Those of you who have been following GhostTheory throughout the years understand our stance when it comes to reality television. Especially when it comes to paranormal reality shows.

In the last few years the term ‘paranormal research’ has truly lost its meaning. Parapsychology and psychokinetic research has been boiled-down to the generic term “ghost hunting” due to the constant misuse of the term in those reality television shows. People looking for Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, or ghosts with a camera crew following their every step are only feeding their egos. Nothing, not a single scientific paper or study has ever come from these “research shows”,  yet some of them have the highest ratings ever. Why is that?

Why would millions of Americans sit through 20 minutes of advertisement, in an hour-long show that has no other content besides groups of people running around the dark, scaring each other or squabbling about the most inane things?

My friend Dr. Taff has the answers in his latest blog post titled “Messengers of Deception”

Right from the start, it’s important to acknowledge that TV is primarily a medium of entertainment and little else.   Of course there is news, which for the most part these days is all about ratings and follows the simple motto, “If it bleeds it leads”, which is why the first several stories of all daily news shows, whether on a broadcast network or on cable, is about violence and death.  We have truly become the purveyors and voyeurs of daily doses of dystopian morbidity, from music and video games to television and movies, it’s all about gorging on blood and gore.  And yet we wonder why more and more young people are acquiring assault quality weapons and slaughtering each other and themselves?  What surprise?  How many coincidences make a fact?  Remember several months ago when some bored teenagers went out and shot a famous baseball player to death?  If this level of murderous insanity prevails, our culture will descend into a the realm of Middle Eastern countries, where no one will ever be safe again.  What a shock, this degree of violence is now a normal part of our society!  We’ve met the enemy and it’s us!

Most people already suspect that our once-trust trusted news shows exaggerate, embellish, distort, manipulate and hype many of their stories strictly for ratings, where they re-run the most violent events over and over again, to make sure that we never forget the level of insanity now controlling our entertainment media.

Some years back, one of the local network affiliate news shows began each broadcast with the following words:  “death, destruction, mayhem, violence and murder” to attract a broader segment of the viewing audience.  They attracted more attention all right.  So much so that they received tens of thousands of complaints and then removed it.

If we can no longer trust the news to convey accurate and non-biased information to us anymore, why should anything on TV try to be any different?  The term reality has taken on a totally new meaning in the early 21st century; death and deception for dollars.

How many of you out there know where the term “news” comes from?   One belief is that it comes from North, East, West and South, a.k.a, the NEWS.

The most obvious and disturbing form of disinformation comes to us in the form of reality shows of every type imaginable.  From dating, to survival, to crazy housewives, to following self-absorbed, pseudo-celebrities all the way to chasing ghosts, spirits, demons and aliens.  If one digs deep enough into even the most seemingly normal, benign, non-paranormal reality shows, they soon discover that most, if not all, of the so-called reality genre is anything but real.  Where every event, every action and almost every line of dialog is well scripted and choreographed. Realty shows cannot just sit back and wait for their desired result to transpire, so they simply fabricate it.

I’ve met many people who’ve worked in production on various non-paranormal reality shows and they’ve all said that same thing.  Nothing on them is real,   If “smack down” wrestling was as real as it appears, the lethality rate would be enormous, where we’d actually be watching people kill each other on live TV.  To even the most skeptical, these manic wrestling shows are very carefully choreographed, or they would have been banned from TV long ago due tot he mortality rate.  And of course there are the occasional accidents and injuries, but even well-crafted stunts occasionally go wrong once in a while.

Bottom line here is that all reality shows are fraudulent, some very near criminal in their nature, in which they’ve forced their participants into signing totally outrageous contracts which prohibit them from ever revealing the truth behind said show.  Many production companies producing reality shows have been frequently sued for libel, slander, defamation of character and misrepresentation.  So these production companies developed the most insane release forms ever conceived.  But as many of the participants are so desperate to see their 15 minutes of fame, they’d sign their life away without giving it second thought.

Descending to the very bottom of the barrel here, let’s focus only on the totally fraudulent domain of paranormal reality, or as my very intelligent and most articulate friend and colleague Loyd Auerbach and I refer to them, paranormal “unreality”shows.

If you’re producing a paranormal reality show where something paranormal mustoccur during every episode, perhaps even several times per segment, you have a serious logistics problem on your hands, don’t you?  You cannot simply have talking heads on camera for forty one minutes out of every hour, or you’re ratings will be as remote as your chances of encountering real paranormal phenomena are.

Therefore, if one wants their reality show to get ratings worthy of renewal, one must do one of four things;  a) fake paranormal events.  b) populate the show with such colorful or outlandish individuals that they’re weekly rantings serve the same purpose as observing real phenomena would, c) dramatically exaggerate and embellish whatever really does occur to make it appear more important than it really is, or d) all the above.

Long before the air was littered with such unreal shows, I was approached by the creator of one of the first (whose name will remain absent as I do not wish to promote this clown in any way).  Years ago, when we first met, I made it very clear to him what the true reality was regarding investigating such paranormal events was like.  His reply was simple and straightforward.

Each episode of his show would fake such occurrences, and on the very rare occasion when they actually encountered demonstrable paranormal events, they would make it appear as if it were a hoax.  Compelling reverse logic indeed, but not for me.

I made it clear to this producer (who already had a well established track record by the way), that his thinking was certainly novel and provocative, but his show idea was nothing I could ever be associated with as it would be a blatant fraud.  I shook has hand and walked out.  About six weeks later, I once again met with this producer along with one of my colleagues at the time, and he again made his pitch.  But now, to the both of us.  We both shook our heads in unison to the negative as we were not even vaguely interested in his offer.

Full article: BarryTaff.net