Kat's Pajamas

By Kat McGuire

I try to forgive Jerry Springer. Maybe he's just a regular Joe out to make a buck any way he can, like the pimps and prostitutes he displays on his show. But then I see he's doing an episode on mother-daughter porn, and my sympathy for the guy dissolves.

I became acutely aware of Jerry, Montel, Ricki and the rest of the crew three years ago when my family got a television for the first time. My mother would have been horrified to know the fascination with which I viewed my first talk shows. They were so deliciously dirty, so far from my own reality. I wasted many hours with Jerry and his menagerie, always with a sharp twinge of guilt that I tried hard to ignore.

What I didn't want to realize was that talk shows like Jerry Springer are essentially degrading and exploitative. We find humanity at its most desperate, and we put it on TV. We watch the people on these shows, call them trailer trash, ridicule their messed up lives or at least feel silently superior. It's nice to pat ourselves on the back for our comparative morality, intelligence or success, forgetting that if the dice had fallen a little differently, we could have easily been "Milky," the transsexual who was abused as a child and has now turned to prostitution. We forget that sometimes our virtue is really just luck.

One episode of Jerry featured a female escort who came on the show to announce to her husband that she was not only performing erotic dances for her clients, but that she was also sleeping with them for money. The husband seemed devastated. He screamed at her, asking how she could do such a thing when they had two kids at home. She screamed back, saying that she was just trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. As the two hurled vicious comments back and forth, the audience cheered. This is what we watch for cheap entertainment: human suffering.

I would like to say to Jerry that a few politically correct comments and a "final thought" chastising his guests is hardly enough to make his show an asset to our society. We really don't need to watch unfortunate people hash out their problems on national television. Talk shows breed little compassion and far too much disdain.

Kat Mcguire is a sophomore sociology major.