Rural Reality: How Reality Television Portrayals Of Appalachian People Impact Their View Of Their Culture

Appalachian people have faced stereotyping of their culture and region in popular culture, news media, and art for generations. For more than 150 years, images of the region have been extracted by outside media makers and disseminated widely, solidifying the “hillbilly” stereotype in the national lexicon. This study focuses on such images in reality television shows about Appalachia. It seeks to determine – through analysis of focus group interviews and personal reflections from the researcher (who is a tenth-generation Appalachian, and a fifth-generation Perry Countian, which is the community of study) – whether or not those images, and the proliferation of them, has an impact on the ways in which Appalachian people understand and accept their own culture. Connections are drawn between Appalachian images and the national and regional economy, and the ways in which Appalachian images have been used throughout 300 years of history in relation to the economy