• Ben Shapiro, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV: Broadside Books, 2011, 393 pages, $26.99.
I may be a conservative, but I still love TV. I count as my personal favorites “M*A*S*H,” “All in the Family,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Hill Street Blues,” “The Simpsons” and “Sex in the City.” Run a marathon of any of those shows, and the yard work waits another day.
But while they’re all well-acted, well-written programs, they’re also among the more liberal programs in television history. Sure, it’s no secret that Hollywood is overwhelmingly liberal, just as it was no secret that most modern liberals are really fascists.
But Ben Shapiro’s fascinating new book Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV makes us think about television as we never have before, much in the same way Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism made us think about modern liberalism.
After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll still enjoy television, because television is awesome! But you’ll never watch it the same way again.
With that in mind, Shapiro at least makes me feel better about my addiction.
“Nobody wants to turn off the television because television is great!” Shapiro writes. “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.”
If you’re a certain age, you’ll certainly enjoy Shapiro’s analysis of television’s history. There have been many influential programs over the years, but Shapiro makes the case that the most influential was Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”
Caesar “came from a certain milieu” — he was a Jewish liberal — and his writers came from that same milieu. The writers’ room featured stars in their own right who would make their mark on television for decades to come: Larry Gelbart (“M*A*S*H”); Mel Brooks (“Get Smart”); Carl Reiner (“The Dick Van Dyke Show”) and Mel Tolkin (“All in the Family”).
Just as this group of talented and politically liberal writers began to produce their own material, society became altered radically. JFK was elected president, the civil rights movement took off, opposition to the war in Viet Nam grew.
By the early 1970s, CBS had developed two shows that blatantly attacked authority — “M*A*S*H” — which simply substituted Korea for Viet Nam — and “All in the Family,” which took on the conservative political establishment in the form of a Queens dock worker named Archie Bunker.
But there were a couple of problems. For starters, both shows did poorly in the ratings in their first couple of seasons. But so eager were the creators — and the network executives — to push their political message that they stuck with them.
“’M*A*S*H’ stayed on the air despite initial ratings that made CBS executives nauseous — largely because the executives at CBS were liberal and ‘M*A*S*H’ was a militantly liberal show,” Shapiro writes.
Yet attacking authority had an unexpected result. While Archie Bunker was always on the losing end of every episode, Carroll O’Connor’s considerable acting skills made Archie a sympathetic character in the audience’s eyes.
The same was true for “Family Ties,” the first show representing liberal angst during the yuppie Reagan years. Hippies benefiting from the capitalist system they so despised began to question their existence. As a result, “Family Ties” made the authority figure an easier target: a conservative teenager named Alex P. Keaton.
Shapiro interviewed “Family Ties” creator Gary David Goldberg, who freely admitted the show’s template week after week was “Alex has a conservative/greedy idea, Alex screws something up, Alex apologizes.”
But like Carroll O’Connor, Michael J. Fox played his character so brilliantly that audiences tuned in to see him, not wallow in the angst of the 1960s generation in the midst of the Reagan Revolution. In the ultimate irony, the Gipper proclaimed “Family Ties” to be his favorite show.
The same pattern held true for television drama. Both “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere” started out with abysmal ratings, but NBC executives stuck with them because of their so-called important liberal messages about law enforcement and health care, respectively.
All of these shows are part of liberals’ efforts to portray reality — their reality.
“But to truly understand the minds of those in Hollywood, we must understand that their shows are reflective to them. In their world, what they put on television is just as real as what you see on the History Channel,” Shapiro writes. “And in their view, liberal is real.”
Of course the ultimate irony is Hollywood’s answer when being attacked for liberal programming — just change the channel. Hollywood liberals advocate the free market system they so despise, never mind the fact that in a true free market system, “Hill Street Blues” would have been canceled after just a few episodes.
But while there are some choices out there for conservatives, Shapiro concludes that there’s no “changing the channel.”
“For now at least, the industry remains one-sided, with creators and executives ignoring the market data,” Shapiro writes. “Flipping the channel has become like voting in Cuba. You can do it, but your preference isn’t going to make much of a difference when the choices are all the same.”
There’s another irony. While television screams “censorship” when government protests violent and sexual content, the industry sure doesn’t mind kowtowing to government when there’s a politically favorable (i.e. Democratic) administration in charge.
Think about it: Unlike motion pictures, television has been dependent on the government since its inception due to its use of public airwaves. Thus it’s only natural that television executives would develop relationships with government to ensure political favoritism. As Shapiro notes, the “patented Hollywood-D.C back-scratch” became “an intensely common phenomenon during the Obama administration.”
I will not go cold turkey after Primetime Propaganda. I’m willing to let politics go in order to have good laugh or have my heartstrings tugged. If anybody’s unwilling to let politics go, it’s Hollywood. That’s Hollywood’s problem, not mine.