Trash TV

The purpose of this research is to examine the phenomenon of so-called trash TV. The plan of the research will be to define the term and set forth the historical background and context in which trash TV has become an issue, and then to discuss its impact on television programming as well as the implications of trash-TV programming for the content and praxis of journalism in particular and for the culture as a whole.

Broadcast and cable television in the decade of the 1990s has been marked by a significant increase in the number of reality-based shows. Far from being confined to three-network broadcasts of fiction in the form of drama, comedy, and soap opera, and belonging to a different on-air exercise than game shows and variety shows (plus public television, independent stations, and one or two cable channels), today's television programming is on a 24-hour cycle of news, instructional, and informational channels such as CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC; Discovery, C-SPAN, the History Channel, and H&G (Home and Garden); and various sports channels. The reality basis of programming available on these shows ranges from instructional, historical, and nature documentaries to talk shows and panel shows.

Since the late 1980s and through the 1990s, reality-based programming configured, in general terms, as news, talk, or panel shows, popularly known as trash TV, has assumed a higher and higher on-air profile. While no single definition of the genre exists, it has come to be associated with sh

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tive of Geraldo Rivera's approach to talk shows after the 1988 Geraldo brawl, Young says: For the next eight years, Geraldo regularly led the lynch mob against a panel of deviates. Taking the central feature of American politics--scapegoating--and applying it to the talk format invented by Phil Donahue was certainly an innovation. . . . Sometimes . . . the show could be unbearably cruel. On "Teen Sex for Status: These Girls Are Out of Control," in February 1995, . . . a panel of teenage girls . . . refused to renounce sex and repent. The audience screamed at them. The girls screamed back. Several psychotherapists offered excruciating analyses. The mother of two of the girls had had no idea of their behavior and damn near went into shock, refusing to come onstage. Geraldo went backstage with a camera and interviewed her anyway (Young 87). The years 1988 and 1989 were foundational for Geraldo-inspired trash TV progeny. Over the next five years, talk shows hosted by, Sally Jesse Raphael, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Ricki Lake, Charles Perez, and Rolonda Watts dealt with all manner of topics and guests, probing revelation of traumas, desires, cosmologies, and political agendas. According to

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