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.