NEW YORK (AP) – Mine workers from West Virginia and Kentucky took their protest of the planned reality show “The Real Beverly Hillbillies” to CBS’ parent company on Wednesday.
“We’re tired of the negative image of the Appalachian people,” Tom Manuel, an underground electrician from Fairmont, W. Va., said outside Viacom’s Manhattan headquarters, where the media giant was holding a shareholders meeting.
CBS has “been on what we call a “hick hunt,”‘ added Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, “trying to find somebody that will take money and go to Beverly Hills to live in a mansion so that our entire country can make fun of them.
“We think that’s practicing bigotry. It’s hurtful and painful. It’s discrimination of an entire segment of our society.”
“The Real Beverly Hillbillies,” a takeoff from “The Beverly Hillbillies” sitcom that ran on CBS from 1962 to 1971, would pay an Appalachian family up to $500,000 to live for a year in a Hollywood mansion.
Union representatives met with Viacom Chief Operating Officer Mel Karmazin for about 20 minutes in the building’s lobby.
Viacom spokesman Carl Folta said the protesters were told that the show was ultimately the decision of CBS.
CBS didn’t attend the meeting, but spokesman Chris Ender said later that the show “is a concept in development. The network has not made a decision, and there is no deadline or timetable on the decision.”
Roberts said his union would continue to protest around the country until CBS withdraws plans for the program. He also vowed to stage civil disobedience actions, boycott the show’s advertisers and pressure local CBS affiliates not to carry the program.
People across the Appalachian region have been voicing strong opposition to the show.
Other major labor unions and 43 members of the House of Representatives from Florida to Texas also have asked CBS to cancel plans for the program.
“Every state of the union has people that are illiterate and culturally backward,” said Manuel, who came to New York with a dozen other union members. “But for some reason everybody thinks all Appalachian people are like that. We’re not. It’s a very rich heritage, and we resent the way we’re presented on national media.”
AP-ES-05-21-03 1628EDT
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