The Blurred Lines of Today’s ‘Reality’

How real is television “reality”?

Although TV has always indulged in wordspin, its tongue is especially slippery these days in deploying such white lies as “reality,” self-serving euphemisms and other glossy terms to deceptively market products and ideas.

It’s not only TV, of course. Just as real estate ads promote rickety houses as needing your “tender loving care,” however, and clunkers formerly known as used cars are now “pre-owned,” our old TV friend, the “rerun,” has gained stature too.

It’s now an “encore” in TV promos aimed at the public. The smart money in industry circles says viewers are less likely to reject an “encore episode” than something called a rerun. If it’s an encore, in other words, it must be really swell.

As if all America had given this sucker a standing ovation and demanded its immediate return to the airwaves, and programmers were helpless to resist the will of the public.

When “encore” runs its course, do we get “pre-seen?”

Words help shape our perceptions, both in entertainment and the darker catacombs of human behavior. You don’t need a TV columnist to inform you that “terrorist” fits anyone seeking to intimidate by crashing a jet into a high-rise or detonating a bomb with the intent to murder civilians. “Butcher” works here too.

But are Palestinians in the West Bank “soldiers” or “gunmen” when firing at Israeli troops rolling in on a mission of destruction? The two words have unequal moral standing.

And is the U.S. fighting a “war against terror,” as the government and most media have said for nine months, or a “war against Islamists?” The latter was floated on CNN last week by the host of TV’s most misleadingly titled program, “Lou Dobbs Moneyline.” Showing you the money is hardly its only function.

“The enemies in this war are radical Islamics who argue that all nonbelievers in their faith must be killed,” said Dobbs. Called to action by his epiphany, he announced he was dumping “war against terror” in favor of “war against Islamists.”

Dobbs stressed that this was no war “against Muslims or Islam or Islamics,” just “Islamists” and their allies, and that “if there were ever a time for clarity, it is now.” Way to go.

But let’s see. Not Islam or Islamics, but “Islamists.” Yeah, that’s clarity.

This is one gimmick that deserves to be buried, swiftly, with the pet rock. Next night, the Dobbster was cautioned wisely on the air by former Defense Secretary William Cohen that trying to sever “Islamists” from Islam and Islamics may give people “the wrong idea” by appearing to indict all followers of Islam as terrorists. In other words, Dobbs can parse all he wants, but get real here. Most viewers hearing “Islamists” will think “Islamics,” and extend that to every Muslim. Or is it Muslimist?

Meanwhile, the Fox News Channel is now calling Palestinian suicide bombings “homicide bombings,” as if the former did not impose guilt. News-lite MSNBC has anointed itself “America’s News Channel,” even though most Americans don’t know it from Shinola.

And until recently, the most misused term by this hemisphere’s media was “politically correct,” which too many Americans apply to anything they don’t support. The smug assumption is that only their beliefs result from conviction, while the rest of us, with whom they disagree, are motivated solely by fear of controversy or what’s in vogue at the moment.

Yet no reign lasts forever, and “politically correct” has been blasted from its throne by TV’s latest overused and misused word of the century.

“Reality.”

Blame “An American Family,” the pioneering 1973 PBS series that kept a camera on the Louds of Santa Barbara for weeks, becoming a “reality” prototype by capturing a marriage on the skids, while attracting such attention that the series was spoofed in a movie by Albert Brooks.

Nearly 30 years later, shows mislabeled “reality” are surfacing on TV like measles spots, as industry copycats fall over themselves trying to cash in on the “Survivor” phenomenon and join this CBS franchise’s fast-spreading progeny.

Turning their heads are recent high ratings for “The Bachelor” on ABC (real guy, real babes, real dumb) and “The Osbournes,” a highly popular MTV series that closely monitors the lives of rock star Ozzy Osbourne and his family, affirming that even daily minutiae can seduce a large audience.

These are called “reality” shows. But the concept of “reality” is as laughable here as on the tightly edited “Survivor” series. Try living your life in front of cameras and TV crews and see how real you can be.

Even funnier, though, is how show after show is now being sold to viewers as “reality,” as producers and their networks embrace this fantasy the way politicians kiss babies.

Last week, for example, found ABC boasting that its two-parter “The Hamptons” was TV’s “first reality miniseries.” It’s true that Hamptonians are, indeed, members of the human race (sort of). But in fact, “The Hamptons” was nothing more than a documentary (a musty word banished from TV’s promotional vocabulary), and a weak one from the usually accomplished Barbara Kopple. Far from being revolutionary, it was executed in a style used for decades by that master documentarian, Frederick Wiseman.

Meanwhile, TBS insists that more history is about to be made. Coming next month is its “Worst-Case Scenario,” billed as TV’s first “reality” magazine series. That is if you call “reality” demonstrating “cool gadgets that help people avoid dangerous situations.”

Or dangerous hyperbole, as in ABC News running radio promos last week saying its prime-time six-part series, “Boston 24/7,” offered “so much reality it’s unreal.”

ABC’s profits are surely real. But reality in news? It’s a troubling concept.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.