Society of the Spectacle

Sensationalism is nothing new in America. Jerry Springer continues a sideshow tradition that reached a height of popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And tabloid news programs such as “Hard Copy” fall squarely in a tradition dating to 1721, when Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, James Franklin, established the New England Courant, a newspaper that featured stories about sex, crime and politicians gone afoul. According to a writer for another Boston newspaper at the time, the Courant was “full freighted with Nonsense, Unmannerliness, Raillery, Profaneness, Immorality, Arrogancy . . . and what not, all tending to Quarrels and Divisions, and to Debauch and Corrupt the Minds and Manners of New England.”

People tend either to love or to hate sensationalist media, and David J. Krajicek and Joshua Gamson are no exceptions. Krajicek takes the more common, negative view. In “Scooped!”--a book that looks at the history of crime reporting and the influence of the media on criminal justice policy--Krajicek argues that we have been fed a dangerous diet of sleaze and shock that leaves us ignorant of the reality of crime in America. Gamson, by contrast, offers a more positive and surprising view. He finds something socially redeeming in TV talk shows.

The two authors do agree on one point: The level of sensationalism has increased dramatically lately. The brawls on Springer’s shows are, Gamson acknowledges, a far cry from the serious discussions on Phil Donahue’s programs of the 1970s and ‘80s. Krajicek, though he draws an unbroken line in crime reporting from the penny press of the 1830s to the yellow journalism of the turn of the century to “the tabloid TV-tinged journalism of the 1990s,” clearly finds the last decade particularly disturbing. A crime reporter for the New York Daily News in the 1980s, Krajicek quit in disgust in 1990 and teaches journalism at Columbia University. His book inventories the damage done by sensationalistic, incident-driven coverage, not just on local TV newscasts and in tabloid newspapers but throughout the media. “This has become an era,” Krajicek observes, “in which a continuum of topic and tone has linked the morning paper, daytime talk shows, evening news, true-life crime programs, sitcoms and late-night talk shows.”

As a result, we come to perceive as an encompassing reality the lurid events and senseless murders we witness and hear about on the shows. Krajicek offers as a telling example the coverage of the crack cocaine scourge of the late 1980s. With story upon horrifying story about innocent bystanders being killed or wounded by random gunfire, the news media failed to spotlight a key statistic for that period. The murder rate among whites remained stable, while the rates for blacks and Latinos soared. Noting that he, too, often wrote about “the aberrations--the murder of a doctor or a grandmother, someone who wasn’t supposed to die,” Krajicek says he and many of his colleagues were so busy tracking the exceptions that they missed the main story.

Amid constant hype about whatever newfangled horror the media is blowing out of proportion at the moment (preteen mass murderers, date rape drugs, carjackings, road rage), the true picture of crime in America gets obliterated. Krajicek points out that the rates in the United States for most major categories of crime resemble those of other Western nations. Our high murder rate is the notable exception, and the main reason, sociologists and criminologists almost universally agree, is the easy availability of guns, a fact that the sensationalist media alternately ignore and deny.

The talk shows that Gamson discusses appear, on casual viewing, to have even less positive value than the crime coverage that Krajicek decries. Indeed, the shows seem especially blameworthy when it comes to the central concern of Gamson’s book--their portrayal of gays and lesbians. With especially blameworthy when it comes to the central concern of Gamson’s book--their portrayal of gays and lesbians. With their penchant for booking homosexual guests who dress and act as outlandishly stereotypical as possible--hyper-effeminate men, ferocious women--talk shows of the 1990s would seem to harm the cause of gay acceptance. These are not programs in which appealing spokespeople from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination impart prejudice-busting facts and figures. They are programs in which, to take examples Gamson cites, a loudmouthed lesbian says she doesn’t care about her teenage daughter’s suicide attempts, audience members (planted by the show’s producers) accuse gays and bisexuals of spreading AIDS and, in what has become almost commonplace on these shows, men and women wound their heterosexual spouses with news that they’re leaving them for lovers of their own gender.

Yet by Page 4 of “Freaks Talk Back,” Gamson, who is gay, has confessed that he loves trashy TV talk shows. He doesn’t merely study them, he enjoys watching them and believes they have benefited gays and lesbians. A professor of sociology at Yale University, Gamson values the shows not in spite of all their fluster but because of it. Talk shows may feature odd and ostentatious gays and lesbians, but at least they give them a chance to be seen and heard. “For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility,” he argues, “whose nonconformity, even when it looks very much like conformity, discredits them and disenfranchises them, daytime TV shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation. It looks, for a moment, like you own this place.”

The question, of course, is whether the place is worth owning. Gamson’s research suggests it is. He shows that anti-homosexual sentiments seldom prevailed in the several hundred hours of broadcasts he analyzed or the 64 interviews he conducted with production staff and guests. On the contrary, he reports, the shows are pro-gay. To focus on the caricatures, as some gay activists and academics who study the media have done, is to miss the shows’ characterization of homosexuality as entirely acceptable. The lesbian mother, rather than being rebuked for her homosexuality, is lambasted for her attitude toward her children. “I have no problem with your being gay, but how can you say you don’t care about your own child’s feelings,” Gamson quotes a man in the audience; the audience cheers, as they do after someone denounces neo-Nazis who blame homosexuals for AIDS.

Some days, the shows go still further, officially proclaiming the normality of homosexuality through the topic they advertise in TV listings. An episode of “The Ricki Lake Show” was titled, “I’m Gay. . . . It’s Not A Phase. . . . Get Over It!”

When people confess their homosexuality to the astonishment of straight friends or spouses, the pro-gay message comes through in a more roundabout yet more powerful manner. The audience, the other guests and the show’s host all renounce the confessors, but not for homosexuality. They fault them for dishonesty, for hurting others by failing to ‘fess up earlier. “I have no difficulty with the fact that Steven is a homosexual,” says a wife on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “I have difficulty with the fact that Steven married me.”

Gamson demonstrates that even the most notorious confession in talk-show history was not set up by the program’s producers to mark homosexuality as deviant or disgraceful. That incident in 1995, in which a man confided during a taping of “The Jenny Jones Show” that he had a crush on another man, became the talk of the nation. In a subsequent lawsuit, Jones was accused of having so humiliated the object of the crush that he killed his admirer. But it was critics of the show, Gamson points out, not Jones or her producers, who exhibited anti-gay sentiments. They criticized the program not only for the “ambushing” but also for tolerating homosexuality--for, as Gamson puts it, “refusing the premise that the revelation of homosexual desire is shameful, that such things should be kept behind closed doors.”

On talk shows, homosexuality becomes more than merely allowable. It becomes a great truth that no one ought ever deny. Gamson shows how talk shows reinforce essentialism, the notion that every person has a single, fixed sexuality. In the United States in the late 20th century, essentialism has become the preferred explanation for sexual orientation. Advocated by gay activists in search of civil rights protection, scientists in search of a gay gene and liberals in search of a winning premise for debates with religious conservatives, essentialist doctrine envisions homosexuality as innate and thereby normal.

Sociologists tend to question both the scientific validity and the presumed implications of essentialism. Too-neat polarities like homosexuality or heterosexuality oversimplify and, in so doing, benefit some groups while further stigmatizing others. Bisexuals and transgendered people particularly pay the price. On talk shows, as in the larger society, they get scolded for refusing to commit to either heterosexuality or homosexuality and come off as confused at best, promiscuous cheats more likely. Gamson quotes Oprah Winfrey declaring, “I’ve always thought you were either one or the other,” and a member of the audience on “The Jane Whitney Show” chiding a panel of bisexual guests for “changing their preferences every day like they’re changing their shirts.”

Gamson is at his analytic best when he is teasing out the contradictions in people’s beliefs. In his respected first work, “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America,” he showed that fans envision celebrities as both regular people, much like themselves, and as extraordinary individuals, like the characters they play. In “Freaks Talk Back,” he points out a similar disconnect: people contending that sexual orientation and gender are both involuntary and elected. On the one hand, the hosts and audiences of talk shows argue that homosexuals should not be blamed for their sexual orientation; on the other, they condemn bisexuals for refusing to choose either heterosexuality or homosexuality and transgendered people for refusing to be either homo- or heterosexual and to make a commitment to a particular gender designation.

Unfortunately, when it comes to contradictions in his own reasoning, Gamson is less aware. Part of what he prizes about talk shows is that they accredit the views of everyday folk over those of experts with medical degrees, doctorates or religious titles. He celebrates an episode of “The Ricki Lake Show” in which “a Latina lesbian in pants who works in construction” outshouts a psychologist from the conservative Family Research Institute, “a credentialed white man in suit and tie.” And Gamson cheers that “attempts at offering facts fall flat” in an environment where the loud win out.

There is more than a little incongruity, however, in an academic presenting, in a heavily footnoted book published by a university press, an argument against expert knowledge. Gamson dismisses as middle-class bias complaints from media critics as well as from leaders of gay organizations about talk shows’ sensationalism, sleaze and reliance on bizarre anecdotes. Raucous spectacle, he insists, is a populist tradition deserving more respect. But what could be more patronizing of working-class and minority audiences than the presumption that cool-headed discussion is beyond them?

Gamson presents some of the best evidence I have seen in support of the proposition that trash can have redeeming social value. Too bad he undermines his own authority along the way by putting himself forward simultaneously as an expert and as an anti-expert.