2008 Woodie Awards
The Quad talks to television's Jerry Springer
By Nicole Fortuna & Chris Pierdominico
Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: Entertainment
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Springer: [...] Well there's not that much about television that gets me psyched (laughs). [...] You get energized by a live audience. That's what I like best, whether I'm doing "America's Got Talent," or even my own show, you walk out there and you got an audience going crazy, it's [...] pretty hard not to be energized when you [...] have that [...] live audience. It'd be hard for me to do a show with no live audience, just talking into a camera; that just seems so less personal.
Pierdomenico: Is there a moral limit to what you allow on the show? Are there any topics that your producers don't want you to touch? [...]
Springer: To let you know how it is done, I am not allowed to know what the subjects are or who the guests are, so I have nothing to do with what gets on the show. In other words, when I go out and do a show, they give me a card and on it are the names of the guests because I have met them, but that's it. [...] That's why my first question every segment always is, "So what's going on?" So, I am not allowed to be involved in who gets on the show, or what we talk about. I'm hired to ask questions that the viewer at home would ask, or you know, make a joke and try and be funny. Now, NBC Universal who owns the show [...] they are only allowed to (have on the show) outrageous behavior, or outrageous people. So if people call us with a warm uplifting story, we're required to send them to another show. We're not allowed to do any subject that (is) mainstream or uplifting [...]. They won't air them. So those are the rules.
Pierdomenico: I was just curious, do any topics that you get that are like that, do you send them to (The Steve Wilkos Show)?
Springer: [...] It depends what the subject matter is. Sometimes they'll get sent to Montel, sometimes they get sent to Steve or any of the other talk show hosts. It depends what the subject is. But we're only allowed to do the shows with behavior that is outside the norm [..].The people or the situation has to be outrageous, otherwise we're not allowed to touch it.
Fortuna: What was the most challenging aspect of your career in the spotlight, in looking at it politically, journalistically?
Springer: [...] The most significant job I ever had was mayor of Cincinnati, [...] and that was clearly the most important job I ever had because that deals with lives; that's not entertainment [...] helping the people in your own community. So that was a serious job. The entertainment, I can't tell you that anything was particularly challenging. I guess back when I was doing the news, I did that for ten years, I started this group called "Cincinnati Reaches Out.' This was during the eighties when they had the famine and the drought in Ethiopia and Sudan and we started this group, there were six of us, and we took medicine over to Ethiopia [...] the people there hadn't had rain in four years so not only were they starving to death, but there also was no sanitation because there was no water. So they were dying of diseases that we had cured in America [...] so we got the pharmaceutical companies to donate medicine and we brought, on that first trip over there, ten tons of medicine over to Ethiopia. Going over there and [...] living there for a time [...] we built a clinic there where people could get their shots. It was on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea [...] if you're asking what's the most challenging, that was (it), because we were not only in a foreign country, but in a life you couldn't even imagine. So that was probably the most challenging thing I had to face in my career.
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