Take the example of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, and picture a BBC3 producer, probably an Oxbridge graduate, congratulating himself on his ingenuity when he proposed to his masters a new way of feeding pap to the proles. The BBC takes teenage girls to the Mediterranean. It films them as they get horribly drunk, strip, vomit, grope, snog and simulate oral sex. 

Unbeknown to the teenagers, the BBC has also brought out their parents to spy on them. There is no point to the programme beyond voyeurism. The BBC doesn't examine the dangers of booze and casual sex, or celebrate the many attractions of booze and casual sex. Rather the sniggering commentator switches from enjoying the debauchery to condemning it. He giggles as the girls make fools as themselves and then tuts sympathetically as the straitlaced parents despair of their children. 

Needless to say, the programme is a fraud. No genuinely straitlaced parents would consent to putting their drunk children on television. Tellingly, the presenter does not ask them why they agreed to wash their dirty laundry in public, for proper questioning journalism would spoil the illusion, and reveal the series to be a freak show staged by calculating men and women who enrich themselves at the public's expense.  

Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents is television's equivalent of the stories that celebrities' agents plant in the press. They do it because they want their clients' names in the papers. The children and adults on the "reality" show do it because they want their faces on television. In both instances, the public sees a manufactured spectacle pretending to be real.

It still feels strange to write "the BBC shows drunk teenagers puking" or the "BBC films them as they show their breasts to the cameras" because I cannot shake off the belief that the BBC is an organisation with a moral purpose, despite the evidence to the contrary. It had better rediscover it soon, or one day its bullish populist managers will be as exposed to their enemies as the humiliated editors of Fleet Street are today.