Vicki Abt, a sociologist and author who lambasted the television talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael for coarsening America’s culture by sensationalizing deviant behavior and personal tragedies to boost ratings, died on Feb. 1 in Lansdale, Pa. She was 83.
The cause of death, at a hospital, was respiratory failure, her nephew, Steven Abt, said.
“The Shameless World of Phil, Sally and Oprah,” Dr. Abt’s vociferous critique of daytime talk shows that was published in The Journal of Popular Culture in 1994, was credited with provoking a degree of soul-searching by Ms. Winfrey. Within months, the host was proclaiming her wish to “disassociate ourselves from the ‘trash pack’” in the programming of her hugely popular syndicated show.
In the attention-getting article, Dr. Abt and her Penn State colleague, Mel Seesholtz, described the tabloid talk-show genre — the stuff of Montel Williams, Maury Povich and Ricki Lake, among others — as “exploitation, voyeurism, peeping Toms and freak shows,” presided over by hosts motivated chiefly by ratings.
Many of the supposedly everyday people featured as guests, the professors wrote, seemed like caricatures in “real-life soap operas” — unfortunate and improvident victims who were being publicly humiliated.
“Rather than being mortified, ashamed or trying to hide their stigma,” the article said, “‘guests’ willingly and eagerly discuss their child molesting, sexual quirks and criminal records in an effort to seek ‘understanding’ for their particular disease.”
Dr. Abt and Dr. Seesholtz added that studio and home audiences “consume others’ misfortunes without feeling any responsibility to do anything to intervene.”
A few months after the article appeared, Dr. Abt accepted an invitation to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and elaborate on her criticism, and Ms. Winfrey responded on the air that she wanted her program “to benefit the world, not belittle it.”
Although Ms. Winfrey continued to engage in more salacious topics — especially during the “sweeps” weeks that networks use to determine the next season’s advertising rates — she gradually began to emphasize themes of self-care, self-improvement and spirituality. Ms. Winfrey also introduced her influential book club discussion segment in 1996, often featuring works of moral uplift.
Even then, Dr. Abt told The Washington Post in 2000, Ms. Winfrey’s focus on self-actualization was popularizing a “ridiculous, naïve optimism” about easy fixes to “the human dilemma.”
“Most of us are mediocre at best,” she said, “average by definition, and being exposed to this nonsense makes us more mediocre.”
How much of the shift in tone by Ms. Winfrey was in response to Dr. Abt’s critiques was hard to assess.
“Oprah did pivot,” Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, said in an interview. “If we simply look at the chronology, there was a sense that Oprah cleaned up the neighborhood of daytime talk shows after Abt was writing her stuff.”
“We still have Dr. Phil, a perfect example of what Abt was complaining about, legitimizing therapy as a means of entertainment,” Dr. Thompson added, referring to Ms. Winfrey’s protégé Phil McGraw, a former clinical psychologist and self-proclaimed “life strategist.”
In 1999, Dr. Abt testified for the plaintiffs in a civil suit against the producers of another daytime TV talk program, “The Jenny Jones Show,” stemming from an episode four years earlier about secret crushes.
A guest, Jonathan Schmitz, who said he was straight, was reportedly shocked when his admirer turned out to be an acquaintance who identified as gay, Scott Amedure. Three days after taping, Mr. Schmitz fatally shot Mr. Amedure, and he was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder.
Mr. Amedure’s family brought a wrongful-death suit against the show. Testifying for the family, Dr. Abt said that publicly ambushing guests with embarrassing personal revelations was “good for show business, but it is undermining the things that constrain us.”
“I was surprised that there wasn’t a murder sooner,” she added.
Lawyers for the family argued that the show’s producers should have been aware of Mr. Schmitz’s mental health issues. A jury awarded the Amedures $25 million, but its verdict was later reversed.
Dr. Abt followed her journal article with a book, “Coming After Oprah: Cultural Fallout in the Age of the TV Talk Show” (1997), written with Leonard Mustazza, an English professor at Penn State.
She was also a critic of legalized gambling and state-sponsored lotteries. “They are always promoted with the idea that you’re going to win, when in fact your chances are slim to none,” she told The New York Times in 1989.
Isleen Vicki Abt, the elder of two siblings, was born on Dec. 9, 1942, in Brooklyn and grew up in Franklin Square, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Harold Abt, was president of a metal-castings foundry, and her mother, Sylvia (Marcus) Abt, ran the company office and served as bookkeeper.
Vicki, as she was always known, graduated from H. Frank Carey High School and received a bachelor’s degree in social science from Hofstra University on Long Island in 1963.
She earned a master’s degree in sociology from Penn State in 1966 and began teaching there as a part-time lecturer the following year. She received a doctorate in sociology from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1972. She took on emeritus status at Penn State in 2001.
She is survived by a daughter, Andi Auman, from a marriage to Thomas Jones that ended in divorce; a brother, Richard Abt; and two granddaughters.
After spending a month watching 60 talk-show episodes for her 1994 article, Dr. Abt concluded that many of the people who went on talk shows were troubled and had a deep need to feel that a broad audience cared about their problems.
The larger concern she was trying to raise about the medium, she told The Times in 1995, was the circuslike spectacle that defined deviancy down.
“You watch enough of these shows,” she said, “and you begin to think everybody’s sleeping with a chicken.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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