“‘Trust the Process’: Reality TV, Cable News, and the Politics of Reassurance”

This essay examines “process” discourse and the politics of reassurance across the prototypically American media domains of reality TV and cable news. Using The Bachelorette’s 2020 season and CNN’s concurrent coverage of 2020s famously disputed presidential election as case studies, it argues that both broadcasts’ copious references to the soundness of the “processes” they purport to depict both naturalize and stabilize the tenuous notions of heterosexuality and democracy on which they rest. The two programs’ exemplary televisual “process” discourse reassures even cynical viewers that, though much of the pleasure US audience-members take in their broadcasts derives from the spectacle (or threat) of dysfunctionality, we can ultimately rely on the functionality of the systems that govern our lives. Not least, it courts the perception that television is the true arbiter of “the process,” and thus that TV itself deserves Americans’ trust—a vitally important impression to maintain during a global pandemic.