I cannot believe this story, from the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 21 — The producers of a CBS reality show featuring 40 children living on their own in the New Mexico desert were warned by the state attorney general’s office while the show was being taped last spring that they might be violating the state’s child-labor laws, according to interviews with state officials and documents obtained Tuesday under the state’s open records act.

The show, “Kid Nation,” which is scheduled to premiere on CBS on Sept. 19, is a reality show whose premise is to take 40 children, ages 8 to 15, and place them in a “ghost town” in New Mexico to see if they can build a working society without the help of adults.

But after the production ended in mid-May, the parent of one child in the production complained to state officials that the children’s treatment bordered on abuse. Four children received medical treatment for accidentally drinking bleach, one child was burned on her face with hot grease while cooking in an unsupervised kitchen, and most of the children were required to work 14 hours or longer per day. They received a payment of $5,000 for their participation.

In interviews last week, CBS contended the children were not employees because they were not performing specific work for specific wages.

Well I’m no Business MBA, but it sounds like the children we paid 5,000 dollars to be on a reality show. That seems like pretty specific work, and 5,000 dollars isn’t much, but is, in fact, payment.

Anyway, that’s bullshit. Children that work in television have all sorts of rules that they have to follow. They have to get tutors, and can only work a certain number of hours a day, and are included in all sorts of other protections to keep them from being exploited, at least in a child labor context.

Can you believe this show? Hot grease? FOUR CHILDREN DRANK BLEACH? Alright. I can see one kid getting into the bleach, very quickly, when a PA’s back was turned. Kids are fast like that. BUT HOW BOUT WE PUT THE BLEACH ON A HIGH SHELF AFTER THAT! You know, just so the five year old’s throat doesn’t get eaten out by corrosive cleaning chemicals. Good lord.

And you should read the rest of the article. It’s all about how the state tries to visit the set, gets turned away, and then has to play legal volleyball with the production company over just what laws apply to the situation, and who has what rights, and who knew what when. By the time it all got sorted out, the show had wrapped and CBS was gone.

So yeah. Let’s not watch Kid Nation. We can’t encourage this kind of thing. Not unless we want to see a light hearted reality show one day about a group of children who work 14 hours a day in a meat processing plant.