EDITORIAL – “Survivor’s” next top mistake to prompt amazing race riots?

If it’s attention they wanted, they certainly got it. The producers of CBS’s “Survivor”… If it’s attention they wanted, they certainly got it. The producers of CBS’s “Survivor” recently announced that this season’s contestants will be broken into teams divided by race, pitting Asian, Hispanic, black and white people against each other in a competition for $1 million.

While some speculate the “segregation island” theme is merely an attempt to boost floundering ratings, the show’s host, Jeff Probst, defended the idea as “well-intentioned.”

“The idea for this actually came from the criticism that ‘Survivor’ was not ethnically diverse enough, because for whatever reason, we always have a low number of minority applicants for the show,” Probst said on CBS’s “Early Show” this week.

It’s one thing to recruit a more diverse applicant pool for the sake of balance on the show. It’s quite another to select an ethnically diverse group of contestants, then segregate them and turn them against one another.

The thing is, racism is still a very real and very painful issue in this nation. Exploiting it for the sake of television ratings is incomprehensibly disgusting.

The show’s creators have argued that, since its inception, the show has dealt with difficult social and political issues, and that they didn’t expect such controversy.

We’re not buying it, and neither are the New York City officials and civil rights groups who’ve come out against the concept.

Kudos to them for their outspoken response to such an appalling idea.

“Nowhere else do we tolerate racial segregation, and we certainly won’t stand for it in this battle-of-the-races scheme to prop up sagging television ratings,” E! News Online quoted New York City councilman John Liu as saying.

But what to do about it? Certainly CBS shouldn’t be forced to remove the show simply because it deals with difficult and controversial topics, especially if the contestants are participating willingly.

That’s not to say, though, that CBS shouldn’t make the decision itself to remove the show. There’s a difference between censorship and editorial review.

If CBS decides to go ahead with its irresponsible and insensitive programming, however, here’s hoping our nation’s television viewers don’t take the bait. Let’s choose unity and tolerance over such blatant racism, and show one another that despite the greedy actions of television executives, negative stereotypes need not survive.