Many of the reactions to the Reporter article have echoed a “Duh,” as if the liberal bias is a self-evident fact. More troubling is the hate speech on numerous occasions in the comments, such as the long screed I read in the morning that called Obama a “Muslim” president and regurgitated the ol’ whopper that the “gay agenda” was being pushed down people’s throats.
I’m starting with the comments because I looked in vain for a rather obvious reality check to Benjamin Shapiro’s “revelation” that American TV is controlled by liberals and churning out liberal-sided programs. (I admit I haven’t gone through every one of the 5,000 comments and still counting, because I finally had to give up.)
A caveat here. I haven’t read Shapiro’s book; it was only released May 31st, so I have to rely for the time being on the Reporter story, the so-called “revelations” of his released interview clips, and his own website’s blurb. If this sounds damn little, I assure you that you don’t need much more to poke holes in his theory. Because Benjamin Shapiro claims: “Primetime Propaganda is the story -- told in their own words -- of how television has been used over the past sixty years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image.”
The implication, at least given in the Reporter story, is that there’s a liberal mafia that’s gained control and had control for some time. And even Shapiro’s promo blurb implies that the Hollywood insiders found ways to put their (ooooooh, sinister) viewpoint across like so many subliminal “eat popcorn” frames.
Something to keep in mind: Shapiro was born in 1984. And his self-incriminating liberal conspirators seem to only go back as far as Leonard Goldberg, who gave us such novocaine as Fantasy Island and Charlie’s Angels, and Gene Reynolds of MASH fame.
But wait a minute, Shapiro claims bias for 60 years. Sorry, bzzz, bullshit. I’ve been waiting for someone to point out that no, there was hell of a lot LESS liberal bias in old television than Shapiro can claim, and oh, by the way, for close to 25 years, we put up with television the way conservatives wanted it.
Want conservative TV drama? Try this. The FBI, a Quinn Martin Production that ran for close to a decade and portrayed Bureau agents as heroic, noble guys… ahem, except when they were violating the rights of anti-war protesters and at J. Edgar Hoover’s behest, trying to smear Martin Luther King with sex tapes and dig up more dirt on the Kennedys. As it turns out, the FBI had an actual veto over show casting decisions! Now isn't that a cozy arrangement for the establishment and the supposedly liberal producers?
Still want conservative TV? Okay. How about The Mod Squad, that oh-so-hip (not) show with a brother and a blonde and of course, the nominal white guy, who instead of going to jail, rat out their friends each week to the cops. And this during a period of massive dissent among young people on university campuses, not only in the States but all over Europe.
Gee, you really want conservative values on your television? How many times have we had dreck such as Highway to Heaven, Touched by an Angel or variations thereof in the 1980s, which you could argue were pushing the “agenda” of an itinerate Jewish carpenter who likely didn’t exist and who supposedly got nailed to lumber? And during the hardcore conservative era of television, it took until 1968 –- mark that date, folks, 1968 –- for a black woman to star in her own series. Don’t remember it? I do. It was called Julia and its lead was the beautiful Diahann Carroll. It took until 1974 for television to get around to even showing Hispanic neighborhoods with Chico and the Man.
Sixty years of liberal bias? That would bring us back to 1951. Oh, really? During the era of Ozzie and Harriet, which believe it or not, you can still find re-run in some places. That era? An era of Father Knows Best and the Danny Thomas Show when everyone was white, slept in separate beds and homosexuals apparently didn’t exist and black people were only mechanics and maids? That era?
But a more precise example to show how farcical the premise is, because any “agenda” would have to start with producers and writers. So let's talk about Rod Serling.
I have a love-hate relationship with Rod Serling, still most well known today for The Twilight Zone. My feelings about the Twilight Zone sort of echo those of Futurama spoofing the famous twist endings. On Futurama’s show, The Scary Door, a guy yells, “There's a gremlin destroying the plane. You gotta believe me!” The other guy holds up a mirror. “Why should I believe you? You're Hitler!” And on it goes.
By his own admission, many of Serling’s episodes of TZ were dogs. His word, not mine: dogs. Hack work. (And oh, boy, I agree, ecch.) But long before the show, Rod Serling was writing cutting-edge dramas for programs such as Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theater. I defy anyone to watch the original kinescoped broadcast of “Patterns,” a hell of an indictment of corporate politics, or “The Comedians,” a searing portrait of a sadistic, bombastic celebrity, and tell me they’re not as true today and as powerful as when they were first broadcast. But the networks and their sponsors were often fucking around with Serling’s work. They frequently wouldn’t let him say what he wanted to say. So Serling fled to science fiction where a Martian could say things he couldn’t put in the mouth of a Democrat or a Republican.
The all-powerful liberal chipping away at American values and warping it to his or her own vision? For 60 years? Are you kidding me? Early television has scores of anecdotes of legendary writers such as Serling and Paddy Chayefsky having to put up with dolts who insisted, “You can’t say that.” One of my writing heroes, Harlan Ellison, is still very much alive and kicking, wrote scripts in the 1960s, and related in his two books of essay-reviews, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, some of his own battles against network and corporate censorship. In fact, the Nixon administration went out of its way to try to sink The Glass Teat when it came out in book form!
Shapiro had “Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds talk about pacifist messages” in MASH. But the point of MASH, a show ostensibly about the Korean War, was that the Gelbart and Reynolds couldn’t get a show on the air about Vietnam. Now consider that by the time MASH started on CBS in 1972, Vietnam had brought down Johnson, Nixon had already started a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia, young Americans were protesting the war by the thousands. Americans had been in Vietnam for years…. and you couldn’t get a drama on the air about the subject. You had to disguise it as a completely different war.
Shaping America? What. A. Crock.
Is there a blacklist in Hollywood today against conservative actors, writers or directors? Possibly. And it would be wrong -- as wrong as those network execs who stuck their big fat, untalented thumbs in during the 1960s when Ellison couldn’t make the point about housewives on prescription uppers while kids were sent away for years for an ounce of pot; when Serling had to fight to get a script about racism in the South on air; when the actors for the kitschy, Sixties version of Batman were told they couldn’t touch each other or stand too close lest they be mistaken as homosexual. Has the pendulum swung too far to the left? Doubtful.
Consider that in one of the last episodes of one of the most thoughtful and provocative shows ever on television, Law & Order, a show brutally cancelled by NBC, a balanced view is given of the abortion debate where the “anti” side is given its due, and a humanized, compassionate portrayal it is at that. Can you think of one other lead character besides Gregory House on network television who’s presented as being an atheist and advancing that view? And yet House is depicted in all his flawed, fucked-up humanity, a drug addict who makes politically incorrect barbs and who’s an adolescent in his romantic relationships. Even the CSI guys, from Grissom to Horatio to Mac Taylor, are the science heroes, yet portrayed as either believing in God or being safely, neutrally agnostic.
Shapiro -- Buddha help us -- is 27 years old. He’s very successful. But like many 27-year-olds, his frame of reference for history obviously doesn’t allow for much past Wham videos and the original (ugh) Battlestar Galactica.
I’ve viewed a lot of Sixties television, even viewed a fair share of 1950s television and viewed hours upon hours of television through the 1970s and 1980s into the 90s and onward. The horror, the horror… The coma-inducing fare for much of the Me Decade as well as the 80s at most, briefly flirted with occasional portrayals of women as three-dimensional characters and offered stereotypes of black people that were so excruciating you want to run out and buy Tyler Perry DVDs. Ask an older black person how many times he saw his race depicted in cop shows pre-1980 as dope fiends, pushers, rapists, etc.? Then ask him or her to be nostalgic over that wonderful period when there was more than one “loveable” sitcom about a rich white guy adopting black kids. And how revolting that was...
Roe v. Wade from 1973. Did you see that in your comedy or drama? I can only recall one show that dared to cover the abortion debate, and that was Maude. Silence on the issue for the most part until the 1990s. Gays? Gays that aren’t swishy, faggoty, stereotype gays? You can count the portrayals on one hand probably. Forget transgender issues, unless you want to go do an academic re-evaluation of the very last episode of the original Star Trek (check it out, you could make a case for the subtext).
Poverty? Yes, there was a lot of bleeding heart drama over poverty from the 1950s on, but except for Serling and Chayefsky, did anyone get to point fingers at Wall Street before the 1980s? Good luck finding episodes of that show.
Shapiro has been a recurring welcome guest on Fox News. And like Fox News, it seems clear that he doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his premise. The book will sell, no doubt. And more is the pity. In today’s United States of Amnesia, history doesn’t last as long as a vicious little idea with no foundation. History is an unaired pilot…
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