Survivor cast adrift by top sponsor General Motors
Andrew Clark in New York
Friday September 1, 2006
The Guardian
A controversial American version of the reality TV show Survivor, which has drawn protests after splitting its contestants along racial lines, has lost its main sponsor - General Motors.
The world's biggest carmaker said it was ending six years' association with the CBS show on commercial grounds, citing a lack of product placement opportunities for cars or trucks in a desert island setting.
General Motors said there was no link between its withdrawal and a decision to arrange contestants into teams of Asians, Hispanics, black people and white people. A GM spokeswoman said: "When you have a show where the premise is people stranded on a desert island and your product is a car or truck, you run out of ways to integrate it in the storyline."
The company spent about $14m (£7.3m) on advertising during the show last year according to TNS Media Intelligence.
The carmaker's exit is a blow to the show's producers, who have been criticised for racial insensitivity. In a new Survivor series soon to be broadcast, four ethnic "tribes" will be set challenges with the "weakest" members voted off. In previous series the tribes were arranged by sex or age. The hit show has 17 million viewers and features contestants competing for a prize of $1m on the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
On Tuesday CBS's headquarters in New York faced a demonstration led by politicians and a Baptist pastor, Calvin Butts. The Reverend Butts told reporters: "At a time when there is so much division in the world ... and we have recently, in our city, experienced a number of bias attacks, it seems to me that CBS ... would be trying to encourage unity rather than division."
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