My Surprisingly Fond Farewell to Jerry Springer

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on May 4, 2023

Through it all, his faithful audience offered approving chants of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” — as Springer calmly worked the room with his wireless microphone in hand.

And always at the end would come a summary commentary and his redemptive sign-off, used more recently by another former Chicagoan, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

None of this sat well with my fellow members of the journalism community, who tend to cling to old-fashioned and endangered but still reliable notions of journalistic ethics and dignified discourse.

For example, when executives at NBC 5 brought Springer in to do commentaries on the station’s popular 10 p.m. newscast, award-winning anchors Carol Marin and Ron Magers boycotted his appearances and later left the highly rated station — amid appreciative applause from many of their colleagues, including me.

When I had an enviable opportunity to chat with Springer at a 2018 meeting of the National Conference of Newspaper Columnists in Cincinnati, I was pleased to learn firsthand that the bad boy of the airwaves turned out to be considerably more sane, well-informed and thoughtful than his oddball media image would lead us to believe.

Since I grew up in the Cincinnati area, I was familiar with Springer’s earlier days as a local politician before he became a TV anchor and commentator. In particular, I remembered how his savvy and frankness enabled him to survive one of the goofiest political scandals that I can recall.

He confessed to the FBI that, as a city councilman, he had paid prostitutes with two personal checks in December 1973 and January 1974. Locals understandably wondered whether his paying prostitutes with personal checks showed he was too dishonest — or simply too naive — to hold public office.

Either way, Springer’s candor with the voters paid off. When he later ran for Cincinnati mayor, he even owned up in a campaign commercial to his paying for sex years earlier.

Result: In 1975, he won his council seat back in one of the biggest political comebacks in Cincinnati history. Once again, he read the public mood and won.

So, despite hosting the reputedly “worst show in TV history,” Springer’s candor offered an admirable model for other politicians to remember — and follow.

More than I expected, he will be missed.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)