CBS’s controversial reality program Kid Nation debuts tonight. The 40 contestants, all children between 8 and 15, “cook their own meals, clean their own outhouses, haul their own water and even run their own businesses” in a made-for-television “ghost town.”
Entertainment industry unions charged during the summer that working conditions for cast and crew at the series’ New Mexico location were unsafe and constituted exploitation. The state labor department was rebuffed in an attempt last spring to investigate potential violations of child labor laws because, CBS maintained, the state’s definition of “employee” did not apply at the time the series was taping. To persuade New Mexico’s attorney general that an investigation “need not proceed” (see below through page 3), Mickey Barnett, a lawyer for the production company, Good TV, Inc., wrote that the youngsters were actually in “an environment similar to that of a sleep away camp” where children from across the country “gathered” for “a few weeks on a ranch.” Lawyers also told the state’s labor department (pages 4-5) that a producer “assigned to supervise the children” fulfilled a role “much like a summer camp counselor” (page 5).
Before taping began, though, parents were given a much more Dickensian picture of what their children would encounter. A 22-page participant agreement for Kid Nation that the parents were required to sign (excerpts pages 6-8) stated that the program (code-named “the Manhattan Project”!) would be taped in a “less developed and wilderness area over an extensive period of time” (page 7) and that participating children could be exposed “to a variety of unmarked and uncontrolled hazards” that could “cause serious bodily injury, illness or death” (page 8). Moms and dads were advised that “accidents or illness may occur in remote places lacking access to immediate medical or emergency help” and that those mishaps could be “aggravated by exposure to temperature extremes or inclement weather” (page 7). Parents were denied “any means of direct or indirect communication” with their children during nearly six weeks of production. Even by the ghoulish rhetorical standards of liability waivers that parents routinely sign for their children’s activities, these warnings seem fairly alarming.
One mother later complained that her daughter was not properly supervised and suffered burns from cooking grease. CBS then arranged for reporters to interview another mother, one who apparently has entered her daughter in a number of pageants. Identified only by her first name, Tabitha, she toldThe New York Times, “I don’t feel like I was let down, misled or that it was exploitation.”
CBS is currently accepting applications for a new season.
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