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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. This week will be remembered as a transitional one for television news and talk for the firing of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon on Monday and the death announced yesterday of former trash TV talk show host Jerry Springer, who had also been mayor of Cincinnati. We're going to talk now about a little bit of the history and present state of TV news and talk and how much it matters or doesn't to politics or American culture right now.

Our guest is Robert Thompson. He's the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University and the author or editor of five books, including Television's Second Golden Age, Prime Time, Prime Movers, Adventures on Prime Time, and others. Professor Thompson, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Robert Thompson: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can we talk Jerry Springer first? He died yesterday at age 79. Funny enough, I was looking for a representative clip of him talking to play in this segment. I actually didn't come up with one because all the TV obits are focusing not on anything he actually said like Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon in the coverage of their firings. Rather, it was all clips of fights on stage among guests or audience members, chairs being flung, things like that. Remind listeners or tell the ones who aren't watching TV yet during Springer's heyday, when and why was this show.

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, yes, you're right. If you listen to a lot of these clips, it's almost like listening to an old telegraph message coming in with the [beeping] kind of thing. Of course, you can't see the blurs on the radio. This show is a lot more complicated than I think it gets credit for and that people are talking about it in these obituaries, in that Jerry Springer, first of all, is kind of given the title of "Father of Trash TV," the person that helped bring down civilization as we know it. For one thing, Jerry didn't start this. There was a guy named Morton Downey, Jr., among others who, four years before Jerry even debuted, was doing actually even more mean-spirited kind of programming.

This was already in the air. When Jerry started his show, he wasn't doing this kind of programming. He kind of adapted to it as he was reading the tea leaves of the cultural ID. Whether or not Jerry would have done that show, that kind of programming would have happened anyway. He just got very good at it and he did it for a long, long time. TV Guide named him in one of their lists, the worst television show in the history of American television. That, my friend, is saying something because there's been some pretty bad ones.

Brian Lehrer: I think I heard today in one of the obits that Springer actually embraced the label, "Father of Trash TV."

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, he did, but he also talked about other things. This is what I think is when I said he's more complex than we generally discuss him. He did embrace that. I think he went to that with a degree of tongue in cheek, but Springer also used to talk about something else that I kind of bought his argument when I would hear him say it. He would talk about how he presented people who were completely unrepresented in American television. This is before the Internet. This is before most reality TV.

He gave a voice to a whole class of people who didn't have a voice on television. Now, the bad news was that he put them up like Barnum used to put up, the human curiosities as he called them. Put these people up for our amusement, our entertainment, and let's face it, for us to laugh at them and mock them. That was the bad news. The good news, though, that I think was more complex about Jerry Springer was that he really paid attention to the guests he had on. He listened to them. He asked them usually pretty intelligent questions.

He exhibited some empathy. He tried to get some kind of resolution. He was tolerant of the various people that came on there. In an odd way, and I can't believe I'm using these words in the context of The Jerry Springer Show, but there was a certain kindness and gentleness humming in the background while the chairs were falling down and the images were being blurred and the bleeps were happening. If you remember, he used to end each show with the "final thought."

It was almost like a sermon, a homily, what we should have learned like at the end of an Aesop's fable or something like that. Then he would end with his signature sign-off, "Take care of yourself and each other." Now, I know there's a certain irony that that statement said after what we've just seen for the previous hour was a little cognitively dissonant, but there was an element to that in this show that I don't think we get by simply looking at the outrageous clips, which indeed there are plenty of.

Brian Lehrer: Do other countries have shows like that?

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, certainly, Japan has been famous for-- Oftentimes, it plays in game shows, these over-the-top sorts of game shows. Some of which we have borrowed the ideas for. Reality TV, when it really kicked in, was based on programs that came from overseas. Survivor was not an American-born idea. That came from overseas. Big Brother, both of those two debuted in the summer of 2000 and very much became the flashpoint for the reality TV explosion that we are still very much in the midst of. No, we're not the only ones that do this kind of thing.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a Jerry Springer of today on television?

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, I think the Jerry Springer ethos has really spread across so many different parts of TV and streaming and across genres as well. If I had to look at what I thought was the most Jerry Springer program on today, I think it would be The Real Housewives franchise, which is spread far and wide, many seasons, many iterations, complete with the-- if chairs were falling down on Jerry Springer, Real Housewives. One of its most signature clips are the overturning of tables. I'm not going to say that the characters on Real Housewives learned that move on Jerry Springer, but they might have.

Brian Lehrer: Any Jerry Springer watchers listening right now and want to call and second that emotion that he had more complexity to what he was trying to do than just bringing down the level of everything for sensationalism and the sake of ratings? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or a little more on Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson as we talk to Robert Thompson, the founder of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. 212-433-WNYC. Let's move on to Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson. Is there any overlap here, by the way? Because one could look at the arc of daytime talk and the arc of cable news and say they've both been descending toward fight club.

Professor Robert Thompson: That's true, and I think you could also look at the arc of the culture in general. When I was growing up, all of the protagonists on fictional TV were essentially good people. The doctors made house calls. They cured all of their patients. The lawyers always won their cases. They were always for the people who were innocent. Then when we got into this new age of high-quality, sophisticated programming, it's unusual to find that.

Walter White on Breaking Bad, Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, what's his name, whatever his name is on Mad Men. These were all really, really bad people. They were, of course, showered with all kinds of Emmys and the rest. Yes, there is a general tendency toward an opening up, but that in itself is not categorically bad. Back in the day, I was also watching pretty much shows about flying nuns and talking horses and genies and suburban witches and all of that kind of thing.

There was no swearing. There was no way people really talk. For that matter, when I was first a kid, husbands and wives didn't even sleep in the same bed, much less people that weren't married. That's opened up and that's brought us some wonderful art, but it's also brought us a lot of stuff that would have never played before these years and that we probably wish weren't playing now.

Brian Lehrer: Peter in Jersey City wants to remind us of another part of Jerry Springer's career. I mentioned that he had been mayor of Cincinnati before doing The Jerry Springer Show on TV, but there's something that came after. Peter, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Peter: Hi, I wanted to remind you that for a season or two, he had a morning program on Air America call-in show. He was a really sharp, lefty thinker. That coincided with his time on Dancing with the Stars. I think that helped get them a bigger audience because he learned to waltz so he could dance at his daughter's wedding. His fans would not let him lose the show.

Brian Lehrer: Peter, thank you very much. As the TV studies professor that you are, you were following Jerry Springer when he was on a daytime talk. Were you surprised that he wound up on liberal talk radio, Air America?

Professor Robert Thompson: No, not at all. I think his politics were very clear. I think they were clear on The Jerry Springer Show. That didn't surprise me in the least. I'm still wiping the tear over that Dancing with the Stars so he could dance at the wedding of his daughter, but he got a lot of that tolerant progressive politics out in his show in the first place. By the way, he did a lot of other things. He appeared on The X-Files, The Simpsons, Days of Our Lives, and Austin Powers movie. Now that he has passed, I think it's reminded us how central Jerry Springer was to the American soul for a period, especially in the late 1990s and as we went on to the new millennium.

Brian Lehrer: Mia in Brooklyn has a horrific Jerry Springer Show memory, I think. Mia, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Mia: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much. When I was a teenager, I was watching. There was a couple that had rented, I guess, a camera. They had a VCR from a local store. I think it was a sheriff and his wife. The sheriff probably wasn't very well-liked in the community. I don't know, but they did an erotic tape, a personal erotic tape as a married couple, forgot the tape was in the machine when they returned it to the store.

The store owner spread it in the community. I guess that was a hysterically funny, wonderful story for Jerry Springer. The cameras from Jerry Springer Show hounded this couple. I just remember the anguish and rage of the-- I feel like crying just thinking about it, of the husband going after these cameras with his fist and the look of just, again, of anguish, and realizing that this couple-- he had destroyed the lives of this couple in their community.

I remember thinking as a 16-year-old, "Are they going to have to move? What's going to happen to their children?" Just the glee on Jerry Springer's face, "Oh, what fun," and just not thinking about what this does to people. I'm just one of these people. I'm an empath. I'm in my 60s now. I have thought, "What happened to that couple? How did they heal? How did they get over it?" Hearing that he was saying, "Take care of each other," seriously?

Brian Lehrer: Professor Thompson, do you know--

Mia: I hated the guy from ever.

Brian Lehrer: I got you, Mia. Do you know the particular episode that she's talking about or is that representative of a group of episodes where people would wind up like that?

Professor Robert Thompson: I don't know that specific episode, but it's certainly within the MO of The Jerry Springer Show. When I am defending Jerry Springer, I only want to go so far in that I think that might be a case. I'm sure there were other cases. Some of which we don't know about, some of which we have some information about where that show did have collateral damage.

There was a murder story that had come after an appearance on The Jerry Springer Show. He always claimed that it had nothing to do with their appearing on the show, but those kinds of programs do play with some dangerous sorts of things in that the people that are on them have to live on after the program is over outside of that protected universe of the audience and Jerry in the studio.

Brian Lehrer: Let's turn in our remaining minutes to the Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson firings. Obviously, we and everybody else have been talking about these all week. I'm curious from your vantage point if you see them as related in any way or a coincidence.

Professor Robert Thompson: The fact that they happened within 90 minutes of each other was really interesting. It's very tempting to think that somehow this is part of a bigger connected picture. There's some connection in that the big 24-hour cable news channels are competing in a very, very difficult market in that there aren't that many people who watched 24-hour cable news. Tucker Carlson was a big hit at three million per night. There's, what, 350 million people in the country and there's 160 million voters. It's very competitive.

CNN is desperately trying to shift some of their approaches under new management. Don Lemon was a casualty of that shift. As far as Tucker Carlson is concerned, I am not too confident that they are trying to shift their approach to things. I think Tucker Carlson, for whatever reason, and there are a number of logical hypotheses, had just become too much of a pain for them to continue to deal with even though he was their top performer.

Brian Lehrer: I saw that Fox's ratings in that 8:00 PM hour have kind of tanked in the few days that Tucker Carlson hasn't been there. I read that Chris Hayes, who hosts that hour on MSNBC, beat that hour on Fox for the first time in a long time this week. I want to really ask you about the larger context of that because cable TV is shrinking as a new generation cuts the cord or never has a cord. Does a streaming universe change news and talk? Does it change what we now call "cable news" in terms of the tone or anything else?

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, that is a really complicated calculus, and I think everybody is trying to work it out as we speak. CNN, of course, when it tried to move into its new streaming experiment, that turned out to be a complete disaster. Fox has got Fox Nation that's operating in parallel with the Fox News Channel, but streaming is a different thing than linear programming where everybody's watching the same thing at the same time.

You're seeing the same people in a lineup. Streaming is going to change that in considerable ways that I don't think we've, in any way, gotten to understand yet. It's in other important places. Not only do we have the news this week of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon showing us the mercurial nature of where cable news is now, but last night, James Corden signed off on The Late Late Show.

Late-night comedy, at least since the turn of the century, has been a very important part of the civic conversation, a very important part of the dissemination of news. The Late Late Show, which has been a franchise for many, many years, is not replacing James Corden. It's eliminating the show entirely. It's going to put something else on in a different format. The reboot of a show called @midnight.

That's beginning to make us question what the future is of cable late-night comedy, broadcast late-night comedy, which really did have a unifying factor to a limited audience but an important audience, and where that's going to go in streaming. There are streaming comedies, but they're different than what the same time, same place broadcast and cable environment provided.

Brian Lehrer: I want to give one of our callers a chance to get on here. Fatima in Manhattan, we're going to get to you in just a sec. Fatima was trying to get on in our first segment today when we were talking about Republican presidential hopefuls, not named Trump or DeSantis. One of the ones who we brought up was Vivek Ramaswamy, who's a businessman, who's now a declared Republican presidential hopeful. People are saying that one of the reasons that Don Lemon got let go from CNN might have been a fiery combative exchange he had with Ramaswamy on CNN just recently. I'm going to replay a 30-second clip of that that we had earlier and then put our caller on who wants to comment on it. Here it is.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Actually, you know what the funny fact is, Black people did not get to enjoy the other freedoms until their Second Amendment rights were secured. I think that that's one of the lessons that we learned.

Don Lemon: Black people aren't allowed to enjoy the freedoms as well.

Vivek Ramaswamy: I disagree with you on that, Don. I disagree with you. I think you're doing a disservice to our country by failing to recognize the fact that we have--

Don Lemon: When you are already Black skin and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me, but we're not. You mentioned that we have three different shades--

Vivek Ramaswamy: Don, I think we have to be able to talk about these issues in the open regardless of the color of our skin.

Brian Lehrer: Fatima in Manhattan, sorry, we couldn't get you in the first hour. Now, you got your shot. Hi there.

Fatima: Hi there. Thank you so much. I love your show. I listen to it frequently. I called in before. I was getting really hot like fire listening to that clip, which I had seen the other day. My comment about that. In terms of Don Lemon being fired, I don't think he was probably well-suited for the morning show. There might be other reasons why he was fired. There were some gender issues, but I don't think they rose to the level of firing unless there was harassment.

Specifically with that clip, what I find extremely problematic is you have a Black man who's a host of a show, and there's a guest who is saying things that lean into racist thinking in terms of whether or not someone can tell someone of another race, how they should think, how they should feel, what they should feel, what their people should feel. The guest could say whatever he wants about Indian Americans because I think that's his background, but he was speaking specifically about Black people and Don Lemon as a black person.

As these networks probably skew like CNN with its new leadership skew towards being more conservative, I think it's an inappropriate position to put a host in that he is supposed to swallow racism when he's experiencing racism or racially-offensive language and is somehow supposed to be mute. If his firing is linked to him voicing his opinion in real-time when he's experiencing being offended, I think that's highly problematic for CNN. That's my comment about that. My quick comment about Tucker Carlson, I'm happy to see him go.

I'm sure they will replace him with someone who's also problematic, but I see Tucker Carlson as being somebody who's extremely white supremacist, and he's dangerous. He's dangerous to people like me because I'm writing a book on racism. One of the things that I have to worry about is as he drums up people and other people on Fox News, drum up people to express their prejudices and their racism, it puts people like me in physical danger. Knowing Kimberlé Crenshaw, she has a bodyguard. I'm writing a book on racism and I have to worry about crazies coming to kill me.

Brian Lehrer: Not only that, I want to give you an opportunity since you brought that up to give your commentary on this one clip of Tucker Carlson, which for people who and a lot of people in the New York area probably don't watch the show. This is how far he went on his show. It was to deny that white supremacy exists in any substantial way in this country, or that it's a domestic terror threat. Here are few seconds.

Tucker Carlson: The whole thing is a lie. If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns or problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It's actually not a real problem in America.

Brian Lehrer: Which is why Putin allies in Russia said, "Where are we going to get our news now?" after Tucker Carlson was fired this week. He equates Russia and white supremacy as fake problems in the United States. Fatima, you get a comment.

Fatima: I think the new racism is to deny that racism even exists. That's where we are. People don't want to admit it. They don't want to have a fair analysis of what's happening in this country. Instead, people either want to engage in exceptionalism where we're not supposed to have any form of racism and it's not impacting every facet of American society and so we reject it.

I will say, because I see these things happening, this is one of the reasons why I decided to write a book. I'll just put the name out there. My book comes out next year. Race Rules: What Your Black Friend Won't Tell You. I'm not trying to plug it as much as to say I am tackling issues like white supremacy and people having those kinds of conversations, rejecting that racism is even happening, right?

You can have Don Lemon in his experience saying he's experiencing racism and wants to speak up. If somebody calls it out, the current go-to for many people is to say, "There is no racism. I don't have a racist bone in my body and I reject that." I find that highly problematic because we cannot get to any solutions if the people who have the big public voice on a Fox News network want to continually deny racism so that they can continue to engage in racism.

Brian Lehrer: Fatima, thank you for your call. Let us know when your book comes out. Professor Thompson, you'll get the last word here. Fox News over the last decade or so has fired Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, and now Tucker Carlson. I think each time, progressives cheered like, "Oh, God, that Glenn Beck, he was so extreme. Now, he's not going to be on anymore." Same with Bill O'Reilly. Well, who replaced Bill O'Reilly in that exact slot? Tucker Carlson. Have they gone from the extreme to the more extreme over the course of at least the last decade?

Professor Robert Thompson: Well, it's a complicated question, but you're right. They seem to keep hiring people who are going to do things that's going to almost get them fired but not quite. Eventually, they do something that gets them fired. They don't then replace those with people who aren't going-- Part of the architecture of what Fox News is all about is to continue to fill those positions with people who do that very kind of thing. Bill O'Reilly became untenable. He was fired. They put Tucker Carlson in his place. Tucker Carlson becomes untenable. My guess is that they're going to replace him with someone that's essentially a younger Tucker.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Thompson is founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Thanks for coming on with us. We always appreciate it.

Professor Robert Thompson: Thank you.

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