Chapter 7 covers the unique type of gossip created and exploited by reality television. Reality TV—unscripted coverage of people who are contestants in a competition or members of a community—purports to reveal real-life drama but is actually deeply contrived and instead creates an illusory experience of a false reality. Shows like Real Housewives, The Real World, The Bachelor, Survivor, Big Brother, and Traitors all rely upon gossip to create artificial conflicts and plot points. In many of these shows, people behave one way in a big group and then change their behavior during individual interviews in which they reveal what they were actually thinking during the group meetings. This format showcases the difference between people’s public personas and their complex inner selves. The drama of reality television comes from the challenge of discerning and exposing the discrepancies between public and private selves. In shows like Survivor or The Bachelor, contestants are asked to be likable enough to make viewers support them, even if they engage in morally questionable activities such as lying or snooping around to expose the bad actions of others. In this space, “secrets and collusion became the major currency” (154), and people form and break alliances in order to further their own ends, all while knowing that their popularity and likability depends on maintaining a trustworthy reputation. 

The show Traitors, a British reality show that pits Traitors against Faithfuls, twists this premise. The Traitors must convince the Faithfuls that one of their fellow Faithfuls is actually a Traitor, and the Faithfuls must determine who is really a Traitor. The show is successful because this premise taps into the human ability to use selective knowledge to build alliances and consolidate power. In this show, the contestants do not need to appeal to an audience in order to succeed; they must instead convince a limited group of people that they are trustworthy. They have to seem completely open while concealing vital information. In this way, reality TV mirrors human information exchange.

Of course, reality TV is “tightly produced and tightly controlled” (161) by offscreen producers who coach the participants in producing soundbites that heighten the drama and create new conflicts. The outside reporting on reality TV often focuses on revealing the “real stories” behind reality TV productions, and this trend openly acknowledges that reality TV is essentially a fantasy. Despite its fallacious nature, McKinney posits that this genre of television creates the illusion that knowledge is power and suggests that information-gathering will keep contestants safe and allow them to succeed.

In Chapter 8, the author contends that social media has allowed urban legends (contemporary-seeming stories with no concrete attribution) to proliferate on a mammoth scale. McKinney uses one of her favorites, the Poop Ziploc story, to illustrate the nature of internet urban legends. The story features a woman who has a successful first date and is then left in her lover’s apartment in the morning when he leaves to catch a flight. She uses the bathroom, and the toilet won’t flush. Having left poop in the toilet, the nervous woman fishes it out and puts it a Ziploc, intending to take it with her and dispose of it at her own house. She leaves a note thanking the man and leaving her number, then leaves the apartment. Suddenly, she is horrified to realize that she left the Ziploc with the poop right next to the note. She tries to reenter the apartment, but the door is locked, and she has to leave, knowing that she left an inexplicable bag of feces next to her note.

This story was presented to McKinney on her podcast Normal Gossip and was immediately flagged by listeners as an urban legend. Upon further research, they found that the person who submitted it had heard it as thirdhand gossip (friend of a friend of a friend) and was convinced that the story was genuine. They realized that this piece of gossip had been repeated in different forms since the early 2000s. In this way, the urban legend mirrors earlier examples of unsourced but persistent stories, usually referred to as folktales or fairy-tales. Urban legends and folk stories are often told to entertain, but they also provide morals or warn of dangers, and they usually evoke strong emotions such as disgust, fear, sympathy, or anger in order to emotionally imprint socially important lessons.

Rumors and gossip also form the basis for conspiracy theories. Many political figures, since the beginning of recorded public history, dealt with rumors around their fitness to rule. Augustus Caesar was suspected of sleeping with his uncle, Julius Caesar, and American president John Adams was rumored to be partial to England. John F. Kennedy was a notorious subject of gossip because of his many semi-public affairs and because he was the nation’s first Catholic president. McKinney points out that widespread anxieties tend to fuel conspiracies and gossip about national figures. A rumor that Hillary Clinton threw a lamp at President Bill Clinton while they lived in the White House has swirled, unsubstantiated, for more than 30 years. This rumor was a sign of anxiety that Hillary, an openly ambitious and politically savvy woman, was planning to run for president herself. McKinney points out that the White House, in trying to quash the rumor, actually fanned the flames by allowing the gossipers to accuse them of a government cover-up. In yet another example, President Barack Obama, accused by then-media-figure Donald Trump of not being a US citizen, was unable to dispel that rumor even after presenting his birth certificate, because the true anxiety in certain facets of the public stemmed from racist dislike of having a Black president in the United States. McKinney therefore argues that conspiracy theories contain the same appeal as folk tales; they feature strong emotion, generate intimacy among the sharers, and address anxieties that people otherwise cannot voice. Like rumors and urban legend, conspiracy theories generate a sense of community in a world that can otherwise feel fractured and lonely.