Re-Mediating the Spaces of Reality Television: <i>America's Most Wanted</i> and the Case of Vancouver's Missing Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I speak to debates amongst geographers and media scholars about the communities that television constructs in both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ spaces. My point of departure is Morley's work on global television audiences, which, in focusing on the fears of white suburban viewers and the social exclusions they enact, neglects the images and narratives of television itself. The focus is a new North American television genre that addresses fears of urban crime, the ‘reality cop show’. In examining the genre's codes and practices and the ‘reality’ it creates, I try to specify the representational work which this kind of television performs. Analysis turns to a 1999 episode of Fox TV's America's Most Wanted that featured the mysterious disappearances of thirty-one women, all of whom were/are identified with the sex trade in Vancouver, Canada. As a morality tale of sex crimes and sexual dangers in the city, targeted at white North American suburban viewers, central details of the case were missing, including the fact that most of the disappeared were/are native women. The imposition of a Jack-the-Ripper “media template” displaced local and highly politicized explanations related to prostitution laws, community policing practices, and dangerous urban spaces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".