Talk TV ‘Pollution’ Feeds Deep-Seated Need

So William Bennett is shocked - shocked! - to find sleaze in daytime talk TV.

Next thing you know, he’ll be warning us of gambling in Las Vegas, corruption in wartime Casablanca, or hypocrisy in Washington, D.C.

The former Secretary of Education and current national scold, Bennett not long ago mounted a soapbox to decry the “pollution of the human environment” such shows represent.

He was joined by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. Bennett has taken on gangsta rap in the past, claiming partial victory when the Time Warner conglomerate agreed in September to sell its stake in Interscope Records.

From Snoop Doggy Dogg, they’ve moved on to the likes of Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones and Montel Williams, a posse of self-righteous ringmasters to human weakness.

The Bennett-Lieberman plan: Start a letter-writing campaign and possibly fund radio ads aimed at “shaming” the show’s producers, advertisers and viewers into some kind of cleansing of their act.

Setting aside the issue of the twosome’s timing - like guests who arrive at a dinner party as dessert hits the table - at least part of their strategy is flawed.

If you can find a way to shame programs whose goal is to humiliate their guests and exploit their personal failings before a mud-thirsty crowd, then you deserve a higher office than senator or roving moralist.

Indeed, even as this was being written, the television showed Sally Jessy Raphael springing what purported to be surprises on her guests: confrontations between past participants in one-night stands. Here, dude, is the 17-year-old girl you impregnated; emote for us.

And there was Jerry Springer, one of the worst offenders, ending a show with a typically sanctimonious defense of his line of work. The program - which appeared to be a collection of fondly remembered confrontational moments; a sort of greatest hits of greatest hits - somehow led him to stand up for his ilk as the last vestige of unscripted television.

Like Raphael, who has called Bennett’s criticism “elitist,” Springer’s broader point seemed to be that shows like his are noble for giving the common man a voice. But the publicity freaks, emotional incompetents and just plain victims who appear on shows like theirs no more represent the common man than Springer does the common journalist.

Raphael, Springer and those who argue a similar line are the real elitists. To contend that their guests are regular folk is to reveal an awfully low opinion of regular folk.

Except for a few veterans who have decided that moving up to middlebrow is a way to separate themselves from the pack - Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, even Geraldo Rivera - the shows themselves are not likely to change.

But in the part of their campaign targeting the companies that produce and advertise on such programs, and the audience that watches them, Bennett and Lieberman are on to something. They paint with too broad a brush, true, and they’re a little too eager to demonstrate their own uprightness, but they are on to something.

It’s hard to imagine that top executives at companies like Paramount, Tribune Entertainment and Multimedia - to name three of the show producers that were singled out - swell with pride when they watch the parade of human folly their underlings are trying to sell to the public. Or that advertisers get a kick out of seeing their air freshener follow a husband, a wife and the hooker who came between them.

These executives are people with a stake in society and an image of themselves as responsible members of it. If enough partners in their golfing foursomes start pestering them to explain the point of a Jenny Jones program, then the change Bennett and Lieberman hope for may well occur.

None of the companies cited, after all, produces and distributes “The Lingerie Twister Hour,” though that would certainly be highly rated and cheap to make, too.

The audience, as well, may prove susceptible to the kind of public pressure Bennett envisions. People watch these shows for the same reason they tune in “Cops,” or read Ann Landers. It’s both entertaining to see other people behaving stupidly and reassuring to have one’s view of right and wrong confirmed.

Watch the audience at these programs. They are more partisan than the crowd at a football game, and the team they are rooting for is the societal norm. Bad boys and girls who appear before them are booed and chewed out; wronged men and women earn sympathy and support.

If members of the crowd can be persuaded that another one of the things society values is a more responsible airing of its dirty laundry, then they may well start coming down not only against the one-night lothario who knocked up the virgin, but against the educated woman who stands with a microphone before this hapless pair, profiting from their pain.