Talk Shows: Why Jerry Springer Loves our Children

Talk Shows: Why Jerry Springer Loves our Children

Jerry Springer is one of the most popular daytime talk show hosts. Each day on the Jerry Springer show, guest talk about their problems in front of national television. Jerry Springer helps his guest work through their problems by adding in comments to fuel the argument. During the show, the audience is watching the problem’s unfold with a dramatic twist to the guest’s conflicting matters. A typical day on the Jerry Springer show is filled with cursing, shouting and fighting. The fighting adds to the affect of the problem and keeps the audience entertained. The problem with the Jerry Springer show comes when the youth of America watches the program after they get home from school which is around 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon. A show like this only promotes violence and even talks about sexual content. One example is why a woman cheated on her husband with his sister. That might sound odd or out of the ordinary, but it attracts peoples’ attention and even our children’s.

In today’s society, children spend a lot of time in front of the television surfing through channels to find interesting things to watch. George Gerbner, author of Television violence; The Power and Peril, quotes, “Television, the mainstream of the new cultural environment, has brought about a radical change in the way children grew up and learn in our society” (Gebner). Children should be learning new things everyday from school and parents, not from talk shows that represent the domestic violence. Violence affects children a lot more than it would adults because children are easily convinced and more gullible. Since children are easily convinced, it is more likely for them to believe what happens on talk shows is real life and that someone is not staging the show. When watching daytime talk shows, children are watching and learning the social interactions between people who cheat, fight, steal, and are sexually deviant. Over time children could start to believe that these acts of violence are the norm. Landrea Wells a student from the University of Florida studied children and television, she states, “The general concern about violence both then and now includes the fact that there have been consistently high levels of violence throughout much of television history. Children are more vulnerable to violent acts due to the fact that they are in early stages of developing behavior patterns, attitudes, and values about social interaction”( http://iml.