BY ALEXANDRA ISRAEL

In print | Published March 6, 2008

Well, it’s official. Reality television has destroyed another marriage.

According to that gold standard of journalism, the New York Post, the reality show “The Moment of Truth” has cost one of its contestants her marriage. For those of you who don’t know, “The Moment of Truth” is a game show in which contestants are hooked up to a polygraph machine and, in front of family and friends, asked a series of increasingly personal questions. For every answer the polygraph machine says is true, the amount of money the contestant can win goes up, but once an answer is deemed untruthful, the contestant loses all of his or her money.

In the case of Lauren Cleri, her marriage to her husband Frank was broken by her admission that she had sex with another man after marrying Frank, that she was still in love with another boyfriend on her wedding day and that she still believed that the old boyfriend was the right man for her. In a painful twist, this knowledge didn’t even win the couple any money to pay for therapy sessions; when asked if she thought she was a good person, Lauren answered “yes.” The polygraph recorded her answer as a lie, stripping her of all her winnings and leaving her out of the spotlight and with her heartbroken and humiliated husband.

Not surprisingly, “The Moment of Truth” is brought to you by the good people at the FOX network. This misguided exercise in so-called honesty was greenlighted by the same network executives who brought the abhorrent “The Swan” to primetime. If you don’t remember this appalling concept, “The Swan” took a group of unattractive, insecure women, gave them lots of plastic surgery so that they would conform to society’s standards of beauty and then pitted them against each other in a beauty contest during which one, and only one, would be given the title of “Swan.” Fox was also responsible for the much-derided O.J. Simpson special “If I Did It.” The show – which never aired due to protests from the family of victim Nicole Brown Simpson -- featured O.J. describing how he would have killed his wife if, hypothetically, he had committed the murder, all the while maintaining that he was innocent.

Thinking about these shows, and about the producers who approve of the exploitation of normal people in the name of entertainment, makes my blood boil. I can’t, however, place all the blame for this onslaught of bad taste on the people who broadcast them. Some of the blame must be apportioned to the people who, like Lauren Cleri, choose to appear on such a show with full knowledge that their darkest secrets are about to be dragged out into the bright light of the game-show set. The women on “The Swan” chose to risk emotional pain in an attempt to achieve physical perfection; Lauren Cleri chose to risk her marriage for money. The biggest problem with Cleri’s actions are not the consequences for herself, which she must have foreseen going in. Rather, her gravest moral error lay in dragging her husband (who seems to have had faith in her honesty and their marriage) onto national television, where anyone with a TV set could watch his heart break in real time.

Placing some of the blame with the contestants is, in my mind, a legitimate move; however, giving credit where credit is due is not meant to absolve the audiences who watch these shows. Let’s face the facts: without the huge numbers that these shows draw, none of the contestants would be given the chance to hurt themselves or their loved ones on air.

We, the educated, intelligent population of Swarthmore might choose to chalk up the success of “The Moment of Truth” to Nascar-watching, trailer-dwelling hillbillies whose tastes couldn’t be farther from our own. But don’t count out the educated elite when discussing reality television. Once I walked in on my enlightened, liberal, feminist mother watching an episode of “The Swan.” When I, feeling very righteously indignant, asked her what could have possessed her to watch this exercise in degradation, she gave me a reply that taught me a lot about the way the world works: “Because it’s like a train wreck, and as much as I want to look away, I can’t.”

No matter how often we complain about the repulsive foundations of shows like “The Moment of Truth” and “The Swan” (not to mention gems like “Joe Millionaire” and “Temptation Island”), we will keep watching, because the grotesque and bizarre fascinates humanity in a way that high art never will. If we really want to wipe the vast wasteland of television free of dubious enterprises such as these, we need to overcome our fascination with the deformed and damaged. I don’t know if it can be done, but I will still try. You won’t catch me watching “The Moment of Truth,” no matter how much I might want to tune in and watch the flames climb higher.

Alexandra is a first-year. You can reach her at aisrael1@swarthmore.edu.

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