IN DEFENSE OF TALK SHOWS

UP UNTIL NOW, THE TARGETS OF BILL (THE BOOK OF Virtues) Bennett's crusades have at least been plausible sources of evil. But the latest victim of his wrath--TV talk shows of the Sally Jessy Raphael variety--are in a whole different category from drugs and gangsta rap. As anyone who actually watches them knows, the talk shows are one of the most excruciatingly moralistic forums the culture has to offer. Disturbing and sometimes disgusting, yes, but their very business is to preach the middle-class virtues of responsibility, reason and self-control.

Take the case of Susan, recently featured on Montel Williams as an example of a woman being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. Turns out Susan is also stalking the boyfriend and--here's the sexual frisson--has slept with him only days ago. In fact Susan is neck deep in trouble without any help from the boyfriend: she's serving a yearlong stretch of home incarceration for assaulting another woman, and home is the tiny trailer she shares with her nine-year-old daughter.

But no one is applauding this life spun out of control. Montel scolds Susan roundly for neglecting her daughter and failing to confront her role in the mutual stalking. A therapist lectures her about this unhealthy "obsessive kind of love." The studio audience jeers at her every evasion. By the end Susan has lost her cocky charm and dissolved into tears of shame.

The plot is always the same. People with problems--"husband says she looks like a cow," "pressured to lose her virginity or else," "mate wants more sex than I do"--are introduced to rational methods of problem solving. People with moral failings--"boy crazy," "dresses like a tramp," "a hundred sex partners"--are introduced to external standards of morality. The preaching--delivered alternately by the studio audience, the host and the ever present guest therapist--is relentless. "This is wrong to do this," Sally Jessy tells a cheating husband. "Feel bad?" Geraldo asks the girl who stole her best friend's boyfriend, "Any sense of remorse?" The expectation is that the sinner, so hectored, will see her way to reform. And indeed, a Sally Jessy update found "boy crazy," who'd been a guest only weeks ago, now dressed in schoolgirlish plaid and claiming her "attitude [had] changed"--thanks to the rough-and-ready therapy dispensed on the show.

All right, the subjects are often lurid and even bizarre. But there's no part of the entertainment spectacle, from Hard Copy to Jade, that doesn't trade in the lurid and bizarre. At least in the talk shows, the moral is always loud and clear: Respect yourself, listen to others, stop beating on your wife. In fact it's hard to see how The Bill Bennett Show, if there were to be such a thing, could deliver a more pointed sermon. Or would he prefer to see the feckless Susan, for example, tarred and feathered by the studio audience instead of being merely booed and shamed?