Freakish Reality Show Star latest to indicate moral decline

Normally I love these stories. Stories of a celebrity who sticks a foot into his or her oversized maw, saying or doing something so completely out of touch with modern reality it makes you wonder if they vacation on Venus. And certainly, we've had our share of racial and anti-semetic slur celebrity stories in the last year or two. This is a bit different - because in this case, the celebrity isn't a celebrity at all. Duane "Dog" Chapman, the mulleted bounty hunter/star of the A&E reality show, Dog the Bounty Hunter recently got in trouble for his own use of the N-Word. (Read the story here.) Without discounting the meanness of this word or it's intention, can we all agree that someone named, "Dog" is not the moral compass of our nation? That we will not be viewing the Dog the Bounty Hunter show so we can better form our opinions on abortion and welfare reform? When Mel Gibson or the guy from Seinfeld says something like this, I can understand how it is news. When real celebrities are caught saying these kinds of things, we can easily create the story that they live in such high towers they are out of touch with what is socially acceptable, and therefore don't know better. I don't understand how this is news, however, since most people only know of Mr. Dog from the half second they see the commercial for his show before they move onto another channel. Though I do suppose one interesting angle on this story is, "If a reality show dufus is caught using the N-word in a private conversation, isn't the real issue how often that word is used in reality?" We would certainly like to think racists like this are rare, and that they only exist in documentaries about racial equality in the 1960s. That this story keeps cropping up every few months forces me to wonder just how bad a problem with race our society has, and how ambivalent reporters are to cover that angle of the story - though they will always jump all over a story like this so willingly.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

View more blog posts from Eric Reid >

Contact Eric

<< back to blog