Les Jones

News > Yesterday's Dark Parody is Today's Headline

Here's a blog item I posted on August 05, 2004:

Future Reality Show: Who Wants a Life-saving Organ Transplant?

It's a new low in reality TV programing:

A Spanish-language reality TV show is offering contestants an unusual prize: the services of immigration lawyers to guide them toward a green card for U.S. residency.

"Gana la Verde" (search) - "Win the Green" - began airing daily last month on KRCA-TV Channel 62 in Los Angeles. Owner Liberman Broadcasting also airs the program on its San Diego, Houston and Dallas stations.

What's next? How about "In Vitro," a new show where infertile couples compete to win a viable embryo and the services of a surrogate mother. Sheesh.

Seen today at the BBC via Drudge:

Outcry over TV kidney competition

A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a programme in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys.

Political parties have called for The Big Donor Show to be scrapped, but broadcaster BNN says it will highlight the country's shortage of organ donors.

"It's a crazy idea," said Joop Atsma, of the ruling Christian Democrat Party.

"It can't be possible that, in the Netherlands, people vote about who's getting a kidney," he told the BBC.

The programme, from Big Brother creators Endemol, is due to be screened on Friday night.

Again, sheesh.

Incidentally, I once saw a simple solution to the shortage of organ donors that just might work. Limit organ recipients to those people who had signed organ donor cards. That would eliminate the free riders who haven't agreed to donate their kidneys, but who are perfectly willing to take someone else's.

In Tennessee becoming an organ donor is as simple as signing the organ donor statement on the back of your driver's license.