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

380 Pages·2011·1.96 MB·English

by  Ben Shapiro

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 television 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