1. Comparison
The Mighty Redcar, this is a series that focuses on a town called Redcar
with poverty all other the town and they made a documentary of the people
in the town of Redcar but it does push forward an agenda by putting forward
different contexts and changing the view of situations to benefit the people
of Redcar, it follows a range of different people in different circumstances.
Benefit Street, this is a show about a street that is all people who are on
benefits, the episode makes out that these people are extremely hard done
by. my issue with this series is that although it attempts to show how hard
these peoples lives are it neglect's the fact that they got themselves in this
position to start with and it shows the houses and how they live nothing is
clean or tidy and they certainly have the time to clean up but don't. still this
show tries to show how hard it is for them to live. it follows a man and
women that have a kid that may be taken away from them by social services
and the man goes for a non paying job because he has little qualifications. it
also follows people that are on the street and a women across the street from
them however the main focus is on this struggling family.
Skint, this series goes for a different approach showing people that take
drugs and abuse the system and using tax money to buy the drugs, the
purpose of this show is clearly to enrage the audience showing only the bad
people on benefits, but it makes you wonder if they announce on tv that they
are using the money to buy drugs how are they still on the system?
There are different representations used in each show, in mighty Redcar
they use a hard done by representation of the town and show what it used to
be to what it is now, presenting the people in the show as hard done by. this
is different to benefit street because in benefit street they don't focus on the
place but instead focuses on the people. How they present the people is the
same as 'The Mighty Redcar'. In skint the representations of people are very
different, it shows the bad people and focuses on how bad they are where as
in the other two it was showing bad people and trying to make them seen in
need and good. unfortunately skint is still not accurate as it does its best to
push how bad they are to anger the audience.
Aims of the programs:
The Mighty Redcar - Get sympathy for people and to inform people of the
struggles people in the town 'suffer'.
2. Benefit Street - getting sympathy for people on the street and a bit of a laugh
from how idiotic some of the people on the street are.
Skint - soul purpose and aim is to make people angry at how stupid the
people on the series are.
Are these programs biased?
yes, all of these programs are biased the difference is the direction they take
it and how they do it but the same premise stands, they try to push people
into thinking a certain way while watching the series. this can range from
music use to scripted scenes to add sympathy a example of this is on The
Mighty Redcar where it opens to two kids talking about lack of jobs and
shops closing down , do they really expect us to believe that this is how kids
there talk to each other or concern themselves with those topics?
