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The credibility of "talk TV" took another tumble in late July with the death of Nancy Campbell-Panitz in Sarasota, Fla. Earlier the same day, "The Jerry Springer Show" featured Campbell-Panitz, her ex-husband, Ralf Panitz, and his new wife, Eleanor. Although the show was taped on May 7, its July 24 airing apparently exacerbated an already violent love triangle.

On the program -- which I did not see -- Campbell-Panitz and Ralf and Eleanor Panitz exposed their love triangle to the Springer audience, estimated to include about 5.4 million viewers. Campbell-Panitz allegedly said after the taping that she thought she was appearing on Jerry Springer for a public reconciliation with her former husband. His on-air admission that the two had had intercourse just days before the taping lends credence to the notion that Nancy Campbell-Panitz was misled, at least by her ex.

Not only did the two not reconcile, but the first Mrs. Ralf was also told by the second Mrs. Ralf that she is "old," "fat," and no longer appealing to Mr. Ralf. The first Mrs. Ralf then left the stage and was not heard from again by the general public until her death. It turns out, however, according to the Sarasota police, that Ralf Panitz had threatened his ex-wife with a knife on July 10 and that on the morning of her death, she had secured a restraining order against him.

The Springer segment drew immediate comparison with the 1995 shooting of Scott Amedure by Jonathan Schmitz, a young man surprised by Amedure's confessed infatuation on Jenny Jones' talk show. Schmitz was invited to the taping of a "Jenny" program during which several guests met their secret admirers. Schmitz, an avowed heterosexual, presumed that his admirer would be female. Instead, he met Amedure, who awkwardly embraced him, and Schmitz sat patiently through the rest of the hour-long show.

But three days after the taping of the show that never aired, Schmitz, apparently tormented by the episode and by "an unsigned, sexually suggestive note" from Amedure, killed his "admirer" with two blasts from a 12-gauge shotgun bought earlier that day (where's a waiting period when you need one?).

Schmitz is currently serving a 25- to 50-year sentence for the murder, and Amedure's family got a $25 million negligence award from Jenny Jones' show and its producer, Warner Brothers. The award is currently on appeal.

Just a few months after Scott Amedure died, ABC White House correspondent Ann Compton, visiting her alma mater, Hollins College, called television talk shows and magazine-format shows "slime copy" journalism. Such programming has long had a negative reputation, due largely to the exploits of "journalists" like Geraldo Rivera. Rivera's own low spot, in my mind, was not his 1988 on-air involvement in a skinhead brawl, which led to his getting his nose broken. Instead, it was the moment in 1977 when Rivera, standing outside the Utah prison where convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was about to be executed by firing squad, assured viewers, "I think we'll be able to hear the gun shots from here."

The recent Panitz-Panitz-Campbell-Panitz disaster was all over our national news and got surprising coverage in the foreign press: several London newspapers, The Irish Times, The Canadian Press. Online news services gave the story big play, and I can only imagine what people must have said on electronic bulletin boards, which we might call "talk computer." Much of the media attention has come in the form of commentary addressing the question, "To what extent are the producers of 'The Jerry Springer Show' culpable for Nancy Campbell-Panitz's death?"

I think this is a useful question. It is asked increasingly in our culture, often over objectionable material like Ice-T's "Cop Killer," 2-Live Crew videos, Ozzy Osbourne songs about suicide, motion pictures like "The Program" and "Natural Born Killers," et cetera ad infinitum Consider this scenario: After viewing "The Program," a film in which young men lie on a highway center line in heavy traffic, other young men go out and imitate the act, and some of them are killed. (As Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up.") After watching Beavis and Butthead play with matches, children set their house on fire. After a December 1998 Jerry Springer show, two teenage boys in Miami sexually assault their 8-year-old sister, claiming they got the idea from the program. After watching professional wrestling, an 11-year-old Florida boy body slams a young girl his mother is babysitting; the girl dies.

Are the makers or distributors of this "entertainment" liable for these deaths? In his acceptance speech on Wednesday night, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman declared that American parents should not have to fight the culture to raise their children. You don't have to look far to find the enemies. In 1996, Lieberman co-sponsored the Telecommunications Act, informally known as the V-chip legislation, an initiative designed to give parents more control over their television sets. We might disagree about the advisability of V-chips, but it's hard to argue the sentiment that Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman also voiced a few years ago: whereas our culture used to work with parents to raise children, now the two forces appear largely to be working against each other.

Certainly it is reasonable to say that an individual has primary responsibility for his or her own actions. The simple answer to the question, "Who killed Nancy Campbell-Panitz?" is -- apparently -- Ralf Panitz. Who killed Scott Amedure? Jonathan Schmitz. In an ABC poll several months after Amedure's death, the highest percentage of respondents said Schmitz should bear primary responsibility for Amedure's death. That surprised me a little, as we live in a culture that doesn't always blame rapists for rape, and sometimes considers a homosexual advance as justifying a violent rebuff.

In the week after "The Jerry Springer Show" with Panitz, Panitz, and Campbell-Panitz aired, viewership fell by 40 percent. While that is a substantial percentage -- more than two million people -- it is important to remember the 60 percent (about 3.2 million) who kept watching. Media executives all too often base their decisions on the wrong standards: not what is good for the audience, or what is ethical, but what will the audience buy? What will motivate the audience to keep watching, see the movie twice, buy it on video? (I take some comfort from the fact that far more people -- 7.5 million -- are watching Oprah's show than Springer's.)

In the networks ratings games, titillation and tease are the trump cards. Particularly on talk TV, programs aim to outshock each other, bringing on women who have gotten venereal diseases from their best friends' husbands, friends who have kept dramatic secrets from each other, men simultaneously married to more than one woman, men who wear their wives' clothes ... you get the picture. You've seen the shows, though you may not want to admit it. Maybe -- probably -- the producers of programs like "Jenny" and "Jerry" should be more careful about what kinds of confrontations they provoke. After all, instigating a crime is itself a crime.

But I think that in placing primary blame on network executives for parading "slime journalism" through our living rooms, we're passing the buck. Long-time Baltimore Sun newspaperman H.L. Mencken said that politicians "throw hooey to the boobs" -- get themselves elected by saying stupid things to voters too stupid to recognize stupidity. In such cases, said Mencken, we get what we deserve.

Lest we be too quick to blame Jerry and Jenny for feeding us a steady diet of tabloid TV, we should remember that millions of us watch these programs regularly. Successful marketing, any business major can tell you, is generally about creating demand for a product; it's about developing products for a recognized demand. Yes, perhaps our media should take some steps not to feed us such hooey, but we also have a responsibility to try not to be boobs.