Discourses in television competition programs: Survivor all star 2024 example

In the neoliberal era in which multinational companies operate, commercial media productions broadcast on a global scale play a role in building a social culture in which inequalities are naturalized and consumption is encouraged, and show a hegemonic function that reproduces the capitalist system. It is seen that the discourses in the media content aimed at legitimizing these negativities, and especially in television game programs such as reality shows, have similarities with social Darwinist discourses. Although the concept of natural selection in the theory of evolution has a consistent meaning in the context of biological science, in social Darwinist discourse this concept is the subject of political arguments that propose the elimination of certain subjects from society. According to the social Darwinist discourse, which depicts the social structure as an arena of strugle for life, "survival" becomes the duty of individuals and the elimination of those who fail is presented as a normal process. In reality show competition programs, where losers are eliminated in terms of a certain skill and winners are rewarded economically, competition overlaps with social Darwinist discourse due to its eliminative nature. In examples that take place in an isolated, stressful environment, the competition process represents a difficult reality to live in. Among the examples of reality shows, the Survivor competition program, which is broadcast all over the world, consists of a content in which the competing teams set up camp on a deserted tropical island representing the wilderness without satisfying their basic needs, they have to adapt to this environment, and those who lose the competition are eliminated from the system. This thesis study aimed to examine the Survivor All Star 2024 competition program broadcast on TV8 channel as a current and watched example of the Survivor series in Turkey with the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis method. The discourses related to meritocratic competition, eliminative competition, isolated tropical environment, tribal narrative, cargo cult, and offensive behavior identified in the program were analyzed in the context of the competition process, auditory and visual modes. As a result, the reality represented in the Survivor All Star 2024 game show plays a role in legitimizing the free market economy ideology of neoliberal capitalism through social Darwinist discourses.