Abstract
The British reality show Celebrity Big Brother caused great controversy in January 2007 when remarks made by a few contestants, most notably the reality TV star Jade Goody, and targeted at a fellow Indian contestant, were widely read as racist. In this paper, I analyse the race incident against the backdrop of a progressively expansive legal framework offering recognition for human dignity, equality and cultural diversity, most importantly through the Human Rights Act 1998. The Act aims to promote a comprehensive human rights ‘culture’ in public life, but it would be hard to ignore the extremely negative coverage of the legislation in large sections of the British press. However, the strong public reaction to the Celebrity Big Brother race incident seems to suggest that while public opinion on existing human rights legislation is divided, the core principles on which the law is founded may enjoy much greater support. Thus, politicians and media commentators were quick to read the Celebrity Big Brother furore as an encouraging sign of how inclusive British society had become. I am inclined to take a more sceptical stance, especially in light of the way in which Jade Goody’s class background was relentlessly targeted in press criticism of her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, while sympathy for her victim, the glamorous Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, appeared to have been motivated largely by the fact that she fitted the media template of the deserving victim.
Highlights
If some commentators in the British press are to be believed, human rights are exceptionally good 6 at protecting „undeserving‟ groups but notoriously inept at protecting the law-abiding citizen
According to Melanie Phillips (2004), the Daily Mail’s most prolific commentator on the subject, „“ human rights” mean prisoners can hitch a ride on the grotesque compensation culture merry-go-round
Human rights lawyers are regularly singled out by the Daily Mail as one of the main beneficiaries of the HRA, allowing them to „line their pockets‟? with legal aid money obtained to fight human rights cases in the courts
Summary
A survey commissioned by the Disability Rights Commission a few years ago 5 (http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/DRC) made sobering reading: it found that 70% of those surveyed could not name any of their human rights. What usually attracts less attention is that in this overlap of politics and entertainment, celebrities have become public figures whose conduct is subject to a level of media scrutiny that was previously reserved for public office holders This may be a predictable by-product of infotainment politics, but it raises ethical issues of its own, namely whether it is right to submit the hapless contestant emerging from a reality TV show (in the case of Big Brother having been shielded from the outside world during his or her time on the show) to face a barrage of media criticism which even the most spin-savvy politicians would struggle to cope with. The same inarticulateness and coarseness for which she was previously feted by media commentators were the cause of her very public fall from grace
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