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Ask Springer if he believes, in his heart, that his guests are humiliating themselves, and he will call the question elitist. "If we think it's someone who we think didn't go to Harvard," he says, "all of a sudden we say, 'Oh, poor them! We shouldn't let them go on TV because they may embarrass themselves. They don't know what they're doing.'" As a general proposition, this kind of populism is dangerous and phony--there are lots of ways to make suckers of people, and just because they are adults doesn't mean it's right. But more specifically, did Nikki know what she was doing?
Springer says that since his guests are so eager to be on the show, it is unlikely that someone who is vulnerable will appear. "You gotta really desperately want to be on the show to get on," he says. "You've got to call; you have to go through interviews." Nikki didn't call, though, it was Rick--Chico's lover--who first contacted the show through the 800 line it maintains for would-be guests. Nikki was roped in later and only talked briefly to producers. Richard Dominick, Springer's executive producer, says the show protects guests by giving them a standard list of 25 secrets that could be revealed. "If they mark no to any one of them," he says, "even if it's not their secret, then we don't use them as a guest." Nikki was never explicitly asked about the list, though; someone handed it to her before the taping. Springer himself admits, "They see the list, but they never believe it's really going to be that."
Maybe the most important thing that Nikki did not know, and that Springer did, is that the audience would regard her with such contempt. "It's white trailer trash! I love it!" said Paul Unger, a farmer who had flown in from Oregon. An 81-year old grandmother named Sophie, who had driven from Indiana with her granddaughter, said, "I hope they fight. They better fight." Springer says the audience is not "laughing at" the guests. So it's a display of sympathy when the crowd chants "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" after a woman tells her boyfriend she's pregnant by another man?
Which brings us back to those children-to-be. Time and again, the women on the show are pregnant, sometimes several months along, but instead of being taken seriously, their condition is used to spice up the scandal--"Paternity results: I slept with two brothers!" The crowd roars when a pregnant woman socks somebody. Meanwhile, the important questions are hardly ever asked: Who is going to support this baby? How is he or she going to survive its parents' bickering and entanglements? With his approach, Springer fosters a reckless (and vile) attitude toward having babies, and the children of his guests will suffer as a result. This is a joke?
--With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago and William Tynan/New York