Primetime Propaganda Read online

  PRIMETIME PROPAGANDA

  The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV

  Ben Shapiro

  Dedication

  To my wife, Mor,

  whose love, comfort, and understanding make our life journey

  such a magnificent adventure

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue: How Conservatives Lost the Television War

  Introduction:

  The Political Perversion of Television

  The Secret Political History of Television

  How Television Became Liberal

  The Clique

  How Television Stays Liberal

  A Spoonful of Sugar

  How Television Comedy Trashes Conservatism

  Making The Right Cry

  How Television Drama Glorifies Liberalism

  “Shut Up and Change the Channel”

  How the Left Uses the Market Myth to Silence Its Critics

  The Celluloid Triangle

  How Interest Groups, Government, and Hollywood Conspire to Keep TV Left

  The Government-Hollywood Complex

  How Hollywood Became the Federal Government’s PR Firm

  Robbing the Cradle

  How Television Liberals Recruit Kids

  The End of Television?

  How to Fix TV

  Appendix: The Best Conservative Shows in Television History

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue: How Conservatives Lost the Television War

  “Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.”

  —Homer Simpson

  I was born in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. When the doctors pulled me out of my mom in 1984 at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, California, I was two blocks down from the beige buildings housing the sound studios of NBC, where they were busily filming Night Court, starring Harry Anderson. Across the street was the headquarters for Disney, which looked a bit decrepit; a few years later, Disney would refurbish the Team Disney building by adding a façade of the Seven Dwarfs holding up the roof—and a few years after that, Disney would add the ABC buildings to its Burbank estate. Drive down Alameda Boulevard for about a mile, and there stood the massive Warner Bros. studios, complete with enormous posters advertising upcoming TV shows and movies. Keep going, make a right on Lankershim, and you’d be staring at Universal Studios, where Mr. T and the cast of The A-Team were filming on the back lots.

  I’ve loved Hollywood ever since.

  Both of my parents work in Hollywood. My cousins, who lived around the corner from our small two bedroom house in Burbank, were Hollywood dreamers too. My aunt got two of my cousins into the movies. One cousin had a bit part in the Tom Hanks vehicle Turner & Hooch. His younger sister became a true Hollywood star, playing the little girl in Mrs. Doubtfire, Richard Attenborough’s Miracle on 34th Street, Matilda, A Simple Wish, and Thomas and the Magic Railroad.

  My family isn’t unusual in Los Angeles; everybody in Hollywood wants to be “in the biz.” Every waiter writes scripts, goes on auditions, or attends acting class—generally, all three. Everyone has “a project.” Nathanael West labeled California the place where people “come to die.” More accurately, it’s the place where people come to wait tables.

  I narrowly escaped an acting career in Hollywood myself. When I was fifteen months old, my mom’s friend, Jean, was making a documentary about child care. She asked if my dad could bring me to the filming. Dad agreed, and he talked with me in front of the cameras. Because I was an early talker, Jean was favorably impressed, and suggested that Dad get me into commercials.

  “He’s cute, he’s bright, he’ll be a natural,” she told him.

  “You must be nuts,” said Dad.

  That was the end of my Hollywood acting career. If it hadn’t been for Dad, maybe I’d be giving an inane Oscar speech right now. More likely, I’d be waiting tables.

  Dad kept me out of TV and movies because he wanted me and my three younger sisters to have a “Norman Rockwell childhood”: two-parent home, no drugs, no alcohol, no premarital sex. That also meant that Dad monitored the sort of TV we watched. When I was growing up, Dad used to go to the video store and pick up old copies of The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of the cleanest shows of all time—Rob (Van Dyke) and Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) have a son, Richie, apparently without copulating, since they sleep in separate beds.

  As we grew up, Dad tried to ban us from watching most of the contemporary TV shows. The Simpsons was off-limits, as was Friends. Forget about Murphy Brown. These were shows, Dad said, that promoted particular social agendas: the stupidity of fathers, the substitution of friends for family, the normalization of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

  Good luck, Dad. My sisters and I ended up watching all the shows our friends watched. So I’ve seen virtually every episode of The Simpsons. I currently own all ten seasons of Friends—my wife is a huge fan, and I gave them to her as a Hanukkah present. I know the ins and outs of Dawson’s Creek, the trials and tribulations of The Practice, even the ups and downs of Becker (there’s not much showing at 3:00 P.M. on TBS). During finals week of my first year at Harvard Law School, I watched the first two seasons of Lost. When I was in college, I staked out a shoot of 24 near my parents’ house for five hours to get a picture with Kiefer Sutherland.

  Then one day, as I was watching Friends, it struck me: Dad was right. It was “The One with the Birth.” Ross’s lesbian ex-wife, Carol, is having his baby. And Ross is understandably perturbed that Carol and her lesbian lover will be bringing up his child. While Ross is going quietly cuckoo, Phoebe approaches him. “When I was growing up,” she tells him, “you know my dad left, and my mother died, and my stepfather went to jail, so I barely had enough pieces of parents to make one whole one. And here’s this little baby who has like three whole parents who care about it so much that they’re fighting over who gets to love it the most. And it’s not even born yet. It’s just, it’s just the luckiest baby in the whole world.”

  Pregnant lesbians and three-parent households portrayed as not only normal, but admirable. This wasn’t exactly Dick Van Dyke.

  And it wasn’t one random episode of Friends. The propagation of liberal values was endemic to the industry. While Ross was busy walking his lesbian ex-wife down the aisle for her wedding to her new lover, Samantha was chatting graphically about oral sex with Charlotte on Sex and the City; Shavonda and Sarah were going topless and French kissing each other on The Real World: Philadelphia; a gay man and a single woman were considering whether to have a baby together on Will & Grace; Kate was deciding in favor of abortion on Everwood; and the city of Springfield was legalizing gay marriage on The Simpsons.

  It hit me that I was watching the culture being changed before my eyes. These weren’t just television episodes—they were pieces of small-scale, insidiously brilliant leftist propaganda.

  And they weren’t merely anecdotal incidents. They were endemic to the industry—no matter where I turned, I began to see that liberal politics pervaded entertainment. The shows that pushed the cultural envelope received the greatest media attention and often the greatest number of viewers. The shows that embraced traditional values—well, there weren’t any shows that openly embraced traditional values.

  The overwhelming leftism of American televisi
on was too universal to be merely coincidence. It had to be the product of a concerted effort, a system designed to function as an ideological strainer through which conservatism simply could not pass. And the more I investigated, the more I saw that Hollywood was just that: a carefully constructed mechanism designed by television’s honchos to blow a hole in the dike of American culture. Television’s best and brightest wanted to set America sliding down the slippery slope away from its Judeo-Christian heritage and toward a more cultivated, refined, Europeanized sensibility.

  And they succeeded. This book tells the story of that success, a success planned by some, coordinated by others, and implemented by a vast group of like-minded politically motivated people infusing their values both consciously and unconsciously into their work.

  It is no great shocking revelation that television is liberal. Conservatives like Robert Bork and Donald Wildmon, among others, have criticized television for years.

  Typically, such critics have tackled television from a purely moral perspective, in a tone of opprobrium, responding in a largely sporadic fashion to a series of daily outrages; they pick up on the most egregious abuses of broadcasting liberty, attacking the content that comes across their screens.

  Everything these critics say is accurate—television has been the most impressive weapon in the left’s political arsenal. But to the evident frustration of conservative cultural critics, this moralistic argument has been utterly ineffective. I know, because I made precisely the same arguments in Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future. In that book, I looked at the television industry and analyzed many of the shows on the small screen. Like Bork and Wildmon, I was highly critical of television’s liberal content, and called for a boycott of particular advertisers, as well as tighter FCC regulation of television content.

  The argument failed for one main reason: television is awesome.

  Nobody wants to turn off the television because television is great! Television is just too much fun for people to turn it off. We come home from a long day at work and we want to space out, so we flip on the tube. We’ve been doing it for generations. My dad tried the cultural conservative argument—turn off the television and preserve your values!—and we all watched television anyway. Hell, each night after I finished working on that day’s portion of Porn Generation, I flipped on the TV to wind down, and watched some of the very shows I was criticizing. Arguing that television is liberal and that therefore every true conservative should read a book during dinner is unreasonable.

  No matter how much critics like Bork and Wildmon exhort the public to hit the OFF button, nobody’s responding; indeed, if nothing else is clear by now, it is that conservative critics totally underestimate the staying power and popular appeal of television. Even conservatives who complain about television still watch it—in fact, according to the Hollywood Reporter, conservatives actually boost television’s most successful shows to the top of the ratings.1 Conservative viewers aren’t boycotting advertisers. They aren’t voting with their remotes. They’re watching because they enjoy it.

  Moreover, even if everything they say is technically correct, cultural conservatives undermine their own credibility on the issue of television by attacking its content. Everybody who watches television has a favorite show. Nobody wants to believe that that show is instrumental in destroying America’s moral fabric. Even more important, most conservatives believe that they are impervious to the seductive siren call of television liberalism. When cultural conservatives attack television political content, therefore, they alienate just about everyone: liberal Americans who like the content, conservative Americans who think the content doesn’t have any effect on them and object only when some shrill comment about Reagan or Bush or Palin emanates from their TV set, and moderates who are indifferent and annoyed by shrieking political debate about their favorite evening entertainment. The traditional conservative critique, therefore, ticks Americans off rather than awakening them—the vast majority respond with a simple, effective phrase: “Lighten up!”

  In fact, the typical conservative critique plays right into the hands of the liberals who program television, in two important ways. First, it allows liberals to point their fingers at conservative censorship, arguing that they want to set up a slippery slope toward fascism. This is a fallacious argument from a Constitutional perspective—the First Amendment was created to protect political speech, not curse words or fart jokes—but it works, playing on Americans’ well-founded distrust of government interference in private choices. Of course, by pointing at the conservative slippery slope, liberals obscure the fact that they are pushing just as hard in the opposite direction, down a slippery slope toward moral relativism and, ultimately, nihilism. But the conservative emphasis on censorship and boycotts allows liberals to create a false dichotomy between crackdowns on free speech on the one hand and unmitigated liberalism on the other. Given such a choice, Americans will choose unmitigated liberalism every time, since they see it as the lesser of two evils.

  Second, the moralistic conservative argument allows liberals to suggest that conservatives are curmudgeons and cranks who still think Father Knows Best ought to top the ratings. Liberals point to the fact that the shows conservatives love to critique are overwhelmingly successful. The market has therefore justified the existence of liberal-oriented shows, and if conservatives don’t like those shows, that’s because they are extremists out of touch with mainstream values. (They are also hypocrites who cite the free market selectively.) Television liberals also point to the age of their consumers as evidence that conservatives are past their prime—television has targeted young people since the late 1960s, and if conservatives reject today’s programming, that’s because they’re crotchety old bores who want to turn back the clock to the monochrome culture of the 1950s.

  Every point the liberals make is correct. The traditional conservative critique is worse than useless in the long run—it forces conservatives to turn their backs on modern television or embrace it without reservation. When conservatives treat television as the Golden Calf, they leave no choice but to lay low the unbelievers—and most of us prefer to continue occasionally glancing at the offending cow. Cultural conservatives who believe that television must be cast out like a leper leave us no in-between. Forced to choose, even most conservatives will side with liberals, in practice, by watching what liberals watch in the privacy of their homes.

  I understand why cultural conservatives have lost the argument about television, because I’m not one of the old-style, fire-and-brimstone types who insist that television must be discarded in order to save America. Perhaps that’s because I’m a member of that younger generation that grew up on television. I’m right in the sweet spot for most television producers—I’m twenty-seven years old, male, and middle-upper-class. I’m married and shop for my family. I’m the gold standard for advertisers and programmers.

  I understand why cultural conservatives find television so damn frustrating. But I also understand why Americans have rejected the conservative arguments on television outright, even if they sympathize with the underlying rationale. Americans love TV, and they’re not all that interested in hearing it criticized.

  In short, the traditional conservative argument has failed. What then can conservatives do?

  We can make a new argument. That argument is made in Primetime Propaganda.

  This book isn’t the typical moralizing conservative critique of industry content, haphazard or hit-and-run. It doesn’t focus on shows from the outside, a strategy that fails because it ignores the inherent subjectivity of content analysis. Instead, it focuses on the industry behind the scenes, and tells the inside story of liberal television from the mouths of those who have shaped it. Primetime Propaganda examines the political orientation and history of television since its inception, not through secondary sources but by looking at the actual words and deeds of the most important figures in TV ove
r the last sixty years. The book makes a case that Hollywood content isn’t merely or accidentally leftist, but is consciously designed by liberal creators and executives to convert Americans to their political cause. This case was built over the course of thousands of hours and dozens of interviews, from the palatial estates off Sunset Boulevard to the entertainment skyscrapers of New York City, from the lots of Warner Bros. and ABC and Sony Pictures Studios to the delis and trendy coffee houses of Hollywood.

  Primetime Propaganda is also a constructive exposé of the television industry, rather than a frontal assault on its existence. The goal here is to understand the sway of television, to gauge and measure it, and to insist that television’s power be used to entertain rather than indoctrinate. It just so happens that focusing on entertainment rather than political propaganda is also how television can save itself.

  First, though, the television industry is going to have to admit that it has a problem: it’s ideologically xenophobic. Most conservatives in Hollywood don’t work today, at least not openly. That’s not because conservatives are untalented or unqualified or incapable of empathy, as many on the left ridiculously contend. It’s because liberals employ a mirror form of McCarthyism on a large scale.

  That’s a controversial contention, and one I used to doubt. When I began writing this book, I thought the claim of anti-conservative discrimination was overblown, self-serving nonsense put out by unsuccessful conservatives who just couldn’t hack it in Hollywood. After all, many of those who complain that they can’t get work can’t make the grade.

  I wasn’t sure there was discrimination against conservatives—until it happened to me.

  If you spend too much time in Hollywood, you find yourself gradually and inexorably drawn toward the bright lights. The U.S. television and movie industry overall employs almost 2.5 million people across the country and pays them over $140 billion in total wages annually. If the biz were a country, it would produce a higher GDP than Hungary, New Zealand, and Peru. And that’s not even looking at the cultural influence of the industry, which is its main cachet.