Julie Smith

Steve Herro
COM 101
January 7, 2016

One of the most prevalent features of Reality Television in the 21st century was its
penchant for promoting tenets of neoliberalism. The work of critics including Laurie Ouellette,
James Hay, Gareth Palmer, John McMurria, and Katherine Sender has demonstrated
conclusively how REALITY TELEVISION was a resource for audiences, attempting to persuade
them of the superiority of personal responsibility, charity, family, and community as resources
for solving pervasive problems.

This critical insight was timely. Many scholars have traced the movement of neoliberal
thought through to the policies of the Reagan Revolution, Bill Clintons commitment to
deregulation and welfare reform, and finally to Bushs compassionate conservatism. A good
deal of work, especially in television studies, was dedicated to demonstrating how REALITY
TELEVISION programming resonated with neoliberal ideals, as well as the lengths to which the
television industry went to connect their programming to the policies and initiatives of the Bush
Administration.

But the end of Bushs second term in office coincided with the most devastating
economic crisis since the Great Depression. The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and
certain financial institutions and U.S auto makers prompted vociferous public criticism of the
free market and a call for increasing regulation of these at-risk segments of the economy. The
economic crisis and the push for regulation reached its peak in the 2008 election, in which then
candidate Barack Obama promised new regulations on the financial sector and on the mortgage
industry. In short, then, the economic collapse put the infallibility of market logic, the most
fundamental precept of neoliberalism, up for debate.

In my talk today I want to suggest that the first season of HGTVs Real Estate
Intervention responds to this crisis of capitalism by re-asserting the infallibility of the market and
therefore attempting to shore up neoliberalism.

Before I describe the program and share some of my analysis, I want to pause briefly to
explain my theoretical approach to studying television programs. Mimi White wrote, Because
they are created in socially and historically specific contexts, cultural artifacts are seen as
expressing and promoting values, beliefs, and ideas in relation to the contexts in which they are
produced, distributed, and received. With that in mind, my work attempts to demonstrate how a
television program produces knowledge for its audience in a particular historical context.

I look at the ways that the program attempts to manufacture consent: to make an
ideologically inflected discourse seem natural or commonsensical. Television programs are
polysemic, and these multiple meanings are often polyvalent. They include multiple, variously
slanted discourses in order to attract as many viewers as possible. But they also attempt to
contain and control these viewpoints, to suggest to the viewer a preferred reading that, in almost
every case, promotes the dominant ideology.
 Now that you see what I am up to, lets talk specifically about the program. Real Estate
Intervention, which first started airing on HGTV in 2009, attempts to makeover homeowners
attitudes about the asking price for the home they are trying to sell. The context of the show,
according HGTVs website, are current market conditions. In other words, this program is a
specific response to the current problems with the down housing market.

There are two hosts of the show Mike Aubrey and Sabrina Soto. They both do
ideological work, but today I want to focus on Mike since he is the primary host. Mike is a
licensed realtor, and his role on the show is to help people to price their house to sell. He does
this by analyzing their house and by leading them through tours of one recently sold comparable
house and one active comparable house.

On REAL ESTATE INTERVENTION, Mike personifies the market. I think that he does
this in at least two ways in his style and in his speech. In terms of his speech, Mike gives voice
to the market and its logic. Mikes primary message is that the market determines the proper
price for a home, and he stays on message without fail. The logic contained in his discourse is
that a house is only worth what someone will pay for it. I think anyone with a working
knowledge of neoliberalism who watched the show would quickly pick up on this. What I want
to focus on today are the mechanisms used on the program to manufacture consent for Mikes
pro-market discourse.