The 'Murphy Brown'/Dan Quale Debacle of 1992: Three Decades Later

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Blurred Lines of Fantasy and Realtiy Television

On May 19, 1992, President George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign ignited while the Los Angeles racial unrest, with Rodney King at the center, was subsiding.

In San Francisco, Vice-President Dan Quayle made a presentation at the nonpartisan Commonwealth Club of California. He opened with a reference to the riots in L.A., which were sparked by the acquittal of police officers captured on tape assaulting Rodney King.

Quale then addressed how he believed the welfare program and a poverty persona that he related to mostly inner-city African-American dwellers.

Adding Fuel to the Fire

Adding fuel to the fire, Quayle then closed his talk by saying, “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

That was a follow-up commentary to an episode of Murphy Brown (CBS, 1988-1996), in which Candice Bergen by then had played a journalist-career-driven, divorced, unwedded single mother with addictions to cigarettes and alcohol. Her Murphy character had also by then utilized marijuana for medicinal purposes (after being diagnosed with breast cancer).

As such, Quayle ultimately suggested that Brown was hardly a role model of character for any TV viewer or human being across the board.

A massive uproar then ensued across the political and social spectrum.

The Following Fall

The following September, when a new season of Murphy Brown commenced, to help soothe things over, Quayle sent a card and a stuffed elephant to Bergen and met with a band of single mothers to watch the show (which he had never even seen before.

The controversy continued when the Murphy scribes included, with a tongue-in-cheek jab, inserted Quayle’s words into both the first and second episodes of that show's subsequent season.

In the second segment, Brown looked into the cameras of her fabricated news magazine series (essentially, Murphy Brown was a show-within-a-show), and said:

“These are difficult times for our country, and in searching for the causes of our social ills we could choose to blame the media, or the Congress, or an administration that’s been in power for 12 years.”

“Or," she concluded, "...we could blame me.”