Benefitting from Scandal

With the breaking story of Norte Dame’s football player Manti Te’o story and the power of anonymity on the Internet, one TV show can benefit from the publicity off the scandal—“Catfish: The TV Show” an MTV reality TV show.

The TV show, hosted by Yeniv “Nev” Schulman, helps people through the struggles of meeting and dating online. Most stories involve people who lie about why they can’t meet with the person they claim to be dating. The show uses social media to investigate the truth about the person’s identity. Schulman, himself a victim of online dating, was documented in the 2010 film Catfish as he interacted with a woman that went by the name Megan. The film’s popularity propelled the use of “catfish” to associate to a person who lies about their true identity. Since then Schulman along with film producers have gone out to help others in similar situations. Or as other have speculated to make “catfish” a popular term.

The show and its team, riding off the scandal coverage, are now the go-to-experts on the subject. Schulman took to his twitter account to reach out to Te’o as to try to help him tell his story.  Schulman even tweeted he had been contacted by a women involved in the story and even promised to investigate more. The Wall Street Journal, along with other media outlets, published a blog entry commenting on safety producers to prevent something like this happening.  Their suggestion: do your research, look for red flags and if it’s too good to be true it may be not be true. And after one quick Google search both Catfish film and the spin-off show come up as the top searches.

The question is whether the show can benefit from publicity and how long. The brand can survive as people’s interactions turn more online friendly. While the truth behind the Te’o is still unrolling, Catfish can surely benefit from helping news sources with first-person accounts of similar stories. The series still has two episodes left to air in its first season. The story now infamous had many people intrigued who have never been interested in sports.  Now Catfish will attempt the same thing. Talk about free publicity.

Both the show and film have been criticized for its lack of authenticity as every person who has been investigated agrees to come out and admit the truth. It does not portray the whole story or how hard the producers work to get the “catfish” to come out in the open. In December the show was picked up for a second season and if the Catfish team takes on the story, it would sure to help the show’s ratings.