'Survivor' Addresses Lack Of Diversity By Pitting Minorities Against One Another
Just as Page Six reported yesterday, Jeff Probst joined Harry Smith on CBS' The Early Show for an interview to defend Survivor's latest genius promotional hook of dividing next season's contestants into four, race-sorted groups: The Asian-American Tribe, The African-American Tribe, The Hispanic Tribe and The White Tribe (isn't the acceptable term Honky-Americans?). Smith can't hide his contempt for the shamelessness of it all, saying "there were groans" in the studio that morning, which Probst counters by explaining that the show's concept came out of "the criticism that Survivor was not ethnically diverse enough." It was a fundamental flaw in the casting process that producer Mark Burnett and his crack team of sleazebag reality producers immediately addressed by segregating the hungry and increasingly desperate players according to skin color, then letting the cameras capture which ethnic group will first resort to devouring a competing, weaker ethnic group once the stomach pains become too much to bear.