https://www.wfla.com/news/talk-show-host-jerry-springer-dies-at-79-reports/

(NEXSTAR) – Legendary talk show host Jerry Springer has died, according to a statement from his family shared with multiple outlets. He was 79.

Springer passed away peacefully at his home in Chicago Thursday, his family tells WLWT.

“Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street who wanted a photo or a word,” Jene Galvin, a lifelong friend and spokesman for the family, told the outlet. “He’s irreplaceable and his loss hurts immensely, but memories of his intellect, heart and humor will live on.”

Very sad.. So many people :(

Steve Wilkos says Jerry Springer kept his pancreatic cancer secret (https://www.thewrap.com/jerry-springer-steve-wilkos-kept-cancer-a-secret/)

Steve Wilkos says (https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64056492) he had no idea (https://www.etonline.com/interview-jerry-springer-didnt-tell-others-he-was-sick-but-was-saying-goodbye-says-steve-wilkos-exclusive) that TV legend, friend and former boss Jerry Springer had terminal pancreatic cancer (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jerry-springer-friend-bodyguard-steve-192059609.html) after he died at 79.

Jerry Springer democratized scandal and then exploited it (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/04/jerry-springer-obituary/673885/)

The talk-show host, who died today, defined the American ’90s—and predicted our current moment.

By Megan Garber

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OKRvpk4mfEsOBqNDXYg1h-Q6ck4=/0x0:2000x1125/976x549/media/img/mt/2023/04/SpringerPredicitons/original.png

APRIL 27, 2023, 5:02 PM ET

The chants of his name defined a decade: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”

Jerry Springer died today at 79. His most obvious legacy will be the syndicated talk show that bore his name—one that embodied the frenetic voyeurism of the American ’90s. Sex, affairs, secret children, incest, love triangles, love trapezoids, more sex, people wrestling and sparring and throwing chairs at one another: The Jerry Springer Show was the tabloids come to life. The program democratized scandal and then exploited it. It allowed its viewers to peer into the lives not of celebrities, but of everyday people. It was gaudy and sad and insulting and irresistible.

Springer’s show, in that way, predicted our current moment even as it embodied its own. It was TikTok before TikTok, Twitter before Twitter, the logic of reality TV wrangled onto the set of a talk show. The most revealing element of The Jerry Springer Show, though, isn’t its scandal-mongering. It’s that the show, like its host, had its roots in politics.

Springer was born in London, in 1944, to Jewish Holocaust refugees. After coming to the U.S. as a child, he studied politics at Tulane University and received a law degree from Northwestern University. He embarked on a career in politics: Springer worked as an adviser to Robert Kennedy and served as the mayor of Cincinnati in the late 1970s. He ran for governor of Ohio—but then, after that attempt proved unsuccessful, he switched careers. He became a reporter at a local TV station and rose up to become an anchor. In 1991, he debuted The Jerry Springer Show. It began as a political talk show in the Phil Donahue vein: social issues and current events, high-minded discussions of politics. It was, like most talk shows of that time, relatively sedate. It featured conversations about gun violence and homelessness. Its guests included commentators such as Oliver North and Jesse Jackson.

And then … the show evolved. Or, perhaps, it devolved. It maintained its talk-show format but changed the subject of the conversation. The show’s titles were tabloid headlines turned into hour-long melodramas: “I Married a Horse” and “I Slept With 251 Men in 10 Hours!” and “I’m a Breeder for the Klan.” The debates became brawls. The chairs on set turned into weapons. The audience cheered. It jeered. It signaled its approval of the fighting by chanting Springer’s name. Springer had tapped into an American market that can never be fully satisfied: voyeurism. In 1998, Springer briefly bested Oprah Winfrey in the daytime ratings. Later that year (https://buffalonews.com/news/in-ratings-rise-brawls-well-with-jerry-springer/article_a544b5c6-fc1a-5201-b649-e7400bb44352.html#tncms-source=login), his show aired episodes that featured none of its signature fights; its ratings plummeted. In July, it put the violence back in and topped Winfrey’s ratings once more. In 2000, Springer signed a five-year contract for a total of $30 million.

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.

When Springer’s show ended, in 2018, The Guardian proposed (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jun/19/farewell-to-the-jerry-springer-show-27-years-of-fights-bleeps-and-outrage) that perhaps “The Jerry Springer Show was such a relentless orgy of humanity’s worst impulses that audiences became too sad to keep watching it.” As the article went on to make clear, the opposite was true. Jerry Springer’s talk show had not become too tragic to maintain an audience. It had simply become redundant.

God has judged Jerry Springer for the sins of bringing that toilet of a show upon the World.

Jerry is now spending eternity in a trailer park full of halfwits who married their brothers or cousins, with Jerry himself forever yoked in a cold, aluminum double wide trailer with a 400 pound woman named Fanny who throws beer cans at him and farts that smell like mace. Jerry will spend eternity comparing everyone’s sperm to see whose daddy is whose.

Hell hath no furry!

Not a fan - a lot of it was staged or he took advantage of people with mental illness.

He won't be missed!

Ed.

My 'final thought’ on ‘The Jerry Springer Show’: It was toxic trash (https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/jerry-springer-show-impact-rcna82060)

By Robyn Autry, chair of the Sociology Department at Wesleyan University

Jerry Springer, who died from cancer Thursday at age 79, didn’t invent the sort of salacious spectacle he would become infamous for as longtime host of “The Jerry Springer Show.” But, as he expertly directed the show that aired five days a week for nearly 30 years, he became the most recognizable face of the genre. With his audience gleefully cheering on the trademark fights between his guests — chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" — the bespectacled, well-dressed Springer presented himself as a sober presence in the rowdy crowd, ostensibly pleading for calm.

But his show caused harm (https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/134rb7c/my_final_thought_on_the_jerry_springer_show_it/): both to the people he invited on to be mocked and exposed, and to the often-marginalized groups they identified with. His show even contributed to the increasingly coarse way we talk to and about one another. Though Springer expressed some reservations about his show’s legacy, it’s not clear he ever truly appreciated just how destructive it was, especially to younger viewers soaking it all in.

For a long time, daytime television had been the purview of melodramatic soap operas, game shows and talk shows, such as Phil Donahue’s, geared toward a discussion of politics and self-help. The Jerry Springer Show had political content when it debuted in 1991, but its host responded to low ratings by backing off those more serious discussions and transforming the program into a modern-day take on the freak show. The most socially marginalized among us, almost all of them from the working class, were subjected to the harsh camera lights and paid to expose themselves for the enjoyment of those watching in person and those watching at home.

Guests clashed over sexual taboos and fetishes, the revelation of affairs and their hatred of others because of their race, sexual orientation and gender identity. There were angry accusations, some teary confessions and, of course, those in the studio audience chanting “Jer-ry!” as if they were at a kegger.

Springer described himself as a ringleader. He said his show, which was syndicated by NBCUniversal Television Distribution, was silly and that he wouldn’t watch it himself, but he also defended himself against charges that he was a creator of gutter television.

But he was.

Like human zoos and their racist history of encouraging viewers to laugh and gawk, "The Jerry Springer Show" revealed less about the people on display and more about the host and about the viewers lining up to mock more extreme versions of themselves.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Springer insisted his show did not exploit its guests.

Springer said the show must be redeeming, considering that millions tuned in religiously to watch it. Some wondered if his show wasn’t just what we wanted to watch, but a representation of who we are. A 2015 article in Men's Health characterized him as a "contemporary P.T. Barnum who has done little more than hold up a mirror to society." Except it was the mirror inside the funhouse that provides a view that’s so exaggerated and distorted that it’s not real.

Classism, sexism, homophobia and racism are alive and well and a cause for concern, but Springer made a spectacle of those vices and made them laughing matters. Consider the October 1997 show titled “Klanfrontation!” which featured a chair-throwing brawl between robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members and Irv Rubin, chairman of the Jewish Defense League.

Or consider episodes like “Transgender Throwdown,” “Transgender Triangles,” or “A Transexual Affair” where a cheating fiancé affair with a transgender woman is exposed before she joins the couple on stage only to be shouted at with disgust and repeatedly asked, “What are you?” as the crowd cheers and pumps their fists as if at a sporting match. In fact, humiliating transgender people was a recurring theme on "Jerry Springer" at a time when public conversations about trans experiences were even harder to come by than they are today. Those episodes were especially harmful.

Over its tenure, Springer’s show was a dramatic rendering of what Deborah Tannen calls argument culture, which treats conversation as a war between opposing parties. It’s a style of communication that rewards aggression, exposure and attack. It also features highly emotional and divisive rhetoric that makes little sense but stokes fear and anger; purposely offends as a tactic to entertain and to punish dissent. Before such culture took root in legislative chambers, television news interviews and in our everyday public lives, Tannen notes its prominence on talk shows.

The Jerry Springer brand had an expiration date. After 27 years on the air, his talk show was quietly canceled in 2018. He thought his fans would tune in to see him dole out justice on a new show, Judge Jerry, but they didn’t, and the show lasted only two years. Public interest in Springer waned as the popularity of other, sometimes angrier ringmasters grew on radio, television and social media, and as content creators increasingly yelled at, doxxed and offended others for views and likes.

Springer once apologized for his show and its wider effects, but it’s unclear whether he actually believed there was anything damaging about his show on the personal lives of the guests he brought on or to the country as a whole. It was impossible to take him seriously even when apologizing. Maybe he was really sorry, maybe he wasn’t. But it makes no difference if he was sincere or not. The damage was done.

Taking on the persona of a TV dad standing amidst his young and rowdy audience members, the "final thoughts" segment Springer offered at the end of every episode was one of the most troubling parts of his show. He’d turn to the camera, offer some pablum he pretended was insight — something like how we should be careful about who we surround ourselves with — before signing off with, “Take care of yourself and each other.”

He would deliver those final thoughts and that signoff after nearly an hourlong spectacle of swearing and sobbing, fighting and jeering. That performance of seriousness was a harbinger for buffoonery masquerading as public discourse that would unfortunately become our norm.

Jerry Springer excelled at bleeping (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/jerry-springer-history-bleeping-bleep-121413537.html)

For 27 years, Springer's circus of sensationalism was a remarkably durable and bankable commodity (https://theconversation.com/jerry-springer-and-the-history-of-that-bleeping-bleep-sound-204669).

The Explosive 'Jerry Springer' Fight That Changed the Show Forever (https://collider.com/jerry-springer-episode-fight/)

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

HvjxMXfb1cI