Art Bell’s episode features Big Brother contestant Brittany Petros (b. 1974), who reveals CBS’s heavy editing—like censoring the "chicken crisis"—and critiques viewers’ preference for relatable personalities over drama, while discussing her post-show plans and a March 12th seminar. Reality TV producer Burt Kearns, author of Tabloid Baby, traces the genre’s roots to Rupert Murdoch’s A Current Affair (1986), exposing ethical violations like paying witnesses ($40K in one case) and exploiting scandals, including O.J. Simpson-era celebrity chaos. He warns of desensitization, citing real-life tragedies (e.g., a contestant’s burns, a suicide after private video exposure) and predicts backlash when shows run out of genuine content, comparing Survivor to a "soap opera." Kearns’ book exposes how tabloid and reality TV blur ethics, profit from notoriety, and reflect America’s voyeuristic culture—raising questions about media’s role in shaping public fascination with spectacle over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours, from Guam, the island of Guam, the rock in the west, eastward to the U.S. Caribbean, in the Virgin Islands.
Actually, it's not all the U.S. Caribbean, that part of it anyway, the Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole.
This is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Mark Bell.
Good morning.
I'd like to welcome WBZT in Boynton Beach, Florida.
I'd like to welcome WAJRFM in Salem, Fartsburg, West Virginia.
And I'd like to welcome WMBA in Enbridge, Pennsylvania.
Maybe Ambridge.
Ambridge?
Ambridge?
Somebody will tell me.
Anyway, 1460 on the dial.
Welcome all three of you as we continue the drive toward 500 affiliates coming soon.
Well, this is going to be an interesting, different kind of night.
We're going to be interviewing one of our nation's great tabloid TV producers, reality TV producers, who's written a book called Tabloid Baby.
His name is Burt Kearns, and we'll do that in the next hour.
In a few moments, this hour, we are going to interview somebody that my wife and I fell in love with during a program that was very controversial called Big Brother.
I wonder how many of you remember Big Brother.
Some of you will have seen it only on TV, and you probably thought one thing about the show, and others will have seen it on the net.
My wife and I fell in love with the show, and we just sat and watched it on the net nearly 24 hours a day.
That was when I had not much else to do.
So we watched Big Brother, and we watched it on the net, and we saw just about every moment of it.
And my wife and I just fell in love with a little girl named Brittany Petros, the little pink-haired girl, the little green-haired girl.
She, the little runette.
She kind of changed a lot.
Her hair changed a lot.
And since we're going to talk about reality TV in the second hour, I thought it'd be very, very interesting to bring on one of its actual participants.
Brittany was, as far as I'm concerned, the star of Big Brother.
And the show kind of suffered after she left and a little before she left.
We'll talk about all of that.
There is, by the way, I think a Big Brother 2 coming.
It looks like CBS is talking about Big Brother 2.
So one of the actual participants in reality TV is going to be my guest in this first hour.
I think you'll enjoy Brittany.
She's really something.
But first, and this is really important, something came in five minutes before broadcast time.
And as usual, I sent it to Keith Rowland, who, doing the admirable, incredible job he always does, already has it on the website.
It's the goddamnest thing I ever saw.
Dear Art, I'm a local truck driver in the Salt Lake City, Utah area.
Today, March 1st, I was traveling north on Beck Street in Salt Lake City toward Woods Cross, and something seemed to flash through the upper part of my windshield.
I looked up and whatever was moving was no longer visible, but what remained was very strange.
I have enclosed seven small pictures for your inspection.
The one called Skyring 5 shows telephone poles and the top front corner of a semi-trailer in the bottom left corner of the picture.
These may give an idea of how far and how large this thing was.
I'm no expert at such, but I estimate it was about three miles to the north of me.
If you have any ideas about what this might be, I'd sure like to know.
I apologize for the low resolution, but I use a cheap little digital camera when I'm in the truck, and this is the best it will provide.
Actually, they're pretty good.
And he has sent us photographs of what he calls a sky ring.
And I think a sky ring is a really good description of, or as good as you can get.
What in God's name is this?
All of you out there, you help us decide.
It's a UFO.
It's definitely unidentified.
And maybe you can help identify it.
But it looks like exactly what he calls it.
It looks like a sky ring.
Anyway, sit right where you are.
Brittany Petros coming up.
All right, here we go.
Who is Brittany Petros?
Well, along with 10 other people, she, in her case at least, she gave up her job, quit her job, in order to go into the Big Brother house with 10 other people.
In a big reality TV experiment, it had been done all over Europe, and it was the hottest thing in Europe, and they thought they'd try it here in the U.S. And they did.
And Brittany was selected to be one of the 10 people who go into this house.
She was born in Robbinsdale, Minnesota on September 4th, 1974.
Now, I guess I want to start at the beginning how you were selected and what the selection process was like for Big Brother.
What was it like?
unidentified
Well, it happened a little bit different for me than it did for the other house guests.
Generally, what you were supposed to do was take a camcorder and videotape yourself, and then everybody got applications off the internet, and then they mailed in this videotape and applications.
One day I kind of just started work early and I was going to go to a movie and in the newspaper next to where the movies were, there was like a little ad and it said, do you think you could live with nine strangers on camera?
Well, surely, at this point, you knew a little something about Big Brother.
I mean, once you got that close to selection, I'm sure that you did a little research on, for example, what happened in the Big Brother houses in Europe.
unidentified
You know, I didn't.
You didn't?
No.
I really did not think this through before I went on it.
It just, I really, I don't know why exactly I told them everybody wants to know, you know, what was it that drove you?
I just did it.
And then when I got picked, we had nine days between being told we were moving into the house and moving into the house.
Did you go to your company and say, can I just have a leave of absence and come back?
unidentified
No, I didn't, because there was really high security with Survivor had just started, and it was so big that they were thinking that Big Brother was going to be like that.
And so we had a private investigator that actually called people at our work.
And a private investigator came to my duplex and was asking my tenants all these questions.
We were told that if we told anyone we were going on the show, we'd be disqualified.
And too many people would have known it would have jeopardized my chance of, you know, Well, you went into the house with Eddie, Curtis, Josh, George, Will, Jamie, Karen, Cassandra, and Jordan.
And so my question would be, if you rush forward to when you first entered the house, what kind of impressions, what was going through your mind when you walked into the house and sat down with all of these people?
unidentified
Well, the very first thing that entered my mind is it was a lot nicer.
The structure and the people were a lot nicer than I thought they were going to be.
I pictured like a dirty, scummy, you know, youth hostel type thing.
Yeah, I pictured like cement floors.
I mean, like I said, I hadn't researched it at all.
I just really, I just didn't think.
And I come in and it's, you know, bright colors and stuff.
And I was like, wow, and these are normal people.
Like, I thought they would have just crazies.
You know, I don't know what I thought.
And it was weird because the first night we all sat at the table and talked to each other.
And the person that I thought I was going to end up being closest to was Jordan.
Well, on Survivor, everybody had to have a plan, kind of a strategy, to win the game.
Now, in Big Brother, I'm curious, why did you not form an alliance?
Or did you?
unidentified
Well, I initially thought about it.
I mean, obviously, I went in there for the money and to stay.
And that's, you know, kind of a reaction that, yeah, you know, you're going to try to make friends with certain people and form alliances and nominate to, you know, the best of your ability to stay in the house.
But for me, it turned completely emotional.
And I ended up nominating.
I would go, and they didn't really show this on TV, but I would go into the redroom and nominate two people strategically.
And then I'd go, but I can't because they're my friends.
And so I would, oh my gosh, the poor redroom people were ready to kill me.
But I would change all the time when I was in the redroom.
And every time, I just voted.
I basically voted on who I liked the most, my friends, who I bonded with the most.
Do you remember the conversations going on about what CBS was going to think or people were going to think of CBS, depending on how they handled the chicken?
Listen, are people, how much like rats are people?
In other words, getting all thrown together that way, after a period of time, do some of them begin to eat each other alive?
unidentified
It's almost, I don't know if it's so much that you eat each other alive, you start eating yourself alive inside because you are so focused on maintaining your sanity that you just, you do anything and everything you can to not be irritated, to not be bothered, and to just deal because you don't have any other choice besides go crazy or deal.
So for me, it was very much turned internal.
I actually felt more stable and more healthy with Will and Jordan in the Big Brother house because I had a platform to let things out.
Well, those two that you just mentioned, Will and Jordan, they were both the antagonists.
Big time antagonists.
They really had things going in there, didn't they?
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
It was a nice outlet for me because when I yelled at Will, I got it out.
And maybe I got out frustrations on other house guests towards him, too, and he was a good, easy target because he was so obviously not nice, you know?
And therefore, how likely are you to be picked to go into the house?
So what do you think was the psychology behind their picking you?
unidentified
Well, after I got out, I found out that they had kind of already decided to pick me before I told them I was a virgin, because that's not something I said right away because I didn't want to be on the show because of that.
And she said, so they Still, they knew this then before the final final, right?
unidentified
Yeah, but it was kind of like icing on the cake, I think, because they had already liked me, they'd already ticked me, they'd already seen me on camera in my interviews, and then that just shocked everybody because I don't come off as a stereotypical virgin in someone's head because I don't know.
I'm not exactly sure what a stereotypical virgin is, but you know, you think of someone that's real timid or real, you know, religious.
Yeah, and everyone's like, what?
You're a what?
And it just, yeah, I mean, I kind of think that they probably, and this is just my own idea, but it's not so much the actual sex that they would want because you can't show that on CBS.
It's the sexual tension.
I mean, you look at soap operas, you look at, it's the maybe that gets people to watch.
That's all she seemed worried about, her image on TV.
unidentified
Yeah, but it was nice of her to do that because if Jordan and I would have done this, it would have looked really bad and it probably would have made viewers not like me and Jordan and it maybe would have saved Jamie.
At the time, that's what I was thinking in the house, and I was like, wow, she actually did something for my best interest.
Listen, why do you think the American public, this is what puzzled me, drove me absolutely nuts, the American public consistently voted out the most interesting, confrontational people?
It must have been driving CBS out of their minds.
I mean, they put in a certain number of very confrontational people, and you all in the House nominated them, and the American public, on a regular basis, voted out the most interesting people.
unidentified
Why?
Well, I think the most interesting people are usually the people that have the most out there personality.
When you have the most out there personality, you have the most people that come in.
I mean, if somebody doesn't do anything, how can you not like them?
Because they don't do anything.
They just kind of sit there.
So you're going to go towards someone that's a more obvious pick.
And I think that the viewers became identified with us on a personal level because we're not actors.
We're us.
And everybody in that house reminded a viewer of someone in their past or someone in their current life.
And, you know, Say Will reminded you of a bully that you hated growing up.
Here's your chance to get him.
Vote him out.
And in a way, you get, I don't know, pleasure, I think, of getting rid of the bad people.
And I think that it's not only the most interesting, it's, I mean, the most interesting to watch, unfortunately, are usually the most conniving, the meanest, because you're like, oh my god, I can't believe they're doing that.
Karen did some things on television that really surprised a lot of people in describing the troubles in her marriage and saying her marriage was going to be over and all the rest of it.
She also began to have some real emotional difficulties at one point in the show.
And you were there through all of that.
How close did Karen come to losing it?
unidentified
Oh, I think she did lose it.
I don't think it was close.
I think she totally lost it.
She, outside of the house, is much more stable.
I mean, that house was not something that Karen should have been living in.
And it's good that she got out when she did because she is so much more stable, so much more.
I mean, she's a completely different person outside of the house.
Yeah, and I guess they're going to use a different company to produce it or produce it themselves.
I have no idea.
But for you, Brittany, the question is, if you were producing Big Brother 2, had an opportunity to have input, how would you change the whole lash up?
unidentified
Well, one thing that I think would have solved a lot of problems was to let us see an episode once in a while.
So we would get the gist that it was whole conversations that were being shown on TV.
The big fear was editing.
And, I mean, we were so crazy in that house.
We were thinking that they would, you know, chop up sentences and chop up days and piece together things and make us say things that we never even remotely thought of saying.
And so, and the more reserved we got, the more the big brother people tried to make us, you know, say things we didn't want to say.
Like, we'd have topics for discussion.
You know, what do you dislike about your house guests?
Well, that just made us more withdrawn.
I mean, it was a big fight.
So I think the best way to get people to open up and be real is to get them to trust you.
And the best way to get them to trust you is to let them see how they're being edited.
And I think that would have made a world of difference.
If I would have seen how I was edited, I think I probably would have voiced a few more opinions because I did bite my tongue a lot in that house.
I mean, we all did.
And at certain times, as you saw, I just couldn't.
Well, now I remember you had an opportunity to send Josh a message, and you had been in a little, I guess it wasn't known to you at the time, kind of a tiff with George because George had his hometown folk voting in one way, and they had corporate sponsorship for the telephone calls and all the rest of it.
And I'm telling you, we were going so nuts out here, Brittany, that my wife and I almost hired an airplane to fly one of those banners over.
So then when you got out and you got to see all of this, you had an opportunity to give Josh a message, and you told him, as I recall, you could only trust, what did you say?
unidentified
I said you can for sure trust Curtis and Eddie, and I have questions about the rest.
And I was in a very difficult position because I had not yet seen the tapes.
I hadn't had the benefit of being able to watch the live feeds.
I mean, I left the show, went to New York, did a big press tour.
I hadn't even seen the show being out.
I have all my friends and family, everyone giving me their two cents.
And for everybody that liked one house guest, somebody else hated them.
And I couldn't get any information out of the behind the scenes people because they were all still working and they were supposed to be neutral.
And it wasn't until the whole show was over and Done, and all these freelance people went on to another job, then they started spilling the beans of stuff that they saw.
So the general gist that I got was pretty much everybody thought Curtis and Eddie were trustworthy.
And then I had, of course, my connection with Josh.
I know when you came out of the house, your mom said you were the most popular.
George had you voted out and described a little of what was going on in his hometown.
That got to you for a while because in the AOL interview, you were obviously pretty upset about that.
unidentified
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going to spill the beans about something here.
Oof, Josh is going to kill me.
When my mom had said that to me when I got banished, I wasn't even thinking about that.
Okay, I can't believe I'm telling you this, but in all listeners.
But when they announced my name and we got in the circle to hug, to say goodbye, I don't know if you remember, but we all individually hugged, and then we all got in a big circle.
And then I went to the door and he kissed my eyelids.
And I went outside and my mom was saying, George's family.
And I was thinking in my head, Josh just told me he loved me.
I was not, I didn't give two craps what my mom was saying.
And then I went to the live show and I'm trying to talk to Julie Chen.
And I'm like, what just, what just happened right there?
And so it took me, you know, and it's crazy because you add to that the fact that I hadn't heard noise and everybody is clapping and talking and just there was so much background noise, I couldn't even focus.
Like I couldn't even think of anything and then my mom, oh, it was horrible.
She'd always smile to the people she'd meet, and so does Brittany Petros.
She was a house guest on Big Brother, the reality TV series Big Brother.
We're about to have Burt Kearns on in a moment.
He turned down the opportunity to be the producer of Big Brother.
But boy, he knows a lot about reality TV, and that's what we're talking about.
Just a couple more questions for Brittany Petros.
I just couldn't leave it where it was last hour.
Britt, a couple of more questions.
I'd like your impressions of other reality TV, you know, like Survivor, for example, and The Mole and some of the other ones that are running.
What do you think about the whole craze?
unidentified
Well, I think what's interesting about it is that they're real people.
And so I think it's kind of cool.
I mean, it gives a chance for, you know, regular Joes that are nobody to do something crazy.
And with Survivor, I mean, who would ever get an opportunity?
I mean, the challenges that they do, being on islands, or, you know, I didn't get to see the first one at all since I Was in the house, but I actually met a couple of them and just, you know, I think it's great.
Where people would call, you know, and they were in danger of possibly, you know, they were lusting after somebody, and it was Bud's job to run out and talk them out of doing what they were about to do and remain a virgin.
unidentified
Well, now it's a really big deal.
If I ever do decide to not be a virgin, it's going to be this huge, huge thing.
I don't know if you got a chance to see her or not on Big Brother, but she was something.
Big Brother All right, coming up in a second, Burt Kearns.
And you're going to find this absolutely fascinating.
I'm sure she watch a lot of the shows that he's been involved in.
Tell you all about it in a second.
First, very quickly, for those of you who just joined the program this hour, we have a series of photographs taken by a truck driver in Salt Lake City, Utah that defy explanation.
They came in about five minutes before the show started.
I got them to Keith Rowland, as always, and he got them up on the website, boom, like that, at airtime.
You can only call it a sky ring.
That's what the trucker who took the pictures calls it, a sky ring.
I have no idea what the hell this thing is, but I would like your help.
It's on my website now, and these are some of the most amazing pictures you've ever seen.
This thing has form.
What could it possibly be?
On my website, if you go to What's New, it'll say UFO in Salt Lake City.
Follow the track, and there'll be seven photographs of this incredible thing.
This really, really weird sky ring.
And any help we can get from you would be appreciated.
Obviously, taken from all the different angles, well, you go be the judge yourself.
Coming now, Bert Currence.
He's a veteran television producer, writer, journalist, who's written the story of reality television in more ways than one.
The author of the recent book Tabloid Baby, That's His Baby, an uncensored history of tabloid television.
He's also the executive producer and creator of Court TV's The Secret History of the Other Hollywood and The Secret History of Rock and Roll with Gene Simmons, documentary specials, producer and co-writer of the two-hour documentary Death of a Beetle for Court TV, producer and writer of one-hour episodes of the network's Mugshots series, including the recent Puff Daddy Rapper Under Fire.
He's also been a contributing producer to VH1 Confidential.
This just goes on and on.
Who killed John Lennon?
Who killed Bob Marley?
Is Tubac Shakur Alive segments, among others, executive producer, creator, and writer of Hollywood Animal Crusaders, a documentary special featuring John, Travolta, and Cher for Discovery Channel's Animal Planet Network, producer and developer of Miramax's The Best Money Can Buy, co-producer of the HBO documentary Panic with Kim Bessinger.
I get panic attacks, as she does.
Ripley's, believe it or not, a writer for Ripley's, believe it or not, writer of Fox's Bizarre World Specials, producer and writer for the NBC Primetime series, You Asked For It.
Remember that?
It just goes on and on and on.
Do you remember the one about animals and when animals attack and all of that?
I mean, his credentials go on and on and on.
Eminently qualified to speak about reality TV.
He's Bert Kearns.
His book is a big one.
It's a pretty hefty book, as a matter of fact.
Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes said, sad, funny, undeniably authentic.
Tabloid Baby tells the tale of what befell too much of mainstream television news over the past couple of decades as the bad drove out the good.
That was Mike Wallace.
Maury Povich said Bert was there for the birthing of tabloid.
The birthing of tabloid.
He became the heart of the genre, and now he's written the Bible.
And the Bible is tabloid baby, and here is Bert Currens.
Yes, I was offered the job to be the producer of the weekly live show that they brought out where one of the contestants would be kicked out of the house.
Unfortunately, you're going to see fewer Brits as these shows become more successful, as they begin to sculpt reality more and more in trying to get ratings, you know?
Well, you have to remember, Big Brother was quite different.
It really was like a laboratory experiment, and it was on the air as much as four times a week, as opposed to just once a week.
With a show like Survivor, they've got a lot of time to sculpt the action, to direct the action, to create drama out of reality.
With Big Brother, they were really having to slap things together on a daily basis and didn't have time to take the activities and turn them into a sculpted drama as they would on a show like Survivor.
One thing that Big Brother did show is that reality is often boring.
It's not a thrill-a-minute.
It's not action-packed all the time.
And that was one of the things that they think about now as they're going into a second season of Big Brother.
But I mean, to be fair, the house guests were also nominating the most compelling characters, and then the audience was following through and voting them out.
At times, it even seemed as if the people in the house were forgetting that it was a game for survival there, that it was a last-man-standing kind of game, where they were trying to keep more peace in the community there than to keep in some of the people who would have caused them trouble and maybe made their own chances a bit better.
Well, if there is another Big Brother, and I guess there is going to be, they're going to have to devise a way, I think, to change the whole dynamic of the thing.
And I'm not sure how you would do that and allow the public to participate and have voting to banish somebody and all the rest of it.
Well, yes, I would recommend that if they're going to keep the show on four nights a week, three nights a week, and be turning around the reality that quickly, yes, I would think they would have to do that, as well as maybe devising some more activities for the people.
The activities that they had each day weren't the most compelling.
And, of course, Mike, one of the stranded players, somehow or another inhaled the smoke from the fire that he was in front of, and probably caught something toxic, passed out, and fell into the fire and was badly burned.
It was one of the ingenious devices that they came up with in the first season when they were on that island, is to come up, you know, is to plant their own rumors.
The latest came today was that the word was that the older gentleman in the tribe had fallen off a horse and broken his collarbone, and that he was going to be brought back.
Well, it was my understanding, and there was a story, that the producer of that show had reached an agreement with the Russians to put somebody up on the Mir space station.
But as you know, the Mir space station is about to come crashing back to Earth.
Maybe they'll have to work something out with the International Space Station.
Behind the scenes, a current affair was like being in a wild, uninhibited newsroom on Fleet Street, something from another century.
When A Current Affair started in 1986, it was started by Rupert Murdoch when he came from Australia, bought the Fox Television Network, and wanted to start up his own news magazine.
He wanted a 60 minutes of his own.
Instead, he decided to do a 30 minutes, called it a current affair, stole the title from a very stodgy public affair show that still airs in Australia, and instead of hiring the greatest minds of television or television news in America, he went to the bars of Sydney and pulled out his Australian newspaper journalists, threw them onto a plane, and said, you've got a half hour a night of television to fill.
When tabloid television really took over the national news agenda in the early 1990s, things began to change.
You know, there was a time when there was a real separation between the church of network news and the state of America.
And there was a real separation between news and entertainment.
And those lines began to blur when Tabboy TV came on the scene.
Back in the late 1980s, you would get your local news at 6 o'clock, you'd get your network news around 7, and then at 7.30, you'd tune in to a current affair to get the dessert, to get the fun stories.
Well, soon, because the ratings were so great on shows like A Current Affair doing those, quote, fun stories, the network started to do the same stories as well.
By the time you had the O.J. Simpson trial, there was no delineation at all.
But if you look at your TV guide on any night, we used to have five nights a week of a current affair and hard copy.
Now we've got five nights a week of Dateline NBC, 2020, 60 Minutes 2.
They're covering the same types of stories with music, with drama, that we were covering back in the grand old days of a current affair and tabloid television.
And the secret is that many of the same producers who were trained on the tabloid shows are now working for the networks.
They call them the tabloid babies, believe it or not.
And it was 60 Minutes who did that in the name of news and also, you know, in the name of ratings as well.
Tabloid television did have a real morality where when you think of tabloid television now, you think of what it became.
It became very sleazy, it became graphic, very celebrity-fawning toward the end.
That was at a time when there was so much competition and such a proliferation of tabloid shows that it got very far away from the source.
But in a tabloid reality world, then you would never show that sort of footage, someone dying.
Because we always remembered that we were a guest in someone's home at suppertime.
And the key to good tabloid television was that no matter how salacious the subject, no matter how edgy the story might be, you can tell any story to any audience if you tell it the right way.
In other words, how close in telling a salacious story of some sort or another, a lot of personalities have screamed bloody murder about the, quote, lies and quote that were told about them.
So in telling the story, as you insert drama and license for drama, how close to actually lying have you seen it get?
I worried about it when I worked for the so-called mainstream news.
To be quite honest, because when you work in mainstream news on television, all you are trying to do is do the same story everyone else is doing and making sure you get the same story everyone else is getting.
And most of the time, the stories that you're seeing on television news are stories that have already appeared in a newspaper somewhere.
Because they only want to do what's tried and true.
Tabloid television was the first time in television where we were coming up with our own stories.
And if someone else was doing that story, we weren't interested in it.
Now, I know that you've got to get the story, and I know there's a lot of paparazzi running around out there and getting in people's faces and sometimes getting their nose broken for the effort.
How much of that sort of thing have you seen?
You know, go get me a good picture, and I don't care what you've got to do, just get it.
In the heyday of reality television, when there were 10 shows competing for the same story, a lot of money being thrown around to get those stories, yes, it was no holes barred.
And sometimes it did get ugly.
Witnesses in criminal cases would be harassed.
Witnesses in criminal cases would be paid.
Going back to the William Kennedy Smith case, the star witness in the case sold her story to a current affair for $40,000, and her testimony proved to be worthless.
Her testimony was thrown out of court, and the defendant was found not guilty.
Yeah, and in most cases, and I remember this as a matter of fact during the OJ trial, in most cases, if tabloid TV was able to get to a witness and get them to tell their story and pay them for it, that was the end of that testimony, right?
How many times did you come up against the wall with something like that, where you said to yourself, look, I know what I'm doing, and I don't know if I can do this?
I left tabloid, the world of tabloid television as it was around 1995, 1996.
I was sitting in a parking lot in a van on a very cold night in Denver, Colorado, outside an ice skating rink where there was a rock concert going on.
And the star of the concert was Kato Kalen, O.J. Simpson's house guest, who knew a bit more than he was willing to tell on the witness stand about what went on the night his dear friend Nicole Simpson was slaughtered.
And we in tabloid television, we in the media had turned Kato Kalen into a celebrity.
And he was on a tour of shopping malls throughout America, signing autographs for charity during the day and at night making some money by appearing at rock concerts.
and that's where i think things have kind of get wrong here but this point and it got to the point where today And that was it for you?
Yes, that was where I really...
That was really where I got to the point where I said, you know, what are we doing here?
Is this where we want it to end up?
Today, we wind up in a society where celebrity is everything.
And it doesn't matter why you're famous.
It doesn't matter if you're Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky or Charles Manson or Bill Clinton.
You're all in the same boat, the boat of celebrity.
Despite, let's say, with legitimate celebrities, people who have achieved fame through achievement or through their art, whether they're movie stars or singers, they too have to live in a very secure bubble.
Because we're in an age now where everybody wants to be a celebrity.
Whether that would mean hurting a celebrity, puts your name right up there, whether it's an era that began with Mark Chapman.
Well, what I learned from mugshots is, well, first of all, everyone who is accused of a crime is innocent.
Anyone who's behind bars is innocent.
But you also learn about the celebrity that goes along with notoriety.
When I was offered the job for Big Brother, I got the call on a cell phone.
I was standing across the street from the LAPD's Rampart Division headquarters where the great police scandal of 2000 had broken out.
The story of Rafael Perez, the rogue cop.
Rafael Perez, behind bars selling his, basically trading testimony for his freedom, was also at the same time working on who he's going to sell his book rights to and who's going to play him in a movie.
That's what lawyers do now.
When you deal with lawyers, they are interested in, they'll let you talk to their client if they can get a good deal for it.
They're looking down the line for that movie of the week.
And in just about every story that I've covered, that is what they're looking at.
Could the average person with average ethics and morality, average being the key word here, walk into the kind of work environment you had in tabloid TV and survive a day?
Do you recall the scene, and I'm not sure if it was in that show or not, but I'll never forget it, where some cat ran up a guy's leg and started biting his crotch.
Working on When Good Pets Go Bad, two, not even one, producing the second episode, was a real education for me as to where reality television was going.
Tabloid television was gone by then.
This was in 1999.
And we'd entered a new era of reality TV where reality was totally gone now.
These shows take videos that could be 20 years old.
They add sound effects.
They add a story.
You may think that these tapes are new, but they've been around and circulating for years.
And it's just reality used totally for entertainment.
Reality TV has morphed into quite a different beast than it was 10 years ago.
Reality TV, the premonitions and the forecasts that were contained in the movie Network back in the 70s, which seems so far out and so much the product of the imagination of Patty Chaevsky, have come true in so many different ways.
And actually, as we, I joined it in its second season and was its executive producer in its second and final season.
We treated it the same way we treated A Current Affair back in the late 1980s.
What we did at A Current Affair back then was thumb through newspapers.
In the days before the internet, we would have papers delivered to us, and we would read, I would read personally, you know, 200 small-town newspapers a day.
And that's where we would get our stories from.
They weren't gotten from the National Enquirer or the Weekly World News.
And we would find that, you know, by following these stories throughout America, a lot of the stories that the mainstream media, of course, relegates to, you know, so-called kooks and the so-called fringe are really stories, you know, from small-town America.
And that's what we try to bring out.
And I think that's why Tabloy TV was successful in its heyday.
And that's where we touched a chord when we did Strange Universe.
Well, look, I always consider a current affair to be the glory days, the early days of a current affair, where we're one day, you know, we're covering a story in Kansas.
Then we're back at the bar across the street from the office watching the television set there and noticing that there are people standing atop the Berlin Wall and realizing that communism is ending.
Getting on a telephone, calling Rupert Murdoch and saying, can we borrow your plane to go over to Germany?
and being the only independent syndicated television show at the brandon brigade communism is falling you know what does that say about We'll pick it up right there.
We're going to ask a few more questions of Bert Kearns, and then we're going to open the phone lines and let you ask any question you want.
Somebody with this big background in reality TV, I'm sure you've got a favorite show.
But in a moment, we're going to ask about some of the new stuff.
You know, the mole, boot camp coming up, and the incredible Temptation Island.
Good Lord, where is it going from there?
In a moment, we're going to take your questions for Bert Kearns this hour.
But first, I want, there's a couple things I want, actually.
Bert, what is it?
I'm a real victim of reality TV.
I watch cops all the time.
I love cops.
I watch, in fact, The Mole, which I don't think is that hot.
I will probably watch Boot Camp, and I have been watching, Heaven Help Me, Temptation Island.
Now, I don't know what you say about Temptation Island.
This is, folks, if you haven't seen it, where they take several committed couples committed to each other and throw them on this island with all of these really good-looking guys and gals and have them date other people and torture their partners with little videos of what they did the day before.
It's incredible.
And somehow, like a car wreck, you know, I'm drawn to watch it.
Somehow, there was something about The Mole, even though I've been fascinated by it, that they did not seem to develop the characters as well as they did, say, on Survivor.
I mean, ABC, which was number one, I believe, in that first season of Millionaire, was struggling to be number three in these latest ratings.
They relied too much on it.
And also, for whatever reason, the way the questions are skewed, the contestants are all the same type of person, except when they have a celebrity show.
I thought they were tasteful in what they showed, but even then, it was much more than anything I've expected to see on CBS.
But then it goes to show that these are supposed to be game shows, and these are people who are really putting their lives on the line.
I mean, there was trouble behind the scenes at Temptation Island.
There was a hurricane that tore through that set during the production of that.
Two people were killed.
Two of the people who worked on the island, who ferried the contestants and the crew members back and forth, were killed in this hurricane that struck.
A lot of the crew members were stuck on this island.
And there are other things that aren't included in the show.
When you watch Big Brother, one of the funniest incidents during the show Big Brother was when two guys, the Big Brother house was located on the CBS Television City lot.
And I don't know if you know this story where two guys had come to pitch a comedy show, and they realized that they could walk right past the wall that surrounded the Big Brother compound.
As I was telling Britt, when something got a little too hot to handle, especially when there was criticism of CBS, all of a sudden you were looking at the chicken can, a bunch of chickens walking around.
By the way, my wife informs me she's reading news indicating that Mike, who was flown in a helicopter after the burns, had third-degree burns on both hands.
It's funny, talking about these desert island shows, the television show Current Affair back in 1993, Peter Brennan, the man who invented tabloid television reality TV back in the 80s.
He went on to create the show Judge Judy and Judge Joe Brown.
Then after several days, they began to warm to each other, and they had a very romantic evening, Which was followed by the morning when they began to confess to each other their sins.
Whereupon the wife confessed on camera to her husband that in the three years of their marriage she had more than 50 affairs, including one with his brother.
But then you realize that they were really playing around with something that is sacred.
It was marriage.
They were marrying someone off to someone that you didn't know for money.
And then you find out that this woman who had married this gentleman, for whatever reason she had, could have been placed in very serious danger if the charges that had been leveled against him turn out to be true.
Well, so actually, then there is a case where, despite the fact that the show got tremendous ratings, the pangs afterward prevented Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire or a Billionaire or Two?
Well, these kind of shows, there are a number of independent producers and production companies who sit around and say, how do we get on this bandwagon?
What's the next one?
What do we do?
There's also a mad genius at Fox named Mike Darnell, who they keep tucked away there, and they say, we're never going to do one of these kind of shows ever again.
It was so embarrassing.
But when they need the ratings, they go to the genius, and he comes up with these shows that we'll rate at all costs.
I had, my wife and I had an idea that we wanted to submit to Fox.
And somebody has, actually we did submit it to Fox.
And we thought, you know, do something like Big Brother, except instead, go to a place, a haunted house, and I mean a real haunted house, and put 10 people in there and in their rooms, and then proceed after you've told them the story of the house and you've related the real hauntings that have actually gone on.
And TV is very good at this, with special effects, proceed to scare the holy hell out of them and see who's going to run out, who's going to bail, how the bonding, the sexual tension, all the rest of it that'll go on.
But I mean, just really scare the hell out of these people.
If you actually went to a location where there really was an act of haunting going on, obviously during the whole show, the people would have no way of knowing whether it was, say, Fox's special effects or whether it was a real thing.
And if you began with people in separate rooms, you sure as heck wouldn't end up with them in separate rooms.
All right, listen, let's take a few calls.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Burt Kearns.
Basically what it is, is they sent eight people, four guys and four girls, to live in the loft for a year.
And the main difference with the rest of the shows that you've been talking about tonight is that they actually get paid to stay there for the entire year.
Nobody gets kicked off.
Nobody, you know, there's no voting against a certain person, no alliances or anything like that.
But they actually make TV shows on the live feed that are basically produced by the people who live in the loft.
As soon as we have that technology where we can flip through the URLs the same way we flip through TV channels, that's the day that television has been co-opted by the Internet.
Right now, I have a website called tabloidbaby.com, which really is the only tabloid television magazine show that's out there, and it's on the internet.
And we're developing it on the internet.
We're posting stories every day and columns and opinion and video, streaming video, the same way we would do it when we were doing a tabloid television show.
Only now there's no one telling us you can't do that.
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of people who have dial-up accounts don't know, but if you get high-speed internet, really high-speed internet, and there's more and more of that available in cities and now even in the country by satellite, you can get a stream that is so good that it's virtually television.
We're talking about reality TV, and we're talking with Burt Kearns, who wrote a book called Tabloid Baby that you're definitely going to want.
If you want the real behind-the-scenes look at everything that's gone on, Tabloid Baby has got it, believe me.
And of course, his website as well, which is linked from ours, you can check it out by going to www.arfell.com, the guest area, and the links will be right there for you.
I mean, it is produced, it is directed, it is edited, it is sculpted into compelling drama with beats, just as many beats as if you're watching the show Law and Order.
But anyway, actually, my question is, what does he think of the extra and inside edition, I guess, that are the tabloid television now?
And my question also is, why does it seem like when you're watching one, you flip over to the other one and they almost have the exact same two stories, which I find, are they using the same writers or are they buying the same story from somebody else?
I mean, sometimes you just flip over and you're like, I just saw this story a half hour ago.
Yeah, the way it was, what I write about in Tabloid Baby, is how it started when it was, let's find the stories.
Let's go out into America and find stories that no one else is covering and let's make them the story of the day for the nation.
Whether it was the story of the teacher who hired her students to kill her husband or the mechanic out on Long Island who was having an affair with a 16-year-old who would go on to shoot his wife, those are the stories that you would see on these tabloid shows and not see them anywhere else.
Since they're so popular, Bert, and they depict that sort of story, isn't there kind of a negative bounce that has people eventually thinking that this is what America is all about, that we've become a tabloid nation?
Well, I've got to tell you that we have become a tabloid nation.
I mean, when you have Dan Rather leading off his newscast talking about gap dresses and cigars in the Oval Office, you don't need Maury Povich to give you sensationalism anymore.
I mean, you take, you know, beginning with O.J. Simpson carrying on through Bill Clinton, they've done more for, you know, the tabloidization of America than any tabloid producer could ever hope to do.
The first one is, knowing that you've been exposed and documented many different stories and situations, do you remember a very strange and one of the more bizarre stories about a couple who had a log home in the Black Hills, or was it the Black Forest of Colorado, and were constantly bothered by ghosts, apparitions, and strange lights?
I have experienced many strange things myself, but nothing has bothered me as much as the two images that appeared on, I believe it was their master bedroom mirror.
There were so many on Strange Universe, from people who have great memory and recollections of having sex with aliens to the stories of Mel's Hall.
The one story that I could not understand was the story that I know that Art is well acquainted with, was the story of the strange lights over Phoenix, Arizona.
What looked to be either a very obvious UFO invasion or some sort of government testing, who knows, a story that was covered on all the local newses that night and then totally dropped from the mainstream media, not covered again.
We saw that tape, we ran that on Strange Universe, and we made a bit of a campaign out of it saying, why isn't the mainstream media covering this?
Why did this story just go away?
And never really got a satisfactory answer to what the lights were or why nobody was interested in covering it.
Are you the ones, Bert, that did you open that story back up?
Because the Phoenix light story happened.
We did it on my program.
Big deal.
Then like two or three months went by, and then all of a sudden the mainstream media grabbed it and ran with it, and then it was a big story all over again.
But the thing of it is, is, you know, I have too much reality, too much drama in my life every day to have to watch someone else's reality.
I just yearned for the days of, you know, the old Hokey Elvis movies where you went to the movies for two hours and didn't have to think of anything.
You were entertained, or, you know, no one was, the boys in the hood, and, you know, these different kinds of movies that are bringing the streets into your living room.
And that's why I watch either TV or go to the movies, is for pure escapism.
But I have to ask Bert a question.
You know, you're talking about these cop shows and the court shows, you know, like Judge Judy and these people.
I mean, please give me a break.
It would seem to me that real sitting judges would be offended by some of the things that these people get away with saying to these people.
That real, true, dedicated policemen would get upset to see these other policemen on TV.
And we all know, we all, you know, most of us that understand our rights and the Constitution know that there's times that they do things that if the defendant said, hey, look at this, they didn't do right here.
Well, of course, yeah, Judge Judy runs, and Judge Judy and Judge Joe, they run courts of common sense.
And they're not really that different, not that far off from a typical small claims court where the rules are a bit looser and the judge rules the rules.
It was funny, I was involved in a small claims action against a landlord last year.
And first of all, I started getting letters from these court shows saying, come on our show instead of settling in court.
And then going into court, now you find a lot of the judges and referees seem to be auditioning for the Judge Judy show.
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Well, but my point being is, how could Judge Judy say to someone, I know you're lying, you're lying, you're lying, I know you're lying.
And that's what makes the show successful, because Peter Brennan, who runs the show, who is featured in the book Tabloid Baby as the man who invented a current affair, Peter took, when he started Judge Judy, he made sure that the cases that they picked and the people that they brought on were people who were very adamant about the fact that they were right and that they wanted to win their cases.
Had no intention of honoring her contract when she went on that show.
I would think the other women on that show would do a class action suit against her for taking the space that they could have used because a lot of planned marriages or put together marriages often work.
Well, Stacey Stillman, who actually is an attorney, she was booted from the island in the third episode.
She is claiming that the show was rigged.
She claims that she was voted off the island after the producer spoke with two of the other castmates and asked them to protect old Rudy because Rudy was such a great character.
They wanted to keep him on the island.
So now she's suing for the prize money plus an extra 75 grand.
But what's very interesting is that the producers of Survivor fought back very aggressively against this suit and pointed out the fact that Stacy is in violation of her confidentiality agreement.
Everyone involved with these shows has to sign a very ironclad confidentiality agreement.
And also, CBS basically owns the rights to their lives for as long as they live.
And it was a movie about a reality TV show where people would, one person would be a victim, one person would be the hunter, and they would actually go out and try to kill the victim.
And the victim would try to figure out who the hunter was and kill the hunter before they got them.
And if they got through 10 spots, they would win a million dollars in all kinds of publicity and become famous.
I think probably tomorrow morning they'll be discussing them at Fox.
It's funny, there is a show in development which is quite similar where they're going to drop two people in a city in America and have bounty hunters chase them and they've got to get to a certain point before the bounty hunters get them you're kidding I believe in Amisho might be bounty hunters right now yeah sounds good to me ordinary people going up against the professionals as far out as you can as you can imagine that's how you know again the day of network
We have things going on in San Diego at Mardi Gras night that never happened before in San Diego, on the streets anyway.
They've got nudity and they've got talking.
It's totally crazy and wild on Fat Tuesday, February 27th.
And I was wondering why some of the TV stations haven't actually come out and filmed some of the stuff that's going on out here, maybe HBO or somebody.
to link to on tabletbaby.com I go through newspapers all around the country uh and the New Orleans Times Picayune has um Mardi Gras cam uh that you can uh click into uh on the web all over New Orleans from karaoke bars to the street clubs where the the entire city seems to be just wired with you know streaming video and live cameras well I know in certain cities they overdid it a little this
I'm also interested in how the media seems to come up with stuff just before it occurs.
And, of course, I always think about movies with the comets hitting the earth and stuff, and then the next thing I hear, we're landing something on an asteroid.
And I don't know.
It all seems to be rather linked somehow, but I don't know how to put it into words.
I'd be more than happy to have a million questions for you and a million people who would like to talk to you so I can hold you through for another hour, and or you can get some sleep and get to bed.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 1st, 2001.
Travel the world and the heaven of the sea.
Everybody is looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
Long ago in days of old, There lived a knight who wasn't quite as bold As a knight should be.
He rode an old grey mare called Bess Searching for a damsel in distress Just to see if he could set her free See the knight in rusty on the ride To a rain
Trusty sword is hanging out at his side with a rusty blade Up the tower steps he sneaked as he moved his rusty arm You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 1st, 2001.
Sounds like the crack of lightning and thunder over the survivor people, some of the rainstorms they've been going through lately.
We're talking about reality television, and we're talking about tabloid television, and we're doing it with somebody who knows what he's talking about.
And I think it's interesting that Henry David Thoreau said, never read the newspaper, because there was no TV in that day.
He said that it's just gossip.
It makes you judgmental, and it takes your focus off the important good things of life.
But I'd like to ask Bert if he thought the Truman show was prophetic and if he ever feels a twinge of guilt, you know, maybe just a little twinge of guilt for what's going on on TV now.
And again, when you look at people who have these internet cams where you can follow them around all day, unscripted, just following their lives, it's out there now.
That's what's happening now.
And yes, do I feel a twinge of guilt over what we have wrought in television today?
Yeah, but here's a fair question on your side of things, a defense for you.
And it's that which is first, the horse or the cart?
In other words, are you guys producing something that tempts people, tantalizes people, suckers people in, puts the hook in them, and, you know, certainly the hook's in me.
It's in my wife.
We both love these things.
Or aren't you really just giving people what they want?
Back at the time that a current affair first caught the public's fancy, it was fulfilling a need that was out there.
There was this great country called America with lots of great stories that the networks referred to as flyover country.
That was a country they would fly over on their way from the Beltway, from Washington, or from New York City on their way to L.A. The great unwashed, they would call it, America.
And what tabloid television did was bring back stories from America.
You know, it's funny, back in the 80s, there was one network correspondent who was covering American stories.
He was a man named Charles Corral.
And he portrayed himself as the lone man in the Winnebago.
He'd pull into town, and today I met a man who made a Liberty Bell out of cheese.
Or, you know, today I met a man who can play Song of Joy, Ode to Joy, on milk bottles.
And he did stories about America that painted it as a very homogeneous, folksy place.
And it was only after Charles Coralt died that we found out the rest of the story, as they say.
The story of a man who had left his family behind, went out to work, and kept a mistress, and kept another family in another state.
And that was the story of Charles Coralt.
We found that out after he died that he had a second family in Montana.
And that was the type of story tabloid television was covering all over America at that same time.
The story of the minister having an affair with the choir mistress or the judge with families in two separate towns.
And that was really a portrait of how America was changing, how morality was changing at that time.
And you think at some point, in other words, is it going to just keep going in a linear fashion, getting wilder and wilder, or is there going to be a turnaround point?
And I'm also the spokesperson for the American Refugee.
Right currently we're dealing with HAARP, but I do have something to say about this subject as a person who doesn't get on the Internet and lives a pretty secluded life.
And I have a little bit different perspective, I think, than what y'all have been talking about.
And these shows are full of, for an hour, you get car chases, police chases, and you see some of the most horrendous crashes where people are maimed, sometimes killed, and it's all done ostensibly, you know, we're getting the bad guys.
But what's the real thing that they're selling?
They're selling the car running off the road, going into a ditch, disintegrating, hitting a train, some giant explosion, people getting hurt.
And one thing these shows do is they desensitize you to the reality.
These car crash shows, these chase shows, they add sound effects.
If you listen, every time there's a crash, it's the same clattering, it's the same sound.
Every time a car hits, it's the same drum.
They add music.
They add sound effects.
They take chases that took place 20 years ago and put it next to a chase that happened yesterday.
But we also have to think, when reality does strike, I can't think, and I was also I thought it was a very interesting comment on America of how everyone seemed to be very touched and very disturbed by the accident that took the life of Dale Earnhardt.
Although the accident itself was not one that would satisfy our animal instincts to really see something that looked so horrible, because it didn't look that bad.
But when people found out that this man was killed in that crash, I think people really were touched by the reality of it and sickened.
So I don't really buy the idea that we've lost our humanity.
I think that, yes, in our society of the internet and video games and sensation, we're always looking for the next thrill.
And I think that these car crash shows really feed that appetite.
But at the same time, to me, they're not real because they turn it into this sort of entertainment.
But packaging it the way they do on television has just been very successful, and it's true of most of the cops' shows, certainly the new breed of them.
I mean, if you really think about why we're watching, that's what we're looking at.
All right, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Burt Currens.
First of all, regarding the Dale Earnhardt crash and the things that it takes to get America charged up, things like that, I think partly what might have something to do with the fact that people like to see things like that is the fact that people are sitting in front of their TV watching things like that instead of actually going out and having any kind of adrenaline rush themselves.
You know, they like to see things because they aren't doing anything.
Sure.
You know, there's nothing going on, so they're sitting in front of their TV and computer, and they're not doing anything.
Second, actually, Art, there is a TV show that's kind of what you alluded to before about.
It definitely started the craze for this fake reality.
I mean, what is more unreal than putting, you know, eight kids together in a million-dollar loft, you know, with cameras all around, you know, with cameras 24 hours a day, with producers chasing them around and following them and prodding them into confrontations.
And we called it reality.
Again, they sculpted it into very good dramatic television, and they got better and they got more sophisticated as each season went on.
But again, it's called reality television, but I think it's pretty far from most of the reality we know.
I believe it's a syndicated show and they're you know private eye this is again private investigators are able to sell that video they have for shows like that as well as their expertise.
Well when you when you take people's lives and turn it into entertainment and people's emotions and you hype them up like that, yes, you're flirting with disaster.
I write about that in Tabloid Baby, a couple of incidents that have taken place over the last decade that have not gotten a lot of publicity.
People who committed suicide or were killed because of tabloid television, because of television shows.
There was a gentleman in Ohio who was videotaped on a lover's lane with a woman who was not his wife.
And it was at a time when one of the tabloid shows was urging its viewers to get out with their video cameras and be proactive against crime.
Well, they had a videotape of this gentleman with a woman who was not his wife, and they made it national news.
And he begged them, and his wife begged them not to.
And instead, they chased him down the street.
They covered the court hearing.
They followed him around, and he responded by putting a bullet through his chest.
And there really was no excuse for that because it broke all tenets not only of tabloid television, but of just basic human decency of turning someone into a victim.
And that was a lesson that was learned, but also kept very quiet.
And that's one reason why my book has been kept a bit quiet and ultimately blacklisted by a lot of the powers that be in the media, because I do talk about that.
Well, I'll tell you, it didn't help my career when the book came out.
I was sort of laying low for about six months.
My career was at a standstill because I had to, a lot of people were offended by what I wrote because I do name names and I have documentation and point out what happened over the past 10 years of news and how we got to the state we are in today.
How a show like A Current Affair would lead to a show like Dateline, which would lead to a journalist like Brian Gumbel, who was so much against tabloid television, becoming basically the announcer for Survivor every morning.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 1st, 2001.
Only in America.
There's no opportunity, yeah With a classy girl like you Falls for a poor boy like me In America
They say that you're a runaround lover So you say it isn't so But if you put me down for another I'll
know, believe me, I'll know Cause the night has a violent eye And a thousand eyes can't help but see If you are true to me So remember when you tell those little white lies That the night has a thousand eyes You say that
you're at home when you phone me And how much you really care Though you keep telling me that you're lonely I'll know if someone is there Cause the night has a thousand eyes And a thousand eyes can't help but see
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 1st, 2001.
This is a young man who had strangled a woman in Central Park, and his lawyer came up with the very novel defense of rough sex.
Well, in the middle of the trial, he pled guilty.
And while he was awaiting sentencing, a videotape came to light.
Somebody came up with this tape and sold it to a current affair for $10,000.
And it was a tape of the suspect who had just pleaded guilty to murder at a slumber party with a bunch of girls who were friends of the victim.
And he was twisting the head off a doll in a grotesque parody of the crime of which he had just pleaded guilty to.
A current affair ran it to great controversy and also the highest ratings in the history of the show.
That was the first case really of both buying a story and featuring home video.
From there, it was just non-stop, from the Rob Lowe sex video to video that drove the Amy Fisher case to the video that flew around during the O.J. Simpson trial.
And then that started something new, this bizarre era of notoriety and celebrity that we're in now, where criminals cash in on a notoriety with videotapes, with sex tapes.
You look at Tanya Harding's husband, you know, sold their honeymoon video.
I'm kind of curious now, with people virtually willing to do anything to get on TV or to make a little money or to do both, from the point of view of a tabloid TV reporter, what does that do to your own estimation of humanity?
I mean, here you are encountering those people willing to sell themselves virtually anything of themselves for fame and or money.
There's a new film that's coming out in about two weeks called 15 Minutes.
It's a Robert De Niro movie, and it is about two killers who come over from Russia and document all of their killings with a home video camera and then sell it to a TV show.
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Unbelievable, geez.
See, I've been doing this for a while, too, and there's a lot of times where you see celebrities doing things that would actually destroy their careers, and you have to back out then.
And I'm sure you probably were in those same circumstances, right?
Well, I know for a fact, in the case of the person from Ohio who had committed suicide after one of the shows ran the tape, our show was offered that, and we didn't want to air it because it was an example of making a victim out of the little guy.
And you don't do that.
It's different if you're a celebrity who breaks the law or embarrasses himself in a way that leads to criminal charges, as Rob Lowe did with the video he made with the underage girl at the Democratic Convention.
It's very different.
You do take these on a case-by-case basis.
Sometimes, when you are in the heat of battle in a ratings period, you go too far.
I've just got a quick comment and a quick question for Bert.
You know, this whole idea about people being, you know, folks being obsessed with death and gore and what have you, that's really not a new thing altogether.
I remember back in the early 80s, maybe, or mid-80s or so, you know, the Faces of Death videos came out and they were banned for a while.
Then whenever they found their way to the video shelves, you know, in the video rental stores, they were the highest-rented videos out there.
I mean, they just couldn't get enough copies of them, you know, and those were pretty doggone graphic.
There's almost a cult following, and it's amazing how many people are still watching them.
But my question for Bert is, basically, you know, trying to figure out why reality TV is so successful, I can't help but think that, you know, Hollywood has done everything you can imagine, every kind of angle.
They've told every story, every kind of way.
And, you know, truth is actually, you know, stranger than fiction.
And anybody that listens to the art show at the time knows that.
I mean, you know, if you think about it, we can only be fooled so many times.
We can only see so many special effects, so many things.
We know it's not real.
And I think that's partially what's due to success.
And some of these stories that are real, the stories that we choose to tell are the stories that contain all those classic elements of passion and revenge and lust and love.
And it's funny, a lot of the stories that first appeared on tabloid television went on to become films.
There was a movie called American Beauty, which won the Best Picture Award a few years ago.
That was actually inspired by the Joey Butta Fuco Amy Fisher story.
They found, in other words, he did some writings that were interpreted one way, but now they're beginning to interpret them another way because they found pipes with apparent traces of marijuana.
And Shakespeare was a real populist, blood-and-guts playwright.
As you remember, a lot of his shows, they would have beheading scenes and execution scenes for the folks down in the pit there, and they would replay that scene over and over again for him.
My comments don't necessarily have to do specifically with reality television, but I wanted to bring up a book that I was given back in a sociology class in college.
It's called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
It's a pretty interesting book, and it takes a kind of a scientific approach to the whole thing.
It states in pretty plain English that there are actual medical problems that can come up with TV addiction, and I don't think excuse me, hold on one second.
It's a role-playing game where you're a first-person run around killing people as though you were James Bond.
And my question is, is how do these things get greenlighted in the media?
Are they trying to train people for life after the Armageddon or whatever?
Is there some kind of underground?
Because I don't understand how they would let a movie come out that tells you how to make a bomb or how they would let a video game come out that shows you how to sneak through a building and kill everyone in it if there wasn't somebody behind it that understood the usefulness of this.
And a lot of it, it's a lot of bite-sized stories that you can pick up the book at any point, and it will just drop you into another year in the last decade.
And I did have a lot to say about my life and where it took me and how I wound up in tabloid television and what it did to me and what it did to America.
Because I think my story is just a microcosm of a much larger one of how tabloid television influenced our country.