CHICAGO — All of a sudden, it’s Jerry Springer who’s taking the hits, not the guests on his fists-flying talk show.

Rolling Stone magazine and a TV entertainment show are reporting that the fights are about as real as a pro wrestling match, a charge the show denies. And the NBC station that brought Springer to the big leagues has scraped the show off the bottom of its corporate shoes amid rising criticism that it has degenerated into a pornographic slugfest.

Springer has a history of profiting from sleaze. And as media watchers doubted that his top-rated daytime talk show will suffer from the allegations, Chicagoans braced for a double dose of “The Jerry Springer Show” on a new station.

“Nobody ever lost any money underestimating people’s taste,” said Christopher Sterling, a George Washington University media scholar.

The show “is like wrestling,” Sterling said. “The whole thing is a put-up job.”

On Thursday, Chicago’s WFLD-TV, owned by the Fox Broadcasting Co., quickly snatched up the syndicated show in a multi-year deal that will air it not once, but twice daily.

A day earlier WMAQ-TV said it was ending its contract with Springer, whose profile the NBC station tried to raise a year earlier in a brief but disastrous stint as a news commentator.

The WMAQ announcement came just hours before the syndicated show “Extra” was scheduled to air a report saying that many of Springer’s fights are staged and guests are coached. On Friday, Rolling Stone hits the newsstands with similar allegations.

Show spokesman Jim Benson denied the allegations and said the show has “strict production guidelines and policies.”

Suzanne Muir, a Canadian restaurant owner who helped staged a high-profile hoax on the Springer show three years ago, said reports of staged shows are hardly shocking and she doubted that viewers care.

“You can tell who his audience is by who he’s playing to,” she said. “These people have just come from a fresh cockfight or a tractor pull.”

The Springer show, which featured such topics as “I Strip With My Family,” had been broadcast in Chicago daily from WMAQ’s downtown studios. It will continue to be produced there under the new deal with WFLD-TV.