POVERTY PORN HITS the BIG SCREEN

Oldtown News
Vancouver, BC

POVERTY PORN HITS the BIG SCREEN
CTV Should Be Ashamed

I don't know if my readers caught the new locally-based reality show, 4 Real, filmed here in Vancouver, BC, but if you did, I hope you were as concerned over its airing as I was.

The show purports to be about affecting change but I truly question this.

It was sad watching as people living in extreme poverty were filmed at the lowest point in their lives.

While the show slightly masked their faces, I assume to offer a teeny bit of privacy, however, what popped into my mind was that these vulnerable people of the Downtown Eastside were being exploited (filmed) at the saddest point in their tragic lives and even more obscene, without their permission. I doubt any of them, other than a few Portland hotel residents who were featured in the show, provided consent.

All I could think of while watching this reality show was that the show was actually peddling to its viewers, poverty porn. To me this is totally unacceptable and since CTV is a partner of this show, I will be filing an official complaint.

For quite some time now, I've watched as a proliferation of creative types & supposed caring professionals, like the area's rampant drug traffickers, cash in on the misery of the downtrodden, poor and sick citizens living here in Oldtown.

I wonder if the American-born Actress, Eve Mendes, who was brought up to Vancouver, to be featured in the 4 Real show or the show's Creator/host who goes by the name Sol, considered what the poor people might be feeling as they had your cameras rolling and turned on them?

Taking tragedy and turning this tragedy into a commodity and presenting it for a buck isn't educational. In fact, it's awfully exploitative and is best described as the peddling of poverty porn. This poverty porn seems to be the newest industry down here in Oldtown and it must stop.

As one anonymous media friend states, "filming people's lives in this manner is like filming a train wreck and who in their right mind would film and show something that tragic"?

I don't know what makes me angrier. Outsiders who come into my community, without being invited in and turn people's tragedy into money-making enterprises or the indifference which plagues this neighborhood and allows for the creation of the Downtown Eastside killing fields or highly-paid Povertarians who sit in their executive director offices and collect $80,000 salaries complete with generous benefit packages, waiting to collect an Order of Canada or Nobel prize.

I pose this question to Sol and the American-born actress, Eva Mendes. You can both relax though since it's rhetorical.

How much are you making off my people's pain and suffering. Oh wait, I know your answer--that's none of your business.

Jamie Lee Hamilton
tricia_foxx@yahoo.com