All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture

2. Constellations of Voices: How Talkshows Work

0:. 2 Constellations of Voices: How Talkshows Work The productive instability of the talkshow is hardly an accident. It is a part of the industry 's intentionality in developing and producing "infotainment" for a multichannel media environment In which the spectator with remote control in hand is a "grazer"-a random access "player" who "interacts" with an expanded set of channels. With the advent of cable and the demise of broadcast scarcity, asserts Robert Pittman, developer of MTV and The Morton Downey, Jr., Show, diversification is the strategy. Rather than displacing any news programs, Downey represented the growing diversification (already achieved in entertainment) of the news and information genre. It was "one more voice." I Geraldo Rivera has said, "I'm Walter Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, Merv Griffin. I'm a TV talkshow host, an emotional man, a reporter, a journalist, a writer. ... I do good." He is all those things, he says, because "the world has changed" and the definition of the journalist can no longer be so narrow. Phil Donahue has called talkshows and the tabloid news programs "new sources of information," arguing that "more information , from any side, leads to truth."2 Geraldo sees the news becoming "more diversified, more democratic" with the appearance of his and similar shows, which pose a challenge to an elitism charging that such shows are not "real" journalism.3 Even the editor of the long-established Des Moines Register has confessed a degree of tabloidization, arguing that to compete, newspapers also have to seek a "richer mix." 4 As part of this "mix" strategy during his "loud" talkshow 's heyday, Morton Downey, Jr., saw himself as "a good old American hot dog" Copyrighted Material 63 64 « Chapter 2 among the "caviar." He accused those "caviar" hosts and guests of speaking "William F. Buckley English," 5 whereas he was " just the dummy, and the audience is the ventriloquist. They put the words in my mouth. I speak for them." 6 Phil Donahue confirms that his show's producers "look for novelty" and seek to "expand boundaries," explaining that talkshows "sandwich the Persian Gulf between the male strippers." He has reminded his critics, "I'm not the New York Times. ... I have to generate an audience." 7 "The Old Formulas Don't Hold Anymore" Donahue's remark begins to situate productive instability as an intentional talkshow dynamic. Novelty and the play with boundaries drive his production of an audience-the electronic media industry 's ultimate product-because his show is not the New York Times. He implies an institutional discourse from an inferior position: the N ew York Times is established in a way his program is not; the Times carries an ongoing, preconstructed audience sufficient to its success. Institutionalization here implies certain identifying stabilities- a distinctly bounded tradition and academically valorized journalistic practice-which, for the Times, have been productive. They assure its circulation, maintain its advertising rates, and secure its hold on the best "establishment" journalists and news sources. Donahue knows his show is different. It must "work" the new, the inclusive, the changing-in other words, the unstable-to succeed in the current media environment. His program must make every effort to "expand boundaries" in order to produce an audience and sustain itself. He must constantly tap and create shifting spectatorial desire and affective alliance. Yet it is significant that talkshow producers still incorporate establishment journalism into their practices in a further play with boundaries. Downey executive producer Bill Boggs, who said he picked the topics for the show, emphasized that he did not get them " from the Star or the Enquirer but from the front pages of the N ew York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post." 8 What here seems at first like a "high" rationalization fo r a "Iow" form could as convincingly be read as the talkshow's useful interplay of texts, voices, and social accents. Boggs Copyrighted Material ConsteUations of Voices » 65 himself furthered this boundary play when he characterized Downey's productive mix of journalism and emotion, anger and issues, affects and ideologies as "confrontainment" and" 3-D television ... rock-and-roll without the music," transgressive, youthful, energetic, tied to popular cultural practices.9 His new, hybridized terminology matches the program it describes and evokes a metaphoric breaking-through of television's two-dimensional frame. The iconography of sports, town meeting, and spectacle, modernist transgression and subjectivity, rock-and...