By Joseph Perkins, San Diego Union-Tribune
June 1995 – The blood of Scott Amedure is on Jenny Jones’ hands. The 32-year-old Michigan man would be alive today had he not appeared on her tawdry TV talk show.
Jones used Amedure to humiliate another Michigan man, 24-year-old Jeffrey Schmitz, for the amusement of her national television audience. Schmitz was lured to Jones’ Chicago-based talk show under the pretext that he was to meet his secret admirer. He was shocked when Jones informed him that this admirer was not a woman, as he fully expected, but the homosexual Amedure.
Schmitz says he tried to put the traumatizing matter behind him, but was driven over the edge when he received an unsigned sexually suggestive note on his door. He confronted Amedure, who confessed that he had authored the note.
Schmitz went out to his car, pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun he purchased for the occasion, went back to Amedure’s home and shot him dead.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the folks at The Jenny Jones Show were covering their posteriors. “There was no wrongdoing on anyone’s part connected with the show,” declared Jim Paratore, president of Time Warner subsidiary Telepictures Productions, which produces Jones. “No one was lied to; no one was misled.”
Jenny Jones is hardly the only offender. All the talk shows pander to the basest instincts of the unwashed viewing public, putting before them in highly emotional and combustible televised settings, the mentally unstable, the sexually deviant, the intellectually impaired and the socially unredeeming.
Consider a sampling of the TV talk show topics for just one day this week. Ricki Lake did a show on women pursuing married men. Maury Povich countered with a show on family secrets exposed. Leeza Gibbons weighed in on sex and friendship. Sally Jessy Raphael went with repentant cheating lovers. And Montel Williams scored with a women in love with a serial killer.
Of all the possible subjects that TV talk shows could explore on air, and of all the possible guests Ricki, Maury, Leeza, Sally Jessy, Montel, et al. could line up, why these? Because these amoral hosts have sold their souls to that demon god Nielsen.
With the glut of talk shows on the air the 25 competing hosts are battling to win audience share. With an estimated 50 million viewers up for grabs, the talk shows are waging a “Schlock War” to see who will stoop lowest to get the highest ratings and command the biggest advertising dollars.
Well, its time that the “Schlock War” be put to an end. The entertainment companies responsible for polluting the airwaves with trashy talk shows need to be put on notice that they are expected to be better corporate citizens – a little less concerned with maximizing the bottom line, and more concerned about the public interest.
If moral suasion doesn’t work, then Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill ought to haul the talk TV producers before Congress, where they should be reminded that the airwaves are public and that the federal government has every right to regulate non-news programming that appears on public airwaves. 
