Rationalizing Moral Depravity: A Documentary Exposing JERRY SPRINGER SHOW Depravity

A recently released documentary worth watching focuses attention on producers responsible for putting together The Jerry Springer Show.  This episode of Hollywood Demons (“Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”) serves as a primer for rationalizing moral depravity.  The show also contains numerous comments by Dr. Drew Pinsky that include several troubling observations and a couple of bona fide moral boners.  

Springer himself, who passed away in 2023, is only briefly in the position of an interviewee, during which time he minimizes the impact of his decades-long program as “a stupid television show.”  He also distances himself from responsibility by saying he wasn’t involved in the nuts and bolts of production.  Presumably the star had little say about content and was “just following orders.”  Of course he was also cashing fat checks issued by the accounting department.  In another absurd rationalization Springer, who earlier in his career was the Democrat Mayor of Cincinnati and a regular news anchor, included himself among the “regular people” who were picking themselves (via ratings one supposes) as stars of the show as opposed to a couple of executives in New York and Hollywood.  In another clip he employs a “free speech” diversion as a defense for hosting  twenty-seven years of what TV Guide judged the worst television show of all time, thus conveniently confusing what one has a right to do with what is right to do.

The producers and other major players behind the scene can be divided into two groups, those who seemed hardened to any moral sensibility and those who felt pangs of conscience that prompted their departure from the show.  Among the latter group was an associate tasked with luring guests into ambushes via complementary airplane, limo, and hotel accommodations. The young producer quit after a “sweet” Southern mom was crying in his arms following a program in which her son callously insulted her.  That case of mistreatment was mild compared to others, including a 14-year-old sexually abused girl who was booked three times along with her abusive dad and mocked as “a racist family.”  That very popular formula likely did more than the Southern Poverty Law Center to spread the notion among low information voters that white supremacy was a threat to democracy.   

Beyond the typical shows noted above, Springer productions were directly connected to legal cases involving incest, murder, and suicide.  In 1998 two 15- and 13-year-old brothers in Hollywood, Florida mentioned a prior Springer episode as their inspiration for victimizing their 8-year-old sister.  Two years later a murder was committed by a man who, along with his new wife, had humiliated his ex-wife on the show.  Significantly, he later murdered his ex on the very day the prerecorded episode was broadcast and viewed by her serial abuser.  Still, the show continued.  Eighteen years later after a “secrets revealed” episode led to a suicide, NBCUniversal finally pulled the plug -- likely as part of an arbitrated settlement with the young man’s family, and also because treating people like dispensable pawns wasn’t sufficiently shocking in the age of mouse-click depravity.   

Naturally, many producers along with Springer whitewashed their product as “just entertainment”-- the word “just” providing absolution for the degradation of human beings for public amusement.  One of the show’s mafia-redolent producers proffered the excuse that a single TV show wouldn’t destroy the country, a ludicrous moral standard the COVID pandemic would pass with flying colors.  Burt Dubrow, the program’s initial executive producer, began his interview with an air of self-justification, saying he wanted to “set the record straight” and noted that the show initially had a Phil Donahue format, and what it later became was only discovered “accidentally” on an episode featuring white supremacists alongside black activists.  The predictable brawl produced a ratings bounce, and the rest is history. Throughout the documentary Dubrow appeared impervious to any moral concerns.     

Dr. Pinsky, an M.D. and addiction specialist, was regularly inserted into the documentary for comments that were sympathetic toward those being exploited but inordinately exculpatory with respect to Springer whom the doctor knew and confessed was “a hard guy not to love.”  In Dr. Drew’s estimation, Jerry was charged with the task of transforming “dog excrement” into “Devonshire cream.”  Apparently lost on the doctor was the fact that Springer, despite his Jewish heritage, regularly platformed racists and thus could hardly be credited for confronting anti-Semites.  At least Pinsky didn’t specifically give Springer “Devonshire cream” credit for his final thoughts segment at each program’s end -- an obvious face-saving device comparable to the mob’s use of a store front establishment to launder money obtained through extortion and murder.

The doctor’s most disturbing observation was the following commonplace:

Jerry always said that the show doesn’t create society, it reflects it.  And he’s absolutely correct; it is a hundred percent correct.

That someone as prominent as Dr. Pinsky could enthusiastically endorse one of the most frequent and mendacious excuses for debauchery since the advent of mass media was shocking.  And he said it with more intensity than anything else he observed in the entire documentary.  The only way Springer’s show “reflects society” is that its very existence reveals a powerful media group willing to exploit the nation’s most vulnerable and degraded individuals for profit -- other consequences be damned.  Stated otherwise, the show “reflects” a vanishingly small segment of society, a segment manipulated to produce contrived confrontations.  Most people would never do what Springer and company did.  Their habits don’t make ratings spike but do make the country function at work, at worship, through charitable activities, and as caring parents.  In short, Springer’s show is a proctologist’s view of society with fake tumors added willy-nilly to the radiological photos.       

 Having all but absolved his “hard not to love” acquaintance of transmogrifying society into a moshpit of degeneracy, Pinsky acknowledges that the show does, at least, “desensitize” and “spiritually deplete” guests, producers, and arguably the mob-like studio audience.  His sociological coup de grace, however, was this declaration about desensitization, also made with intensity: “They are human beings, and we dehumanize them.  That is on us, and we should look at ourselves very carefully.”   

Who is “we”?  I never watched more than a few minutes of Springer, and it was as an ethics teacher keeping up with the depravity displayed on the networks and MTV.  How exactly are “we” responsible for the “desensitization” (to say nothing of incest, murder, and suicide) perpetrated by Springer and his producers?  Earlier in the documentary Pinsky had opined, “Television doesn’t ruin society because we watch” -- a non-sequitur that combines an overstated premise with an ill-defined conclusion.  The doctor could at least have pointed to regular viewers alongside Springer, his producers, and television higher ups, then apportioned degrees of culpability.  After all, no one would watch the “dehumanization” if it weren’t first produced and broadcast. Those who quit the show clearly felt its negative impact on themselves, guests, and society, and they took responsibility.      

By placing blame upon an amorphous “society” or on “us” one fails to assign guilt where it properly belongs, typically with the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of morally vacuous individuals willing to do almost anything to make a pile of money or become famous and powerful -- including the “lovable” Springer.  

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.