If in fact the media are truly culpable for violence (though I suspect the Mob's Hollywood-related recruitment boost likely plateaued in the '70s), why the need for those qualifiers: "It's not the right time ... put it on now"? I might be reading too much into the phrasing, but however genuine his emotion, Moonves' heart-cry captures perfectly the pointlessness of such media palliatives by building in its own escape clauses. In effect, it says that we in the media aren't to blame for these problems -- so we can't really do anything about them -- but we won't shirk our responsibility to ... to ... to do what? To act like we're doing something. To be inoffensive.

It's as if we're moving toward some Clintonian, ineffectual trade-off of free expression for security. No, not even security. Comfort. Quietude. I respect your feelings about guns, and you respect my feelings about vulgarity, and we both respect the other guy's feelings about tobacco or alcohol or sex, and in this potlatch of empty gestures we all tacitly agree that the primary purpose of the mass media, above all, is to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. The result's a trifecta: bad public policy, bad broadcasting and publishing, and probably ultimately bad business to boot.

Without defending Springer in particular, one can defend what his show stands for: a judgment-free ethos that has been better, not worse, for the overall media flow. I don't mean the argument that daytime talk shows have given disenfranchised classes a voice on the air. A lot of Springer criticism does smack of class bias -- one wonders why the term "trash TV" is so popular among white-collar elites -- but Jerry's hardly restored the working man's lost dignity, either. Still, Springer is a product of a television era in which smart, often taste-free material can also move from the fringes to the mainstream if it can pay its way: where Matt Groening can move from the Doms-Seeking-Submissives classifieds' neighborhood to 8 p.m. opposite "Touched by an Angel."

This country in general, and in particular its art form, television, don't do taste best. We do vulgarity, obscenity, rudeness: Philip Roth, Robert Crumb, pre-talk-show Roseanne. Many of our more decorous high artists, like Henry James, left the country. None of this, of course, is to say that Jerry Springer is an American artiste, but God help us if we start relying on Barry Diller or Les Moonves to discern the difference. Springer's show is undeniably scummy, but it's like the bacterial scum left after you brew a good beer. That is, it's the unavoidable byproduct of ferment. Without that, you've got nothing but water and grain, which you may recognize as the principal ingredients of white bread.

salon.com | June 3, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon