Yeah, I think the ethical values of this popular reality show star are…wanting. I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that.
Taylor Frankie Paul, the TV reality star who had been tapped by…Disney! You know, that paragon of virtues that parents want their children to be inspired by?— to lead the new season of “The Bachelorette” slated to premiere this weekend, was featured in a viral video sent to social media showing her attacking the father of one of her children. She is facing a domestic violence investigation; Paul had previously pleaded guilty to aggravated assault years ago.
Annette Funicello she isn’t.
Disney made the decision to pull the premiere. Good call.
It amazes me that popular culture has reached such depths that a women capable of behaving like this could be a star of a television show, even one as stupefyingly cretinous as “The Bachelorette.”
In 1958, Edward R. Murrow gave an eloquent and angry speech about how the TV networks were failing the American public, society and the culture, and how a great opportunity was being squandered. Near the end, Murrow said,
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”
The hilarious part, and also the tragic part, is that the television fare that Murrow was deriding in 1958 looks like “King Lear” compared to the “Three Stooges” level of culture being offered today, and the 1958 schedule was loaded with crap like insipid panel shows, too many Westerns and lame sitcoms with names like “Love That Jill.” (Disney also offered a series called “Annette.”) TV news, naturally the main focus of Murrow’s aspirations and lament, today has sunk to the Disney sponsored muck of “The View.”
Ethics Alarms 
It’s been almost a generation since the embarrassing television show and then death of Anna Nicole. She was a stripper who would have been nothing except she married a millionaire and his eighties and then carefully gathered up his money after he died. It’s also been almost a generation since Lindsay Lohan got pulled over driving like the law didn’t exist with cocaine in her pocket. Out of control starlets are nothing new and haven’t been for a while. Every so often Hollywood stars get what’s coming to them, like when Thomas Gibson attacked a producer and was fired from criminal minds or when Wesley Snipes went to jail for tax evasion. However, most hotties avoid serious punishment and keep right on doing whatever they were doing, at least on some level, witness Shannon Doherty, who blew two high-profile chances with Beverly hills 90210 and Charmed before cancer sent her for the permanent retirement.
I’m honestly not that surprised. Pretty much from birth now girls and then women are taught to expect much and to protect themselves by any means necessary because men are pigs, plain and simple. It’s not that far to believing that any level of abuse is justified. After all, supposedly Hillary threw things at Bill and was incredibly abusive to any kind of employee or staffer and women still worship her.
“men are pigs, plain and simple.”
PWS
Going from Warp Speed to zero or hitting a brick wall at Terminal Velocity; this show was getting hyped like the Super Bowl or the NCAA Men’s BB Tournament.
PWS
As near as I can tell people who seem addicted to this type of programming lead very shallow lives and need to see dysfunction in others to rationalize their own bleak existence. That includes TMZ along with all the scripted “reality” shows. It appears to be a need for schadenfreude.
After Murrow’s 1958 remarks, the 1961 speech by FCC chairman Walter Minnow called television a “vast wasteland” and it has, with rare exceptions, continued on that same path.
The advent of the internet also held much potential for human enrichment, but that, too, has largely been squandered for a lot of time-wasting activities like cat memes and opportunities to air one’s dirty laundry to a world-wide audience. Various aspects of the popular culture appear to be engaged in a race to the bottom where decency, intellect and taste are concerned. Dysfunction is a feature, not a bug.
Correction: Mr. Minnow’s first name was Newton, not Walter. Nagging doubts about the name prompted me to actually look it up, as I should have done to start with.
[Newton Minnow is one of my all time favorite names, right up there with 1920s Yankees pitcher Urban Shocker and actor Rip Torn.]
Even without Paul’s easily-verifiable history of violence, she’d be a bizarre casting choice for a show called The Bachelorette. From what I gather, she’s divorced and has three kids. Does that fit anyone’s idea of a bachelorette?