Why do television news directors air throngs of anonymous Americans hopping and hollering behind a reporter as he delivers a live dispatch from a crime scene or other news site? In contrast to nonprofit Channel 11–which airs prerecorded station IDs from calm, smiling citizens–Chicago’s commercial stations open a less quiescent window on the world beyond the news anchors’ sets. Does leaping into the frame of a live shot for a moment of airtime nourish attention-starved Americans, those who’d otherwise never be seen on TV? Or does the ritual appearance of these rowdy human moths console viewers–and advertisers–with nightly evidence of their own superiority?
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Springer defends his much-maligned show in Ringmaster! (St. Martin’s Press), a large-print, photo-heavy book he wrote with Laura Morton, coauthor of Marilu Henner’s Total Health Makeover, Joan Lunden’s Healthy Cooking, and Joan Lunden’s Healthy Living. More than a peephole, The Jerry Springer Show provides a platform for “a slice of contemporary life that heretofore [has] never been seen on television,” Springer argues. That vast wasteland out there is home to many folks, and Spinger is their honorary ambassador.
If Springer is mystified by his Oprah-topping coup, he’s clear about the moral superiority of his unstaged fights over the slick “fictional violence” seen in movies and prime-time TV. “There is nothing, I repeat, nothing, at all enticing or attractive about the behavior you see on my show,” he writes. “Do I think it’s a good idea to punch someone in the face?” Springer said to me during a phone interview. “No. You can interview everyone on the planet earth and you will never ever find a human being that would say I’d ever hit them. I’ve never hit a human being in my life. I never slapped my daughter. I never got into a fistfight as a kid. I just don’t do that.”
Tweaking the line between “normal people” and the rest of America is the subtext of shows like Springer’s, argues Joshua Gamson in Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press). “I like what talk shows make us think about,” he writes, while acknowledging that they “seem about as much about democracy as The Price Is Right is about mathematics.” By trolling for outrageous guests, suggests this gay Yale sociologist, Springer and other talk shows offer political platforms for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans–even if the ones who take the bait are not polished op-ed spokespeople. Gamson allows that “ugly, rude, peculiar people, especially on talk shows, do not make the best representatives of the argument for tolerance, acceptance, freedom, and rights….You know you’re in trouble when Sally Jesse Raphael (strained smile and forced tears behind red glasses) seems like your best bet for being heard, understood, respected, and protected.” Yet “almost everywhere else in media culture you are either unwelcome, written by somebody else, or heavily edited.”
“Trust me, I don’t want to talk about this either,” replied Springer.
