Is America running off the mouth?

Fathers who're dating their daughters' boyfriends . . . A schizophrenic who is stalking herself . . . Housewives who want to strip on national TV - you can get all the juicy details of these stories and more on your favorite talk show. But what's a steady diet of broadcast junk food doing to our spiritual health?

Everybody's talking at me. I don't hear a word they're saying.

- Harry Nilsson 

It used to be, if the flu kept you home curled up on the couch with a bowl of soup and a channel changer, and you didn't care for the networks' morning lineup of game shows or afternoon diet of soaps, you could always surf out in the twilight zone of UHF, hoping against hope to stumble across an old movie or rerun of "The Fugitive" (although episodes of "Perry Mason," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," or "I Love Lucy" would also do in a pinch).

Today, however, Ted Turner and the American Movie Channel seem to have corralled all the old flicks worth seeing, and the best of the reruns have found a home on "Nick at Night." So what is the prisoner of daytime television left with? What fills the cable slots stretching from sunrise to sunset? Talk, that's what. On television and radio the talk show is ubiquitous. At any given moment you can surf the 50-odd channels available on cable or slide up and down the AM dial and your thumb won't get very tired before you hit a talk show of one type or another. In the last several years the talk-show format has mushroomed, gaining tremendous popularity and influence.

Are talk shows popular? In a story last summer on the introduction of a new, all-talk cable network (America's Talking), The Christian Science Monitor reported that there were already 25 daytime talk shows on television, a number that continues to grow as talk shows prove to be one of the cheapest ways of drawing audiences and filling programming slots. For not only is cable overflowing with a new generation of Phil, Oprah, and (ugh!) Geraldo copycats, but also in the last few years a veritable rainbow of folks - including Jesse Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Brown, and Ron Reagan, Jr., to name a few - have tried out the talk-show format, while political talk shows such as "The McLaughlin Group" have proven so popular that they've generated their own spin-offs in the likes of "Crossfire" and "The Capitol Gang."

Meanwhile, over in radio land Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern lead a crop of better than 850 talk shows spanning the AM and FM dials. And while all this talk may be cheap for the networks, it has clearly made multimillionaires and media moguls of Phil, Oprah, Rush, Howard, and a growing band of others. But of course the real sign of their popularity is that there are now TV shows about talk shows, with NBC's "Frasier" focusing on a Seattle radio talk-show host and the cable network E!'s "Talk Soup" offering a daily review of the best and worst clips from daytime talk.

And what about the growing influence of talk shows? During the 1992 elections Ross Perot soon discovered the advantages talk shows offered presidential candidates - cheap access to large audiences for more than just a few sound-bite seconds, and moderators offering the frothiest of questions - so he started a trend by appearing early and often on CNN's "Larry King Live." Nearly all the highlights of Perot's Cheshire cat candidacy (now you see it, now you don't) took place on that particular talk show, making him its second most popular guest (right after Kermit the Frog).

But the other candidates weren't far behind, and before long George Bush was also popping up on King's show and chatting with the "Today" show's Katie Couric, while Bill Clinton dropped in on Phil, answered questions for MTV, and blew a little sax for Arsenio. Before you could say "station break," talk shows had replaced the network news as the nation's prime access to presidential candidates. Like his hero Jack Kennedy, candidate Clinton may have benefited most from this outreach to TV's younger and more politically alienated audience; but President Clinton has probably often wished that the chat on radio talk shows would stop altogether. For the mostly conservative 850-plus radio talk shows, led and embodied by Rush Limbaugh and his better than 20 million fans (affectionately known as "Dittoheads"), have attacked Clinton on everything from health care to the crime bill. And while Limbaugh may be kidding when he describes himself as the "most dangerous man in America," it is interesting to note that his second book, See, I Told You (Simon & Schuster, 1993), had the largest first printing of any book in America and that he was one of the first speakers invited to address the new Republican congressional members when they arrived in Washington.

A number of positive things could be said about all of this talk. Supporters of Oprah, Phil, and some of their less-confrontational imitators argue that these shows offer their audiences and guests support and advice for dealing with a variety of personal and relational problems. Some (mostly the shows' producers and guest psychologists) also see a cathartic and educational value in guests processing painful experiences before a live audience. Meanwhile others suggest that radio talk and call-in shows have created a new interactive town hall of the airways, a place where the grassroots and populist voices of local talk shows can challenge the wealth and power of the networks.

Still, in spite of these glowing testimonials, there might be some cautions to consider before ingesting large amounts of these programs. Let me suggest some things I would put on a warning label: "Caution, this product contains more than the daily recommended dose of assaultive behavior and simplistic analysis. Extended exposure has inclined some viewers to act like irresponsible victims, while increasing the voyeuristic appetite of other consumers for carnival freak shows and colosseum entertainment. Caution should be exercised in the use or consumption of this product."

According to a January article in Time, newcomer Ricky Lake has become the hottest ticket and second-highest rated show in daytime talk by pumping up the volume of her program and encouraging guests and audience members alike to confront each other with an in-your-face brashness sometimes escalating beyond mere name-calling. While talk shows resembling "American Gladiators" have been around before ("Geraldo" and "Morton Downey, Jr." for example), Lake's sudden popularity and impressive numbers may have brought rudeness and an occasional chair-throwing into the mainstream. Time columnist Richard Zoglin notes that while Oprah and a few other hold-outs have chosen not to imitate Lake's approach, hosts such as Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, and Montel Williams represent a growing wave of increasingly confrontational programs. As a matter of fact, the emotional pitch has been turned up so high that a 1993 New York Times article by Elizabeth Kilbert reported a concern among psychiatrists about the harm being done to guests who were pumped up in the greenroom, assaulted on the stage floor, and then dumped into a limo and sent back to the airport. This concern certainly seems validated by a recently taped episode of "Jenny Jones" on secret crushes. A guest who thought he was going to meet a female secret admirer was confronted instead with another man and was so upset by the experience that three days later he shot his admirer to death.

And this assaultive style has shown up elsewhere. New York Times reporter Richard Sandomire describes "The McLaughlin Group," which has become the most popular political talk show on television, as "five barking, squawking, ideologically split pundits who argue national and foreign affairs in a go-to-hell fashion that would have made Walter Lippmann. . .weep at the loss of any shred of political civility." And this pit-bull method, in which host and guests interrupt, harangue, and ridicule each other while reducing every issue to a David Letterman scale of 1 to 10, has made McLaughlin and his team wealthy, famous, and much imitated.

Meanwhile, a 1993 article in Time reported that much of the tremendous popularity of both Limbaugh and Stern could be attributed to their angry, assaultive, and bombastic styles. (Indeed, it's a curious fact that Limbaugh's own plummeting career revived in 1984 when he replaced anger-monger Morton Downey, Jr. on a Sacramento talk show.) These are the verbal Schwarzeneggers and Stallones of the airways, often appealing to the same audiences. Indeed, Newsday media critic Paul Colford argued that Limbaugh and Stern have found a voice and audience because they were "both ambassadors in the culture of resentment."

In a New York Times article last March, Walter Goodman criticized afternoon TV talk shows for transforming everybody into victims. "If everyone is a victim," Goodman argued, "no one's responsible." Certainly it is important to understand how persons can become victims of things that happen to them in childhood, or even later in life, and to have compassion for such persons.

Still, life is a bumpy, often dangerous road, and it does often seem that the pseudotherapeutic and confessional style of many of these shows elevate very minor scrapes to the status of catastrophes, encouraging us to see victims everywhere. But having a parent who has difficulty expressing love is not the same as being beaten by a violent alcoholic or living amidst the violence of war; and there are millions of physically and mentally challenged persons who are not victims at all, and would not want to be treated as such.

There are two significant dangers in sloppy no-fault sentimentalism that finds victims everywhere. First, if everyone becomes a victim, then we are in danger of losing touch with the real victims and with our moral obligations to offer them help. Second, when all people are victims, then they don't need to take responsibility for their action or inaction, not even when they become the perpetrators of new harms against others.

Finally, there seems to be more than a little voyeurism in these daytime talk shows. At present, the 25-plus daytime talk shows, which Goodman argues are the "nation's picture window into domestic dysfunction," have a voracious appetite for the sad, strange, and salacious.

Thus, when they recruit candidates through newspaper and magazine ads, or by means of the National Talk Show Guest Registry (which reportedly has more 2,400 people with particularly juicy tales), they are often seeking guests willing to bare their distorted psyches or family history while acting out in unacceptable ways before the studio and home audiences. Janet Maslin of the New York Times noted that afternoon talk-show hosts first titillate their viewers with the guests' dirty laundry and then invite the same audience to hoot and harangue these guests like gladiators at a colosseum.

What seems particularly pathetic and offensive about this practice is the fact that so many of these guests are people with limited skills or resources, people who might be seduced into an emotional striptease by the cost of a ticket to Chicago or New York. As the January article in Time reported, "These are guests who come out of the vast expanse of anonymous Middle America, from trailer parks to ghettos, that TV has rarely shown so unvarnished."

Maybe the vulgarity of this voyeurism is what led some Canadian comics to pose as husbands who sleep with their baby-sitters on a recent Jerry Springer episode and - much to Springer's chagrin - to expose the farce of it all. One does wonder why anybody would be watching such a program in the first place.

I'm not recommending the elimination of TV and radio talk shows or even that people stop watching them entirely. Instead, let me suggest that if these programs do represent a new form of backyard discussions or town-hall meetings, we need to be aware of some disturbing trends in ways we are convening with one another, and we need to take some corrective steps. First, we need to drop the volume of these conversations turned diatribes. Last year the Museum of Television and Radio ran a retrospective on Steve Allen, the man who invented the TV-talk format back in 1954. It's hard to believe that Ricki Lake's screaming guests and hooting audiences are really an improvement over the wit and grace with which Allen moderated the original "Tonight Show."

And in the radio arena Jon Meacham suggested last year in an article in the Washington Monthly that Limbaugh and other strident voices on the air-waves could learn a great deal from the way Will Rogers used to call Americans to selflessness and consensus building over that same ether.

Years ago the American Jesuit social theologian Father John Courtney Murray used to refer to democracy as a sustained civil argument; and, while there will always be room for passion in these arguments, rude interruptions, ridicule, or name-calling must not be allowed to crowd out civility. Clearly many of the important issues facing us as a people are quite upsetting and frightening, but we can't allow blasts of unproductive anger or simplistic harangues to sidetrack us from these difficult and complex problems. Whether our town halls are in Vermont or on the information highway, there can be no screaming others down. Growing up in the McCormick household we were told never to say "shut up" to another person. This rule needs to apply in all our conversations.

Second, we need to remember that while juicy topics and simplistic answers may translate into better ratings for TV and radio talk-show hosts, the real issues in life, whether personal or political are far more complex and resist such easy resolution. Lifelong relational problems are not resolved through the catharsis of confessing one's victimization before the camera, nor can major social or economic difficulties really be reduced to a list of this week's winners and losers. Producers may demand that things be wrapped up before the hour comes to a close, but real life is not so cooperative.

And finally, the real danger with entertainment that seeks to titillate us with other people's dirty laundry is that they distract us from the real issues. As Janet Maslin noted after watching nine hours of talk shows in one day: "Only one topic is off-limits (on these programs): America's fascination with escapist trivia as a means of avoiding real discourse."

Indeed, one of the primary reasons the Romans used to have circuses was to distract the people from pressing social and political issues that needed to be dealt with. After all, conversation isn't just about what we talk about, it's also about what we don't talk about.

So if we are going to watch or listen to these shows occasionally, they need to be part of a balanced diet including articles, books, and programs that deal with more significant and complex issues.