, but the benefit at the end isn’t economic.
Benton: Well, a tax benefit for being married, I suppose.

Kim: And the narrative isn’t as focused on hard work — although I’m sure they all do hard work at the gym to stay looking great.
But I’m talking more about the shows that have, say, a poor waitress from small-town Ohio who has been practicing singing for many years and has stuck with it through thick and thin, and here she is on stage, singing in front of America, living her American dream. There’s sentimental music. There’s a video package that shows the contestant’s struggles — their parents are very sick, maybe, or they lost their home in Hurricane Katrina. Every lemon that life has thrown at you. They talk about those struggles, and the show is the vehicle to turn those struggles into the American dream. This gets repeated across people, across episodes, over and over, and I think it’s really powerful.

Predicting the impact that entertainment TV can have on viewers can be difficult. Like, the same person might watch The West Wing and House of Cards, and those two shows pull our thoughts in very different directions. West Wing is all rainbows and unicorns and politics getting things done and helping people, whereas House of Cards is about corruption in every corner of Washington that could get you killed at any time. Sussing out those differential impacts is very hard. But what was really powerful in the 2000s — particularly the early 2000s — was that so many of the most popular shows on air were reality TV shows that fit this model. It doesn’t matter whether it was Shark Tank or American Idol or The Apprentice or MasterChef — the core narrative is pretty much the same, that anyone who works hard can get ahead and be rewarded.

Benton: It’s interesting, because viewed through a slightly different lens, American Idol and the like are actually about the production of a lot of losers, right? You start off with hundreds or thousands of people, it gets cut down to 30, then 10, then 3, and at the end, there’s one winner and everyone else ends their season by losing. But you’re saying it’s that lesson from the single winner, the last one on stage waving to the cameras, that gets communicated to people.

Kim: Well, even the losers we see are almost portrayed as winners. There’s always the final scene where the person voted off says to camera, “Oh, I’m just so grateful for the opportunity, this has been a wonderful experience, it’s changed my life.” And even if they lose, they don’t lose — they still get a recording deal, or some measure of fame. They still get media exposure and perhaps a shot at something bigger. And the competition structure makes the winner seem even more legitimate — America has voted you the winner. It makes it more merit-based, like a heightened sense of meritocracy.

Benton: And the data you analyzed found that watching these shows had a significant impact on the degree to which people felt the American dream was attainable — basically, that with hard work, anyone can succeed in the United States.

Kim: Yeah. We didn’t find a lot of effects on voting behavior, because as we know, voting behavior in the U.S. is explained by party ID most of the time. But we did find effects on people’s attitudes, because I think entertainment media can be powerful in affecting how people think about more foundational beliefs in American politics.
So questions like: Are the rich deserving of their wealth? Should we do more to help poor people? Is economic mobility viable in this country. On those we found meaningful impacts. For people who were heavy viewers of these shows, who watched five or six of them, the impact on believing in the American dream was comparable to the effect of having immigrant parents — which is a huge impact. That was really shocking to me, personally.

The other most shocking thing to me was the limited effects of your location — where you live. Raj Chetty at Harvard has done work to quantify the measurable effects of intergenerational mobility. There’s lots of research out there that shows people living in some places have a much easier time moving up economically than people in other places. The New York Times published this huge map that showed all the counties that were high mobility and low mobility. So I was curious whether your location impacted how much you believed the rags-to-riches story.

What I found was much greater effects for the reality TV shows and almost no effect for where you live. The reality on the ground where you live has almost no effect on your actual belief — at least according to the data that I’ve been collecting.


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Highbrow vs. lowbrow, news vs. entertainment

Benton: In the book, you compare this phenomenon to an earlier time of great economic inequality, the Gilded Age. Back then, Horatio Alger was writing all these dime novels about poor boys who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps into respectable middle class life — a similarly rags-to-riches dream.

Kim: Yeah — back then, before television, those novels were mainstream entertainment media. And literary critics hated them — they all had the same plot. Why were boys reading these books when there was Shakespeare and Moby Dick? It was too lowbrow, too “popular” at that time. But that’s what people were reading or consuming for entertainment. I think the same goes for contemporary America, where political scientists, or people like you and me and the people we hang out with most of the time, have a tendency to think it’s horrible that people aren’t consuming news all the time to stay on top of the issues of the day; it’s their civic duty to consume news. But literally the first thing you learn in a political science grad program, in your Political Behavior class, is that most people don’t know that much about politics. And people make political decisions, despite having only limited information.
I just found it really intriguing — I didn’t grow up with academic parents, I’m the first in my family to go to college. Who are we to judge someone working five jobs for not keeping up with the news? You don’t have mental or physical energy at the end of the day to know what’s happening at the Supreme Court or the status of some bill in the Senate.

Benton: Exactly. You had something similar happen in the earlier days of the transition from analog to digital in news. Some journalists, used to being part of mass media, had a lot of disdain for anyone who wasn’t buying what they were selling. That we — people like journalists, political scientists, and the like — are hyperconsumers of news doesn’t make us normative. We’re the weirdos.

Kim: This is something I always grapple with in my career. When I started studying the political effects of non-political media, it felt really risky. There were a lot of criticisms when I was writing papers about reality TV shows. A lot of people told me “this is not political science research” and that I’d never get a job in academia. But I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that people aren’t interested in politics most of the time, so other things in their environment must be influencing the political decisions they make.
The other thing that helped is the rise of behavioral data. For a long time, we had to rely on surveys to measure people’s individual news habits — you know, a questionnaire that asks “How often do you watch Fox News? How regularly do you read The New York Times?” And everyone answers, “Oh, I read news all the time, I’m a good citizen.” But with behavioral data, we can see exactly which stories people are clicking on and how much time they spend reading or watching. In 2014, the bestselling book in America was Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this giant 700-page tome of economic theory and data. But if you look at the Kindle data, almost no one actually got past page 20 or so. The behavioral data tells us that most American life is not political — so why don’t we study what people are actually consuming every day, however lowbrow it may seem?

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On cop shows and sports media

Benton: It reminds me a bit about, in roughly the same period you’re studying, you had the rise of prestige TV — The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire. TV critics focused a ton of energy on writing about them, recapping them, because they were incredibly interesting, well-made shows that rewarded the attention. But they were also mostly elite products, consumed by a fraction of the number of people who watch NCIS or the reality shows you’re writing about.

Kim: Yeah, cop shows are another classic example — I’m doing some research on them now. The genre is fascinating because, no matter which one you watch — Chicago P.D., Blue Bloods, NCIS, Law & Order — every episode has basically the same narrative. The criminals get caught in 40 minutes. The cops are extremely effective, and they’re all heroes. If there is some violence, it’s done for the greater good. And maybe there are some bad apples here and there, but the good cops always catch them and filter them out. That’s the narrative about the cops that people are regularly exposed to.
And the people who watch those shows, if you look at the audience demographics, are mostly older, white, and living in a rural or suburban area. Living in New York City, I see NYPD every day. The understanding I have about NYPD isn’t just a function of my media consumption. It’s also the literal cops on the street that I see every day. But when you’re not seeing the police much in your life, the only way you get to know about them is through media. Entertainment media becomes the primary information source.

Think back to 2020, the year of George Floyd, when there was so much news coverage about police brutality. But if you look at the Nielsen ratings for that year, three out of top 10 TV shows were cop shows. Again, I think that’s a prime example where the news media and entertainment media are offering very different narratives, and most people spend a lot more time consuming entertainment media.

Benton: Do you have a working theory for why the genre of competition shows you’re writing about boomed so much in the 2000s?

Kim: I think it’s mostly money. As the audience gets more fragmented, there are more and more TV shows, meaning there’s less budget for each individual TV show. As a producer, you have an incentive to optimize your budget. And one way to make really cheap TV is a reality show. You don’t need to find expensive actors. There are plenty of people who are very eager to be on your show. And I think Survivor and American Idol led producers to think, “Oh, this is what people want. And it’s cheap. So we should be producing more of it.”
The popularity of these shows has declined a bit since this boom, as people’s media choices have grown even more. Right now, I’m really interested in short-form entertainment — TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. When you’re watching NCIS, you’re immersed in a narrative for 40 minutes. There’s a plot, there are characters you’ve probably come to know over a period of time. Same for many reality TV shows, too. But now we’re talking about entertainment media under 30 seconds — is there a narrative? There’s a micro-narrative. I think we haven’t really thought through what that means for, say, narrative persuasion. I think there’s a lot of room for research in that area.

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Benton: Yeah, I was wondering, reading the book, how this sort of research would apply to YouTubers today. That also seems like a space where there are some very defined genres, very defined narratives, often tied to consumer consumption. And I’d bet the impact those narratives have on how viewers think about subjects could be significant.

Kim: Actually, one of my new studies is a huge field experiment throughout the 2024 election season. We recruited around 4,000 young Americans and incentivized them to follow social media creators on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram for five months. One group was encouraged to follow very political influencers — like, people who talk about politics all the time. The second group was incentivized to follow people who only occasionally talk about politics. They normally talk about cooking, or whatever, but maybe once a month, when they’re cooking, they suddenly say, “By the way, guys, have you guys heard about this housing crisis going on in the Bay Area?”
Our opening question was: Which one is more powerful in persuading people? The ones who talk about politics all day every day, or the ones who mostly talk about other things you care about, cooking or dancing or singing, and then they occasionally bring in politics? Which one’s more effective and more persuasive? The preliminary finding is that the two groups were equally effective — which is really interesting.

Benton: Well, equally effective as channels, but not equally effective in terms of time spent persuading about politics, right? The first group spent 100% of their time talking politics, the second group spent like 5%, but they had the same effect.

Kim: Exactly. I think that has implications for the strategies that political groups like the RNC and DNC use going forward.

Benton: It also fits in with what Donald Trump did during the election, doing all these appearances on bro podcasts and YouTube shows that barely ever mention politics, reaching all these underactivated young men.
Kim: Yeah. The audience is gamers or whatever, and politics gets inserted into the spaces they know. They’re predominantly apolitical people, but they have huge audiences that connect with them. And the fact that they’re only talking about politics occasionally undoubtedly makes the impact of that occasional time much greater. Given all we see about declining trust in traditional political figures — politicians, elites, journalists — maybe people turn to the creators they watch every day, the ones they have a parasocial relationship with.

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An American phenomenon

Benton: Have you or anyone else found similar effects in other countries? Did, say, European countries have a competition show boom around the same time? Is the impact on people’s beliefs a uniquely American phenomenon?

Kim: These shows are everywhere. There’s America’s Got Talent, but there’s also France’s Got Talent, Korea’s Got Talent, Japan’s Got Talent, and so on. But I do think the effects are uniquely American for two different reasons. First, if you look at the amount of TV that each country watches, Americans are exceptional. We’re No. 1. We just watch a lot.

Benton: I’m swelling up with pride here.

Kim: The other reason, I think, is because most of these TV shows are reinforcing our belief in American dream, the baseline belief people have in economic mobility is very important. In my survey, there was a small group of people who described themselves as extremely pessimistic about the American dream to begin with. And when I randomly exposed them to watch an American Idol or a Shark Tank, it backfired. They believed in the American dream even less.

Benton: Why was that?

Kim: I think if you’re already pessimistic, watching this rags-to-riches TV show might make you even more disillusioned — thinking “This is all a lie.” I think that’s a visceral reaction some people have. But it’s a very small subset of the sample in America. Most people here have a very optimistic belief in the American dream to begin with, and that’s why these TV shows are reinforcing their attitudes. In other countries, they don’t have that high level of belief in economic mobility to begin with. The TV shows don’t have the same effect because the baseline is different.

The news/entertainment mix

Benton: Journalists sometimes forget that, even in the good old days of the newspaper, hard news about politics and government was only a small fraction of the entire package. Half of it was ads, and then you have the sports section, the movie reviews, the comics, the gardening column — just because the front page had a story about the mayor didn’t mean everybody read it, or that it was the reason they bought the paper.
Kim: Yeah, and now you have The New York Times seeing all this growth in subscribers from things like Wordle and recipes. One of my new interests is gaming. I’m really curious to understand what’s happening to young men in America, given the rising partisan gender gap. In terms of entertainment media, I think the single most popular form of entertainment media for them is games, which extends out into Twitch streams and gaming chats. I don’t know if you happen to have a son…
Benton: I do, and I check his YouTube watch history every day — just to confirm it’s still Minecraft videos and he’s not getting red-pilled.

Kim: Yeah‚ I’m curious about what type of messages about women or race they’re being exposed to, explicitly or implicitly. That’s my new research area. I’m trying to download many, many Twitch videos and transcribe them to see whether any particular themes emerge about, I don’t know, should women be able or not to play games, or work, or be a professor or whatever. That media culture is really fascinating to me, given the global emergence of the partisan gender gap. And it coincides with the rise of multiplayer games in the 2010s. I’m curious to see whether that has any political and health consequences on young men. That’s my very new project.

Benton: Have you ever looked at sports media consumption? That’s another genre that comes with built-in narratives — the struggle for greatness, triumph over adversity, and all the rest.

Kim: I’m going to make a confession. So many people have told me I should be studying sports. And that’s one thing that I have zero knowledge about. I watch reality TV shows, I play games. I do all the other things I study. But sports, I just leave that to somebody else. I don’t speak that language.

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News is not a hobby for many

Benton: So, as Markus Prior has written, the story of increasing media choice has been that fewer and fewer people choose news. Its share of content consumption drops as people’s options grow. Is there anything you can think of that could lead to news ever regaining any of that mindshare? I mean, the Times does this with Wordle and so on — it doesn’t reclaim that attention for news per se, but for a news company, and I’m sure there’s a knock-on effect that’s useful to news.

Kim: I’m going to give you one depressing answer and one potentially more hopeful answer. The depressing answer is that the one time in recent history when news consumption really increased sharply was the pandemic. What the pandemic happened, it was the first time in many years that consumption of local news actually increased. People didn’t want to die, and in order to survive, you wanted to know the infection rate in your town, what’s closed down, what restrictions are in place. So consumption for local news increased. I think that underscores the importance of journalism in times of crisis. Entertainment media can’t offer that. That’s the depressing answer, since we don’t want a huge crisis, but when we have one, people do watch news.

Benton: Sort of like the Trump bump that a lot of news organizations saw in 2017.

Kim: Yeah. But the other is — I think a lot about the role of early education. People don’t read books or news like they used to. We’re losing that reading muscle because of all our TikToks and the dopamine-inducing media content we consume every day. I think we have to do our best to protect the next generation so they have a developed reading brain to process information. So they have some control over what they watch or how they think about it when they grow up.
I spent like yesterday talking to students in my American public opinion class about…what do we do now? Is there anything that we can do as educators, as teachers, or anything that higher education institutions can do to slow down the misinformation or all these challenges we’re having? And a lot of people agreed on the importance of early education — which, of course, also comes with many other challenges around public policy.

But yeah, reading — I think a lot about reading. One of my weird hobbies is that I pay a lot of attention to what people are doing on the subway with their phones. I’m always curious what they’re doing with their phone.

Benton: That’s a little creepy.

Kim: I don’t, like, look at them up close. But from a normal distance, you can see whether they’re watching something or reading something or playing something. In my entire last year of observation, I’ve only seen two people reading news. Two, out of all the people I’ve seen on all the subway rides I’ve taken.
It’s a small number, but it’s consistent with the behavioral data that we see. It’s a very small subset. Most people are texting, watching YouTube videos, scrolling Instagram, looking through their photos, playing a game — occasionally, reading a book. But that’s also rare. I always tell my students: Go out and look at what people actually do. Think about the questions you can answer based on real-world observations, not ivory tower expectations or what you read from a pundit in the Times. Talk to real people.

I always ask my Uber driver to guess how many people in America regularly watch Fox News. You can see I’m a very annoying Uber passenger.

Benton: And what numbers do people give you?

Kim: 50% of America. They think half of Americans are Republicans, and they all watch Fox News. [In Q1 2025, Fox News averaged 3 million viewers a night in primetime, less than 1% of America’s population. In “the demo” — people aged 25-54 — it averaged only 361,000 a night.]
The partisan media effects are very interesting. If only 3 million people are regularly watching Fox News — but if most people think that half the country is — that perception has huge consequences on polarization and how we think about the other. I think that’s where the news media effects get amplified — not because a lot of people are watching, but because it changes how we think about what others are up to, or what others are doing.

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The impact of The Apprentice

Benton: Let me circle back a bit. You said that the biggest impact you found in your research was in attitude change, as opposed to voting behavior change. But I also know you had that paper about The Apprentice that found people watching the show had a meaningful impact on Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican primary. What was different there?
[From the paper’s abstract: “Using an array of data — content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers — we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary.”]

Kim: That paper was tricky, because there was not one ideal data source that I could rely on. It was a mix of a bunch of different data sources collected in one place to figure out whether there was a compelling story there — polls, transcripts data, Twitter data. I was looking at people back in 2004, when The Apprentice first aired and was very popular. At the time, we didn’t have that many TV choices. A lot of people used to stay on one channel — meaning that if you watched Seinfeld, you watched whatever NBC show came on after Seinfeld. I was looking at the ratings for the very popular TV shows that aired right before The Apprentice — Joey and Will & Grace, depending on the season. I was looking at the proportion of people who watched the 8 p.m. show and then stayed to watch the 9 p.m. show. I was basically quantifying the effects of people who were not selecting to watch The Apprentice, but who happened to watch The Apprentice because they were watching the show before it.
One thing that I found really, really convincing about the analysis, that made me more confident about the result, is that I didn’t find any similar effects for any other Republican primary candidates in any other elections. And I didn’t find the same effects in the general election, where party ID was the big factor, along with whether you hate Trump or Hillary. The fact that I didn’t see effects in the general made me more confident that the effects in the primary were real. You’ve got 10-plus candidates up on a debate stage, you don’t know who these people are, and name recognition matters a lot in a primary.

Who’s most vulnerable to propaganda?

Benton: Finally, I wanted to ask you about a paper of yours that hasn’t been published yet, on Chinese and American propaganda in Africa. I was really struck by the finding: that “propaganda’s effects are especially large for those who would ordinarily not choose to watch it.”

Kim: So the interesting context for that paper is that, in political science and other fields, we have tons of papers built around doing experiments — meaning we randomly assign some people to a condition, other people to nothing, and we try to measure if the condition had an impact on whatever we’re studying. Like, we randomly tell people to deactivate Facebook for a month, or watch Fox News for a month, or whatever.
And one of the biggest problems in that approach — and I say this as a person who runs experiments, too — is that, in the real world, no one watches TV because researchers tell them to. That’s not real life. Many of the papers we see in our field on, say, the effects of watching local news or Fox News or whatever are based on these experimental methods. And that experimental method of forced exposure is the direct opposite of the actual media environment right now, which is defined by choice. We choose what to watch, what to read. But the primary method we use in social science is to not give people any choice.

The paper you’re talking about is an attempt to try out a different methodology that we think might reflect the real world better — to both force them to watch and to give people the choice to watch, and then compare the effects.

[The paper in question asked people in five African nations — Botswana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia — to watch some mix of Chinese-produced videos about the wonders of China’s economic system, American-produced videos about the wonders of the U.S. system, and nature videos, which served as the control. Some had no say in which videos they got to watch; some were allowed to say whether they wanted to see the China, U.S., or nature videos. The results? “Propaganda’s effects are especially large for those who would ordinarily not choose to watch it” — meaning the people who didn’t want to watch pro-China or pro-U.S. videos were more influenced by those videos than those who did.]

Our finding was the effects were much more pronounced on the people who were not likely to choose the content if we give them a choice. That raises a whole lot of questions, and I think it merits a little bit more skepticism in how should we think about many of those papers using experiments. In real life, if no one’s watching it or being exposed, whatever we’re estimating is just a counterfactual.

Benton: That’s interesting. A metaphor might be that seeing Fox News could have a bigger impact on someone who sees it on in a public space — like at a sports bar or at the airport — than on people who choose to seek Fox News out.

Kim: Yeah. For instance, I’m not a fan of broccoli. If someone forced me to eat broccoli, I’m sure it would have a big effect on me, because I never eat broccoli. I’m not used to it, so the new stimuli would impact me more. But in real life, I’d never choose broccoli.

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https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/04/the-u ... nequality/

[ponchi101]

Worthy of Neil Postman. Txs

[Oploskoffie]

Thank you very much for that, ti-amie. Will try to read more of her work for sure.