After 25 years on the air, “The Jerry Springer Show” is still in syndication, albeit garnering much less attention than it used to. It’s as raucous as you remember, but lost in a sea of imitators. He’s 72 now and nearly as famous for other projects, including hosting “Baggage,” canceled by Game Show Network last year.
Perhaps lost in the sands of time is that Jerry once was an up-and-coming Democratic politician. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1970, but served as mayor of Cincinnati and eventually became a TV anchor who raised his station’s news ratings from worst to first.
He’s qualified to comment on politics and the Financial Times of London thought to ask him. His take on the GOP debates: “They ought to run a crawl along of the screen, [saying] ‘This is NOT a debate for junior high school class president.’ ”
And this: “Clearly they could be on our show, but now they’ve gone off the deep end, and we would start bleeping out some of what they’d say.”
Think about that. Jerry Springer, personally responsible for a good bit of the coarsening of discourse on television, has had enough. BTW, he’s not eligible to run for president, born in London to refugees from Poland. Not that he would want to: “If it was Springer versus Trump … you’d need to build a wall to keep Americans from trying to get out.”
I’ll close with a nugget from Jerry’s past. After being elected to Cincinnati City Council, he resigned after a raid of a massage parlor produced a check he had written for prostitution services. He won his seat back the next year by a landslide. Paying a prostitute with a check? Voters know smart when they see it.
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