Mediated voyeurism and the guilty pleasure of consuming reality television

Abstract

Media commentators have frequently argued that the rising popularity of reality programs stems from the show's ability to accommodate television viewers' voyeuristic needs. However, extant literature provides inconsistent evidence regarding the relationship between voyeurism and consumption of reality programs. This article expands on work by Baruh (2009) showing that voyeurism and social comparison tendency were positively associated with consumption of reality programming. After controlling for viewer demographics and hours of television viewing, multivariate analyses in this article indicate that there exists a positive relationship between voyeurism and consumption of reality programming, whereas social comparison tendency is no longer significantly related to reality programming consumption. Furthermore, bootstrap analysis indicates that the relationship between voyeurism and consumption of reality programs is mediated by a tendency to engage in voyeuristic uses of television. In contrast to consumption of reality programming, analyses indicate that trait voyeurism is negatively related to the consumption of fictional programming. On the other hand, social comparison and voyeuristic uses of television were found to be positively related to fictional programming consumption.