Capital Punishment

"Talk Show Telling versus Authentic Telling" is about the concept of talk show telling and whether or not it is doing more damage than good. The author, Evan Imber-Black, is a licensed physiotherapist and has published many books. Her view is that talk shows are damaging people's lives and creating a social norm where people feel it is healthy and rehabilitative to blurt out their personal secrets. Overall, this is an effective argument because the author uses sufficient evidence and support to back up her claims throughout the article; but it does contain a few weaknesses, one of them is the fact that the author does not distinguished between good talk shows and bad talk shows, she assumes that they all are trying to harm people.

In the opening paragraph Mrs. Imber-Black uses an anecdotal story to create a portrait of how many people deal with their problems. She has a patient come to her for therapy and in the first session the woman reveals all of her deepest secrets in only a few minutes of meeting her new therapist. The author comments, "In an effort to slow her down and start to build a relationship that might be strong enough to hold her enormous pain, I gently asked her what made her think it was all right to tell me things so quickly. "I see people doing it on Oprah all the time," she replied" (615). This shows the significant impact that talk shows have had on the people who watch them and even the people that don't. Our society as a whole has changed since the advent of the talk show, cultures have changed the way they keep (or share) their secrets.

Television has created an impression that if one tells a secret no matter the situation it is always better for you and will help ease the pain. The author remarks that "if cultural norms once made shameful secrets out of too many happenings in human life, we are now struggling with the reverse assumptions: that opening secrets Ð'- no matter how, when, or to whom Ð'- is morally superior and automatically healing" (616).

According to Imber-Black a common method of talk show telling is called an ambush show. In this kind of show the person being told the secret has no idea what they have come onto the show for, or they have been told they were appearing for something other than the actual secret. Under these false pretenses the person will enter the show not knowing that they are about to be "ambushed" by someone that has a shocking secret. It could be that their beloved son is gay or that the mom is hooked on drugs, but the audience and host always know the secret before the person being ambushed this way they can really zero in on the shock factor.

This sort of show seems to be the most popular and can lead to some serious ramifications; on one occasion a man was killed over a shocking secret. This except from the article explains what happened: "in 1995, a young man named Jonathon Schmitz murdered an acquaintance, Scott Amedure, following an unwelcome revelation on the Jenny Jones show. Schmitz had been told he was coming on the show to meet a "secret admire." He was not told that the show was about "men who have secret crushes on men." When his shock and humiliation resulted in Amedure's murder, the host and producers insisted they had no responsibility" (618).

Talk shows always seem to encourage the notion that telling a secret is always better than holding it in even if there are children in the crowd. Talk show telling completes ignores the fact that children might be involved in these weird and uncanny secrets. Often the children are in the audience while their dad tells their mom on stage that he has been cheating on her. But everything will be alright because these shows employee so called "experts" that come on at the end of every show to fix the problems of these people, who they