Today’s Topic: Hosts Who Shirk the Blame

Jonathan Schmitz was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison Wednesday.

And how ironic that Jenny Jones, a former stand-up comic, was never funnier than when testifying in his recent murder trial.

How laughable to watch her on the stand dressed in angelic white and portraying herself, in effect, as a plodding 9-to-5’er who comes to her TV talk show with her lunch pail, punches in when the plant whistle blows and sleepily begins riveting on an assembly line of guests without knowing much of anything.

Duh!

Seeing her wrap herself in this woolly scenario to escape culpability in the murder of Schmitz’s victim, Scott Amedure, was the lone comical window in this otherwise grim saga of talk-show hell, one initiated by a joint appearance of the two men during a 1995 taping of the syndicated daytime series that bears Jones’ name. You know, the one she hosts, stars in and imbues with her swingy effervescence.

A series that she claimed under oath to be in a terrible fog about.

Titled “Same-Sex Secret Crushes,” the ultimately lethal episode found the gay Amedure hugging and publicly revealing his own crush on Schmitz, a man who said he was heterosexual and whose background neither Jones nor her staff had bothered to check before springing Amedure on him in front of the cameras and studio audience. If they had, they would have learned that he had a history of severe mental problems.

So severe that three days after the taping, Schmitz brought a 12-gauge shotgun to the mobile home of Amedure, who was only a casual acquaintance, and shot him to death.

At least the shooter announced in court Wednesday that he was “sorry,” a word yet to surface in the vocabularies of Jones and her associates at the Warner Bros.-owned show.

Schmitz’s diminished-capacity defense during his trial in Pontiac, Mich., rested on his claim that he was publicly humiliated and driven over the edge by the Jones taping (the episode was never broadcast). Still, the jury found him guilty of second degree murder (it could have voted for manslaughter or first degree), and on Wednesday he stood stonily before Judge Francis X. O’Brien--with Court TV and CNN beaming the moment to America--and heard his future.

O’Brien told Schmitz that although he’d kept his fragile mental state in mind in setting the sentence, “You still have to be accountable to society.” Fair enough.

So end of story? Not quite, for still to be determined is to whom the Jones gang will be accountable.

Will it be the nation’s Nielsen families? Will it be the multitudes of brain dead who, after all of this, still sit sucking their thumbs transfixed in front of her show and its mother lode of human wreckage?

Or will it be another jury in another courtroom?

It’s no wonder that Jones had pleaded ignorance when asked in court about the operation of her own show and the planning of the episode that, in effect, cocked the trigger that blew away Amedure. Still looming is a civil case that finds Jones’ show and its corporate hierarchy defendants in a $25-million lawsuit brought by Amedure’s family. Thus, being truthful and admitting even an inkling of complicity in his death during the criminal trial could have settled her hash in the civil proceeding.

The prosecution argued that Schmitz’s action was premeditated; his lawyers argued the opposite. Stories also differ as to whether Schmitz had been informed in advance by the Jones staff that the secret admirer he was to meet was possibly male. The show’s producers denied misleading Schmitz. Witnesses for Schmitz said he was expecting a female.

Although he appears gracious in the widely shown footage of his encounter with Amedure during the taping, Schmitz is obviously able to mask his true feelings at times, evidenced by his impassive response when sentenced Wednesday.

Not informing Schmitz and hoping for the classic, close-up mortification shot would be in character for the Jones show, given the public-embarrassment themes still in use by it and the shoddy talk shows of Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael and Jerry Springer.

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Yet that’s only half the issue. Whether the shooting was or wasn’t premeditated, and whether Schmitz was or wasn’t aware that his admirer could have been male, the Jones show in any case was running a red light without concern for cross traffic. In taping this episode without knowledge of the psyches of the participants, it was playing Russian roulette with lives, as do all shows that gratuitously muck around in exploitative, ambush-the-guest themes.

There’s apparently no criminal liability for that, but there’s plenty of moral liability, for if not for “Same-Sex Secret Crushes,” Amedure would be alive today and Schmitz would not be behind bars.

Also culpable, at least indirectly, are TV stations, such as KCOP-TV Channel 13 in Los Angeles, whose continued airing of the Jones show is an endorsement of its conduct.

The marketplace has its own moral code, though. “The Jenny Jones Show” has been renewed through at least 1997-98, according to Broadcasting & Cable magazine. And the trade publication was told by Dick Robertson, president of Warner Bros. Domestic Television Syndication, which distributes Jones’ show: “The viewers know she’s a terrific talent, and we carry that banner high.”

CNN’s “Larry King Live” had on the families and lawyers of the murderer and his victim Wednesday night. Schmitz’s parents blamed the slaying largely on Amedure, who on the morning of the shooting reportedly had left a coarse come-on note on Schmitz’s doorstep, after which Schmitz bought the shotgun and ammunition and sought out the man smitten with him.

But added Schmitz’s lawyer, Fred Gibson, speaking to the camera: “Jenny, you are responsible for what happened, and you should take responsibility for that.”

Also making TV his platform was Geoffrey Fieger, famous for representing Dr. Jack Kevorkian, but also the attorney representing the Amedures in their civil case. Fieger’s saber rattling about the courtroom massacre he planned for the Jones crowd was clearly the strategy of an attorney lobbying for a fat settlement without the mess of a second trial. But the words he spoke, while glaring at the camera, thundered with a truth absent from the talk-show host’s testimony in the criminal trial. “ ‘The Jenny Jones Show’ destroyed two lives here,” Fieger declared. “She did ‘em both, and nobody should forget that. Nobody!”

Least of all Jones, for whom one wishes infinite nightmares about Amedure and Schmitz, instead of blissful slumber induced by counting her ratings points like sheep.