Turn on a talk show, any talk show. No, on second thought, don't do that. Use your imagination. I want you to see those smiling, eternally empathetic expressions on the faces of Oprah, Ricki, Montel, Maury, Phil and Sally. Look at those expressions until they sicken you. It's called Trash TV, and it's everywhere from Hard Copy to Eyewitness News.
Trash TV theorists, if such there be, postulate three principles. Number One: the low attention-span principle - if life is a highway, you wanna be speeding. Number Two: the shock 'em principle - if life is an amusement park, you wanna be on the coolest ride. Number Three: the people-are-stupid principle - if life is a book, you haven't read it. With, we get the prime directive of trash TV theory (the same one gotten by looking in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations under "Joseph Stalin"): "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
The point is that people need stories. They can't handle simple information like statistics. The number of people that died in Bosnia and the specifics of Bill Clinton's, LAW '73, budget package don't tickle your fancy half as much as the break-up of Michael and Lisa Marie. TV news shows and talk shows, both of which make a pretense of addressing important issues, are aware of this, and so they go out searching not for the biggest news but for the best stories.
While there is nothing intrinsically bad about stories, the problem arises when these stories become your reality. If you haven't noticed it, the TV news completely warps your perceptions of what's important. Maybe you know at some level that O.J. is less important than Bosnia. But when coverage of "The Trial of the Century" is all around you, it's easy to forget. You form an opinion on the verdict. You discuss it with your friends. Genocide somewhere in Eastern Europe isn't nearly this interesting.
Yet, after all, talk shows are supposed to be different from news shows. What's wrong with the stories talk shows tell? The people who watch them do not expect information. I assume they realize that they are watching a form of entertainment, yet I have spoken to many people who seem to believe that talk shows and talk show hosts are actually interested in bettering society, in dealing with issues, and helping their unfortunate guests. But regardless of this, the stories that talk shows tell warp any morals you may have preserved in this amoral wonderland. What news shows do to your sense of reality, talk shows do to your sense of morality.
On the talk-show circuit you see displayed the crudest caricatures of human beings from all across the United States. Talk show hosts take moral decisions out of your hands when they teach you how to react to each guest. When they turn against a guest or show him sympathy, his behavior has just been censured or sanctioned. It is easy not to stop to notice that the guests are cheating wives and husbands, prostitutes, male chauvinists, teenage mothers, drug addicts, nymphomaniacs, and gang members. Talk shows are conducted as if they were therapy sessions. They want you to believe that, despite the intitial shock you may be feeling, they are giving you a slice of life, that these people are just like you, that their plight needs to be understood. Talk show psychologists tell everyone from teenage mothers to drug addicts to people who are overweight by over 100 pounds that it's all right. It's all right.
On top of that, in the middle of the afternoon with little kids watching, people say the most vulgar, most disgusting things to each other, and someone goes to the trouble of bleeping out the curse words. Trash TV passes by the censors untouched, but an army of good citizens and concerned parents would go apeshit if a simple "bullshit" got on the air. Imagine what could happen to a kid if he realized that that sex-fiend junkie cross-dresser on TV actually uses the word "fuck"!
Now, many of you, if you have gotten this far, believe yourselves to be immune from what I have just described. You know what's really important. If you watch talk shows, it's only to laugh at the assortment of freaks assembled for your amusement. Yeah, right. And people watch soap operas to laugh at the bad acting. Oprah's laughing too, but that's because her ratings are going through the roof. She doesn't care why you're watching. All she knows is that yous're a sucker for a good story. And as for me, I'm just here to make you think.
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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