Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Eunji Kim about her book titled The American Mirage, How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Maritocracy, published by Princeton University Press in 2025.

This book investigates a really interesting puzzle because on the one hand, in news media, we have all sorts of politicians talking about how the American dream is no longer within reach. It's dying. It's faded. Doom and gloom. On the other hand, in journalism,

TV, reality TV, the kind of non-news media side of things, popular entertainment, we have rather a lot of things that look like the American dream is very much all over the place, very much in everyone's grasp. What exactly explains this significant discrepancy that we might see on the same device of a television screen or a phone that

but with very different messages. That's exactly the sort of thing that this book helps us understand. So, Eunji, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.

Yeah, Miranda, thanks for having me today. Well, I'm very pleased to. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Yes. So I'm assistant professor of political science at Columbia, but I define myself as a media scholar who's always interested in how media, all forms of media, including YouTube, TikTok, to reality TV, to entertainment, to Netflix, and how all of that shapes the way we think about the world and society.

But one of the primary reasons that I decided to write this book was when I entered the grad school, one of the deep puzzle that every scholar in social science was interested in was rising income inequality.

So the gap between the rich and poor has exponentially rising for the past three decades. And people were wondering why people are OK with this pattern, why Americans are so tolerant of income inequality and not really supporting the policies that could potentially help this inequality problems, for instance, by supporting more redistributive policies.

And many of the answers that I read was, oh, Americans are perfectly OK with income inequality because they believe in the American dream. And I thought, wait, but where does that belief come from? Most of the answers that I saw was, oh, that's just the way it is. It's just the way that Americans are born.

That's why it's called American Dream. But I thought they just cannot really explain the individual level variations among Americans. Of course, it can explain the difference between the French and Americans overall. But why do some Americans are more optimistic about the upper mobility, but not others? So in order to answer that question, I was thinking more about how media that everyone consumes on a daily basis is

potentially affects the way we think about the American dream. And I almost stumbled upon this reality TV show as an answer by looking at the most popular TV shows for the past three decades. Very interesting questions indeed. Is there anything further we need to understand about the kind of puzzle you're investigating as foundation for our conversation? Yeah, I think one interesting kind of a framework to think about is, so

If you look at the most popular TV show in America for the past 40 years, for instance, then you'll be shocked to know that 60 Minutes, one hour news magazine TV show on CBS, was a really popular TV show to an extent. It was number one, the most watched TV in this nation, for instance, in year 1991 to year 1994.

Indeed, it has always been a top 10 TV show for the past 40 years, except that in more recent years, particularly around 2000 and 2010s,

60 Minutes disappeared from a top 10 ranking and all the TV shows that we are watching and popular turns out to be most of the reality TV shows and sports TV shows. These were popular before, but I'm seeing a pattern where news is fading its popularity.

And other forms of media, including reality TV, has been gaining popularity over the years and that has consequences. So we're thinking about how media composition changes and how that affects the way we think about the society.

That is very interesting as a trend to understand. And it kind of relates to something I wonder if we can talk a little bit about in this initial part of our discussion in terms of the importance of examining these sorts of questions, because it could be taken as, oh, well, what's popular on TV? Like,

that's interesting because finding out anything is interesting in an academic sense. But, you know, maybe the stakes don't go beyond that. You argue in the book that the stakes definitely go beyond that in this case. Can you tell us more? Yeah, I think there are two reasons for that. The first is the declining news audience. I'm sure that many of the listeners of this podcast might find it hard to understand, but

Most Americans are not that interested in politics, period. Our Twitter newsfeed, our Facebook, our news consumptions are overwhelming. And it looks like every American is obsessed with partisan media and watching Fox News all day, every day. But that is simply not the case if you look at the behavioral level data.

And the truth of the matter is that right now in 2025, we just have so many choices at any given time. We have infinite number of media choices. And that means that if you're not interested in politics, you don't have to listen or watch any political news if you want to. It's so much easier to opt out of news completely right now because there are just so many other options.

So that means compared to, let's say, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, where for the vast majority of American households, watching an evening news on CBS or ABC was a family ritual after dinner that is not happening. So that means we are losing a common source of information that people used to watch all the time. So the fragmentation is something a lot of scholars have already studied.

So that's like one kind of pattern. But the other reason is I think increasingly I'm seeing that the narratives that entertainment media is telling us is often very different from the news media offers. I will give you one very easy example.

Last year during the election season, I think every single news media outlet that leans more liberal or progressive was trying to sell an area of the economy is better than we think. Economy is doing okay and we're all going to be okay.

And I think Biden campaign and a Kamala campaign was kind of betting on that. However, on entertainment media, for instance, on TikTok, there have been millions of TikTok videos where people go to McDonald's and complain how expensive the burgers have become.

So I think that's an example where elite and news media can push one narrative. But when entertainment media that a lot of Americans consume every day and play an outsized role in their perceptions about the world, push a very different narrative, then the net impact of all those narratives together means that the entertainment media effects might dominate in terms of coloring their perceptions about the economy in this case.

That's very helpful to explain the stakes of what's going on here and connect that to the trends you mentioned earlier. Getting into then how you do this analysis, can you tell us a bit more about your approach?

Yes, I'm sure that many academics have all grappled with the chicken and the egg problem, the fundamental problem of causal inference and causality. Is it the case that people who are already optimistic and believing in upward mobility already are watching reality TV shows, for instance, or TV?

the TV shows that promote the myth of American dream or is it vice versa? So one of the things that I was really trying to nail in this book was collect an electric array of data to really tell the story to make sure that the relationship between the media exposure and the belief in American dream is not just correlational, but also causal.

So that was the vast majority of my efforts that were put into that approving the causality. So first, I use many of the, for instance, news media coverage to really tell the case that, yes, news media have been portraying American dream in a very negative light for the past 20 decades. Using sentiment analysis, New York Times covers, that's what I show. And then I move to all sorts of beyonds.

behavior level data. So not what people say in a survey, but what people actually do using, for instance, the Facebook data, the web tracking data, all the things that media scholars have been using for the last 10 years and show that, yes, we do see that the news media consumption has been declining and entertainment media consumption has been going up.

But when we say Americans watch a lot of entertainment, we have to make the point, but what types of entertainment media are they watching? So then I dig into the data a little more at the granular level to really show that, yes, it is a particular type of entertainment media. The reality TV show, particularly reality TV shows have the rags to riches narrative arc that have been really popular for the past 20 years.

And then I do content analysis. I use survey data to establish the correlations between the two. And then I use the lab in the field and also natural experiment to show that these relationships are causal.

And then I also show that the impact of this media on positive preferences are also causal. So that's like the whole book that I was trying to figure out. Is there any method in social science that I can use in this book? And I'm very confident that I've used most of that in this book. Yeah, you certainly used a lot of different methods, which makes the findings really interesting to understand now.

If we look then at the shows that you're focusing on, just to give us a sense of sort of scale and scope, like how many shows are we looking at? When we say that they're popular, how popular? Yeah. So one of the interesting data sets to look at is imdb.com. It's a website a lot of people go to figure out who is featured in this movie or the plot line for the movie. So I basically scraped all the TV shows that exist in America. It's on imdb.com.

And we can plot the proportion of reality TV show in our entire media landscape. So if you plot that, for instance, at the peak of 2008, 2007, that was when reality TV show got really popular. We are seeing that one in five new television released in America was a reality TV. That's how popular it was.

And that proportion, I haven't checked the latest years, but that has been always more than I think like 10%. So like one in five reality TV show newly released that's been one in five new TV show in America has been a reality TV show. So it's a lot of TV shows you can imagine. Yeah, that is really rather a lot. So that's helpful for us to understand so that we can comprehend kind of the scope of what we're talking about here today.

When we're discussing this popularity, though, do we see things like partisan divisions in terms of where the prevalence of these shows are that have the American dream so prominently in them or where they're popular? Do we see that kind of thing show up from this massive amount of data you've analyzed? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So before I answer that question, I will clarify one thing. So when I say reality TV show, I think people's instincts is think about the Real Housewives or the Jersey Shore or Bachelor. But that is not the type of show that I talk about. So I particularly focus on the TV shows, reality TV shows that have the rags to riches narrative. So what I mean is the presence of ordinary people, the dramatized reality

economic benefits for the participants and a narrative emphasis on hard work. So if you think about those three criteria, you will quickly realize why bachelor doesn't fit that category because bachelor ordinary people, yes, dramatize economic benefit. No, they get no money. They get love and narrative emphasis on hard work.

Well, not really. I'm sure they work hard by hitting the gym every day, but there's not much of an emphasis on meritocracy or hard work. So these are the reality TV shows that I focus on. But when it comes to partisan divisions,

Surprisingly, there is not much polarization happening when it comes to Rex Rich's narrative reality TV show. Maybe it's because of a very uniquely American thing that Democrats and Republicans, they both love the idea where anyone who can work hard can get ahead in this country. And I think that makes the TV shows incredibly powerful more than we think, because we're

If you think about how persuasion happens or when persuasion happens, if it's only one side watching one type of TV show and no cross-cutting exposure, then there will be a limit to how much it can persuade in general. We're talking about the possibility of echo chamber, for instance. But because this TV show are not partisan and attract people from both sides,

And because Americans, when they're watching American Idol or Shark Tank, they're not thinking about politics.

And that makes persuasion, I argue, much easier because you're not actively counter-arguing. You are not thinking about rising income inequality or declining American dream. You're sitting in your couch drinking beer and you're watching Shark Tank entertained and engaged. And that's where I think persuasion is likely to happen much more because you put your guard down.

Okay, that's helpful to start thinking about these mechanisms there. Does this happen more with different partisan biases than others? Are there other factors that show up as being more significant? So I do notice that when holding everything constant, it did notice that Republicans, if they're watching this rag to riches TV, should they react much more compared to Democrats? Yes.

So they all watch, they all enjoy, but there is a differential effects of how they interact with the content. So I think it's maybe because the idea of self-reliance and individualism is much more closely related to republicanism. So maybe that's potentially why that that message resonates more with the self-identified republicans in my sample. So that's what I see.

But one thing that I find very interesting is people who have a very high economic insecurity, these are the people who are actually more likely to tune into this show. So I find that part to be really fascinating. And I think that maybe tells a story of why maybe at the macro level, these shows are way more popular when income inequality is rising and economic insecurity is much more heightened than before. It reminds me of

Like many historians, for instance, after World War II, there's a popularity of superhero comics. And many historians said that there's something about our need, our psychological need to see heroes, to be rescued, that fueled the popularity of a superhero comic. And during the Gilded Age, the original Gilded Age, a lot of Americans read the dime novels written by Horatio Archer.

instead of reading, for instance, the classic novels that people produced.

And that's also a case where historians are kind of speculated that maybe there's something between the economic insecurities of the original Gilded Age that prompted people to read more dime novels that has a story of rags to riches as more of an escapism or our instinct need to believe that no things will be okay and we can still, you know, get ahead. So I find that part to be really fascinating.

I mean, as a historian, I love the comparison to other times. That definitely brings out more connections there. What about the implications then of this? If we can see sorts of connections between kind of what's happening in the quote unquote real world and what people are choosing to consume as media, is it possible to investigate the extent to which we might be seeing sort of

between these rags to riches tales that people are choosing to consume that might be persuasive in ways they are less, but realizing less, because as you said, you know, drinking beer and enjoying it, you're not focused on learning from it as if it was a lecture and,

Is this causing distortions in collective ideas about what the American dream is? Yeah, so it's obviously a reinforcing mechanism. But I really spend a lot of time really proving the causality that, yes, it does cause the belief in the American dream when people watch more of that. So one thing that I want to highlight in my book was

I use many different experimental methods. One interesting thing that I think many listeners might find intriguing was I did an experiment. And often we do online experiments, which I've also done in my book.

But if you think about how we do this in real life, as a social scientist, often it is really hard to force people online to watch a one-hour episode of an American Idol. Because who knows, maybe they're distracted, they're not focusing. So that's why a lot of university researchers invite people to university psychology lab so that you can really enforce that they're watching the show that you want them to watch.

But at the time, I was based in Universal Pennsylvania, and there was no way that I could really convince people of different colors and particularly different partisan convictions to come to Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania campus. So I figured that I really have to recruit people outside Pennsylvania.

of the campus and just go out there where people are and conduct media experiments on them. So I, one of my unique features of this book was I brought a truck. I,

I transformed the truck into the media lab. This truck has two rooms and obviously four wheels. I drove this truck to rural Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey. I went to Blueberry Festival. I went to Farmer's Market. I literally showed up to Farmer's Market with a truck.

And I invited people to come inside my truck and watch randomly assigned Rags to Riches TV show so that I can estimate the causal effect of watching Rags to Riches TV show on their Believed American Dream. So that's one way of proving causality.

But you might be wondering, well, that sounds very artificial. No one watches television because researchers pay money and force them to watch. And I completely agree. And that's a limitation of all the forced exposure experiments that we do in social science. So I was looking for some natural variations where by the pure accident or by pure force of nature that some people just happen to be watching more TV shows like American Idol than others.

by pure accident and with no control by the researchers. And I stumbled upon the fact that in season six of American Idol, when that was happening, there was also a survey that happened to have a question about the belief in American dream. So I was able to merge those two data sets together.

in a way that I gathered all the hometown locations of successful American Idol 6 contestants using the intuition that no one knew who's going to perform better or who's going to make the top 20 of American Idol. But if they did...

People, particularly from the people living in the hometowns of successful American Idol contestants, were excited. They were watching much more American Idol than similar people living in a different town where they didn't produce any successful American Idol contestants. So that was kind of as a random thing that happened in the real world.

So I used that variation to link that whether people who are from the hometowns of successful American Idol contestants were more likely to believe in American Dream compared to their counterparts in other towns that didn't produce the contestants. And that natural experiment produced a very similar result as the forced exposure experiments I thought in the truck at Erso in online.

That's a really interesting finding and also an interesting experiment. So thank you for telling us about that particular method that you chose. Obviously, as you said, it does have limitations. Every method does. But, you know, maybe more research needs to go drive trucks around and engage with people in that sort of direct way.

Were there any other kind of key findings about the ways in which entertainment media influenced ideas about the American dream, both in the sort of short term of, oh, look, I'm watching this contestant from my town. Here's what I think now, but also in the longer term as well? Yeah, so the longer term is hard to assess, as you can imagine, because it's really hard to find like the panel data that has American dream question and also the media exposure data.

So it's really hard. I do not have any long-term data per se, but I think I hint at the long-term implications because these TV shows have been everywhere for almost 20 years in American media landscape. So the micro findings I have in the CERB experiments and in the natural experiments, I'm hoping that that has very obvious implications. But I think one other part of the key findings I've

personally find it very surprising is I'm sure many of the listeners are very familiar with these granular map that this very famous economist Ras Chetty produced about the mobility rates across counties in America. And basically granular rates of intergenerational mobilities across between towns. So for instance, some areas of America are much more upwardly mobile than other areas. And I was curious whether

How much of our belief in American dream is a function of both media exposure and the place they live? Maybe one can make the case that, well, even if you're watching a lot of reality TV shows, if you witness in your real life, in your immediate environment, that you're not seeing actual mobility in your town, no one's getting ahead, then maybe that matters more for your perceptions.

And that's about the perennial debate in American political behavior, where what matters more in our perceptions? Is it our media that we watch, we choose to watch, or our lived experiences? What matters more? So I actually combined the data between their actual county-level mobility rate.

their actual county level Gini coefficients, the income inequality levels, to see whether their belief in American dream are moderated by their lived experiences and the geographic context. And I actually found zero effect of that, the null effects of lived experience in the location.

So that part, I was a little bit surprised. There's a possibility that maybe the county level measures are not just precise enough or maybe it's too rough as a proxy to capture their lived experiences. But I think that kind of reminds us that maybe something about things that we choose to watch versus lived experiences, we are just like immune to it. Maybe we just or maybe we're not aware of as we used to think.

And maybe that's why media potentially matters much more because it's a repeated exposure. We choose to pay attention to it and it matters potentially more. And one way to think about it is our experiences on the airplane or subway. When I take the New York subway every day, I find that people just do not care that much about what's happening around them. Every one of them is staring at their phone. Same in the airplane. Do I really talk to people next to me?

Not really. Most people just stare at the movie screen in front of them. So what matters more, the person who's sitting next to you or the movie that you choose to watch for the 17-hour flight? Maybe the movie. So that's something that I think a lot about the intersection between those two factors. Yeah, that's definitely a finding I think a lot of people can immediately relate to and goes back to the question we were discussing earlier around the stakes of this kind of research.

Given then the links between people's choices around entertainment and their beliefs in the American dream, can we see any links between that and then expanding it out to, for example, policy preferences? Yeah, so the secondary effects are always harder to detect compared to the first order effects on the American dream. But I do see the relationship between the two, and that's the

basic last empirical chapter of my book to figure out, sure, like what is the implications? If the conclusion is that, yes, if you watch a lot of American Idol, then you're much more likely to believe in the American dream, then so what? Why does it matter for the study of politics?

So I think the last chapter on policy preferences kind of answers that so what question, because the way we think about American dreamer, whether anyone who works hard can get ahead, that affects how we think about who's more deserving in our society. Because if you think that's the case, then why do we need welfare? Or why do we need to tax riches and use the tax benefits to redistribute to the poor part of the society?

So that's the finding that I have in the policy chapter, showing that people who are more, when we are exposing people to rags to riches entertainment media, then they're actually much more likely to not support raising taxes on the rich.

I see not much of that impact on the poor. For instance, they're not becoming more antagonistic toward the poor. But I do see that they become much more generous towards all the policy areas that target the rich. They don't want to raise taxes. They don't think that income inequality is a problem or desirable.

income inequalities problem. So all those types of taxing which idea, people become much more tolerant after being exposed to a react to its narrative. So I think that has a policy implications. Yeah, that's definitely a very interesting and important finding given the ways in which those things are all kind of being put together in ways that we do need to pay attention to what people are choosing to watch on the long plane flight or on their commute.

What about the things that people are choosing to watch that may not fit into researchers, at least, conception of kind of entertainment media that we study, right? We have film studies. We're in some ways used to looking at things like television shows. What about the implications of all of these findings for TikTok?

Ah, great question. And I think this is a question that every undergraduate student asks me when I teach entertainment media right now, because that's what people do nowadays almost every day. So I think TikTok is a really interesting case because the vast majority of my book talks about the importance of narrative. Narrative meaning that you watch a TV show for 30 minutes or 40 minutes and there's a narrative arc of

There's a storyline that anyone who works hard can get ahead. There's a whole thing that you are immersed into. But TikTok, with the 30-second or max two-minute video, what we are seeing is not some macro narrative, but what I call as micro narrative.

So I think we have a lot of research to do to figure out what that means and whether we think that we can apply the same narrative framework to TikTok videos or TikTok's micro narratives. Because one can argue that TikTok is full of short or personal stories about success and struggle, or maybe a lot of them echo American dream themes, like turning a side hustle into business.

So maybe we can argue that even if it's very different format from TB, maybe the certain patterns apply. But I think it's something that I definitely want to study much more in the coming years.

Well, that's actually very convenient. Thank you for giving me that lovely way to move to my final question, which is what are you working on now that this book is out? Yeah, so currently I'm working on two different set of big new research. The first is I'm very interested in how why Americans are so optimistic and so favorable towards police in America.

particularly after the George Floyd and after so much news media covers about police brutality after the murder of George Floyd. So maybe similar to my book, I was looking into what is really causing or reinforcing people's thinking about the police brutality.

If you look at the Nielsen ratings data, the same pattern, it turns out that top three out of the top 10 TV show in the year of pandemic were cop shows ranging from Chicago PD, NCIS to Blue Bluffs. And if you look at all these TV shows that are very popular among older, wider and suburban population.

Then every episode has the same narrative. Police are heroes. Every criminal gets caught within 40 minutes. They're extremely effective. So I'm curious to see whether these cop shows, popular police procedural shows, are potentially playing a role in distorting Americans thinking about the criminal justice system and police brutality. So that's my new working paper that I'm currently working with.

And then the second line of research is related to TikTok and not necessarily like entertainment narrative per se, but I'm very interested in how apolitical social media creators on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are affecting our electoral politics. So in the last election seasons of 2024,

I and my co-authors have run a five-month-long field experiment where we randomize exposure to social media creators, either who only talk about politics versus apolitical influencers,

who occasionally talk about politics. And the question is, what would be more politically persuasive? Is it people who talk about politics 24-7? Or is it people who mostly talk about makeups and cookings and, I don't know, guitar and music, and then maybe twice a month or once a month, they suddenly talk about housing crisis or the national economy?

So between the two, which matters more in terms of political persuasion? Which should be more effective? So that was the question that we wanted to answer through this very ambitious five-month-long field experiment during the 2024 election season.

Okay, both of those sound like very cool projects. So thank you for giving us the sneak peek on both of them. And of course, best of luck to you and the rest of your colleagues in working on them. And while you're doing so, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled The American Mirage, How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Maritocracy, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Wengie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Well, thank you for having me.