Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Even more problematic than Hollywood’s bias against conservatives is its general refusal to even acknowledge that such bias exists. Recognizing and fighting the new McCarthyism would destroy the industry’s image of itself as a paradise for those of all stripes, creeds, and colors. Many of the people I talked to said flatly that television was balanced in terms of politics. “I really believe there’s something for everybody on television,” said Marcy Carsey. “If anything, I think that conservative shows are broadcast right now, which is fine.”33

  Michelle Ganeless of Comedy Central agreed with Carsey. “My opinion is that there’s something on television for everyone, and not every show is for every person. The great equalizer [is] sort of the television ratings.” Ganeless’s channel, of all the cable channels, may be the most liberally biased in terms of programming—Jon Stewart acts as a comedic PR wing for the Obama Administration and, together with Stephen Colbert, forms a phalanx of anticonservative propaganda on television—but Ganeless dismissed claims of discrimination: “I doubt that people are blacklisted.”34

  Michael Brandman, formerly of HBO, also waved off such criticisms: “I sort of feel—I sort of give it the same importance that most of the right-wing rants deserve. It’s right-wing rants.”35 So did Herman Rush, producer of The Montel Williams Show: “I don’t believe Hollywood is any more liberal or conservative, it’s mixed up of both people.”36

  Unfortunately, not everybody is entitled to an opinion, unless they have the right opinions—which is to say, leftist opinions.

  THE BLACKLIST AT WORK

  Even when the television industry’s residents refuse to acknowledge a problem, though, the problem presents itself. Take, for example, a relatively innocuous piece by Entertainment Weekly former executive editor Mark Harris from April 2010. In that piece, Harris celebrated political content in various television shows, from The Office to Parks and Recreation. So far, so good—nobody is arguing that liberal content on television should be restricted. Then Harris stepped into discriminatory territory: “Take, for instance, The Middle, ABC’s beautifully written and acted, underheralded family sitcom—and a show that, to admit my own bias, I expected to hate, since many of the political views of its star Patricia Heaton are about 8,000 light-years to my right. I’m not sure exactly how Heaton and the show’s creators—veterans of the left-populist ’90s classic Roseanne—found common ground. But what they’ve come up with . . . has an unmistakable ideological [left-leaning] undercurrent all its own.”37

  First off, Harris’s comment betrayed a shocking lack of knowledge about how the industry works—the actors generally don’t write the shows, so Heaton wouldn’t be determining content. But more important, Harris’s antipathy for Heaton’s politics infected his estimation of her work. While he was pleasantly surprised to find that The Middle skewed liberal on issues like gay rights and the economy, his initial expectation was that any show with Patricia Heaton had to be some sort of right-wing diatribe—and that, by extension, it had to be terrible. Unfortunately, this is the logic of far too many in the industry, who assume that just because someone voted for Bush or McCain, their work must be correspondingly conservative and therefore awful.

  The logic is not only flawed, it’s repulsive. Conservatives are able to write in a nonpartisan fashion—even if work is conservative, that doesn’t make it bad. But when liberal equals good and conservative equals bad—when you judge work based on its politics rather than its quality—quality falls by the wayside.

  Harris’s dislike for Heaton not only demonstrates how the left often infuses its criticism with political discrimination, it demonstrates how skewed that criticism is altogether. Harris criticized Heaton for her politics and implied that her politics would taint The Middle. But that criticism couldn’t be further from the truth in the case of Heaton, who is not only one of Tinseltown’s most skilled comic actresses, but by all accounts, a voice of reason on the set. She’s far from a controversy monger.

  But that hasn’t stopped people like Harris from attacking her. It also hasn’t stopped other television figures like vulgarian Kathy Griffin from going after her with a rhetorical chainsaw. Back in December 2006, Griffin did an interview with the National Enquirer in which she stated that she “used to think Patricia Heaton was funny, but now I’m just grossed out by her! . . . The whole gay issue, I gotta tell you—when I hear Patricia talking her bull—and saying it’s not in the Bible that gay people should be together—those are the pieces of information that I can’t forget about.”38 Of course, Heaton has never stated anything about gay marriage; this was Griffin tarring Heaton simply because Heaton identifies as a Republican. It doesn’t matter much coming from Kathy Griffin—but it does matter when even a figure as publicly reasonable and talented as Patricia Heaton is attacked for her moderate-right politics. If they attack Heaton, whom won’t they attack?

  Conservatives in Hollywood know that they’re fighting an uphill battle just to exist. The few conservatives in Hollywood who do speak out are adamant that discrimination exists on a widespread basis. They state to a man that outspoken conservatism is not to be tolerated on sets, in executive meetings, or in pitch sessions. Those conservatives who are most successful now were silent during their early days in the industry; only later did they reveal their political proclivities. That, they often say, is the only path to success as a conservative in Tinseltown. As a general rule, the conservatives who have made it in television tend to feel discrimination less than those who have not made it—but that’s because, as a general rule, those conservatives who made it in television didn’t do so when they were openly conservative, and many still don’t consider themselves conservative on social issues.

  “Are you kidding me? Of course it’s true,” explained Kelsey Grammer, star of Frasier and Cheers and well-known Hollywood Republican, when asked about the blacklist. “I wish Hollywood was a two-party town, but it’s not.” Grammer told the Hollywood Reporter that in his early days in the industry, he was essentially forced to donate $10,000 to Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Party to prevent a director from blackballing him. Grammer said the best strategy is to keep quiet about politics “unless you think the way you are supposed to think.” Evan Sayet, who wrote for Bill Maher before going out on his own, said that while on staff at one of the comedy shows, “I was informed I could not write jokes about ebonics, global warming, or any other cause coming from the left.”39 One extraordinarily high-profile television actor who openly identifies as a conservative refused to comment publicly for this book, citing backlash from the Hollywood community and possible impact on family, friends, and media coverage.

  “[Liberals] can speak very openly, even in business meetings,” avers Andrew Klavan, author of the novel True Crime and other adapted Hollywood hits, who now does video commentary for Pajamas Media. But if Klavan speaks openly, he says, “that’s pretty much the end of my sale.”40 Gary Graham, a character actor who has guest starred in Star Trek: Enterprise, Nip/Tuck, JAG, and Ally McBeal, among other shows, writes the same thing: “There are very dire consequences to being in this town, working in this industry—and speaking out against the sort of leftist agenda that is now racing through our government at every level—from city to state to federal. It pisses them off. And unfortunately for those who speak out, they control the gates to the kingdom.”41

  The blacklist, according to character actor Dan Gifford, “exists as certainly as political correctness and passive aggressiveness in Hollywood exist.”42 Anybody who has spent five minutes in Hollywood knows that PC and passive aggressiveness are perhaps the two main driving forces in the industry.

  Oscar- and Emmy-nominated writer Lionel Chetwynd was similarly disparaging about the supposedly “open” nature of the industry. “Hollywood is always a liberal enterprise any way you look at it,” Chetwynd told me. We were ensconced in his home in the Hollywood Hills, in a study piled floor to ceiling with books. Bagpipes blared in the backgrou
nd, a constant reminder of Chetwynd’s military service with the Black Watch, Royal Highland regiment of Canada. That military service, which Chetwynd marked as one of the formative experiences of his life—“I’m a captain, Frazier Highlanders, so you fuck with me, you deal with guys in loincloths and blue faces”—also influenced his perspective toward the industry. When he entered the industry in the 1970s, it was dominated by the antimilitary hangover of the Vietnam War. Chetwynd immediately ran into this liberalism head-on.

  In one social setting Chetwynd began telling a major Hollywood producer about his experiences in the army and how it had shaped him. “How can that be?” the producer asked him. “I mean, you’re a smart guy, how can you believe that shit?” Chetwynd answered him by way of a story: the story of the Allied assault on Dieppe in 1942, a gallant but fruitless test assault on the French Coast in which 3,623 of the 6,086 men who came ashore were KIA, wounded, or taken prisoner. As Chetwynd told me the story, I couldn’t help but be engrossed—it was a story of unbelievable bravery by men who knew they had to sacrifice themselves in a raid that would be mostly a learning experience for troops and commanders rather than a significant contribution to victory in Europe. The generals had to send them in order to test what a German response to an amphibious assault on Fortress Europe would look like.

  The producer was similarly enraptured. “This is a movie!” he reportedly exclaimed. “Is it available? Come over and pitch my people.”

  Three days later, Chetwynd pitched the producer’s people. “I told the story. . . . It was a suicide mission. It was Canada’s coming of age [Canada lost an enormous number of soldiers]. That was the part that brought him to tears. The church bells tolled from St. John’s Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. It was a dreadful national loss.”

  The executives were predictably enthralled, too. Then the producer said, “So you mean our bloodthirsty generals sent their own men to their death? What a story!”

  “You don’t quite have it right,” Chetwynd interjected. “In fact the generals, if you read the memoirs, wept. It was terrible. One is believed to have committed suicide. Because of the exigencies of war, they did it.”

  “It wasn’t the generals?” the producer replied. “Then who is the enemy?”

  “Well,” said Chetwynd, “Hitler and the Nazis.”

  And the producer’s representative responded, “No, no, I mean the real enemy.”

  Chetwynd erupted volcanically. “I was pulling a cigarette out,” he remembered, “and I plunged it into the glass table and broke it. I was so angry at someone who could only understand Nazism as a cipher for the evil in us. I couldn’t posit it as a voracious ---- animal that’s out there to destroy us. . . . [This experience was a] way station where I discovered what I was up against.”

  Burt Prelutsky, a writer on M*A*S*H, among other shows, as well as a two-term member of the Writers Guild board of directors, told me about an incident that underscored his recognition of the intolerant liberalism in the industry. As a member of the board, he had to vote on whether to give Guild money to a defense fund for a gallery owner who had displayed the pornographic works of Robert Mapplethorpe. “I spoke against them, which must have been an eye opener to the other people in the room,” Prelutsky remembered. “The eye opening thing was that once they got over their shock that I was arguing against it, they almost tuned me out.”43

  Perhaps the first conservative actor to openly challenge the liberal blacklist was Michael Moriarty, then the star of Law & Order. Moriarty voted for Clinton—he was a liberal Democrat. But after Attorney General Janet Reno attacked television for its violent content—a ploy often used by liberals to distract from television’s overt sexual content—Moriarty fought back in the press, alongside the show’s creator, Dick Wolf. On November 18, 1993, Moriarty attended a meeting with Reno; Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC programming; Wolf; Roz Weiman, an NBC censor; Betsy Frank, an advertising executive; Linda Otto, a producer; Thomas Carter, a director at the Equal Justice interest group, and a psychiatrist. At that meeting, Reno apparently suggested that the federal government control television programming from 3:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. As Moriarty later wrote, “I won’t go into any greater detail about the meeting except to say I was feeling . . . frustration, shame and rage during this travesty, this lavish display of contempt for the Bill of Rights. . . .”44 When Moriarty attempted to get a movement underway to force Reno’s resignation, he said, he was abandoned by NBC and Wolf and hung out to dry. He ended up resigning from the show. One year later, he took out an ad in Variety in which he stated that he was “now a blacklisted actor.” “I left my job in protest,” he wrote. “I must now leave my country.”45 Moriarty told me that Dick Wolf and much of the television establishment abandoned him when it became clear that by siding with him and against censorship, they’d be standing against Clinton. He was, he said, a “foolish idealist . . . I regret none of it.”46

  Moriarty is an exception to the rule. Many conservatives do regret their blacklisting, and with good reason. By simply expressing an opinion, they often lose out on hundreds of thousands—even millions of dollars. What makes Moriarty’s story all the more shocking is that he wasn’t even standing up for conservatism per se—he was standing up against Clintonian censorship. When Democratic political liberalism comes into conflict with principled, old-style liberalism, however, even old-style political liberals lose out in Hollywood.

  Dwight Schultz had a similar story to tell. When I met with Schulz, star of The A-Team, recurring guest star of Star Trek: Voyager, and prolific voice-over artist, he handed me a piece of paper—a casting call for a computer-animated 3-D film entitled Astro Boy (which would eventually star Kristen Bell, Nathan Lane, Eugene Levy, Donald Sutherland, Charlize Theron, and Nicolas Cage). He pointed angrily at the character description for one President Stone, the villain of the piece: “Direction: A cross between a refined, somewhat more controlled version of General Buck Turgison (George C. Scott) from Dr. Strangelove and Dick Cheney. . . .”

  “When you’re auditioning for voice-over work, cartoons, you get this in the mail,” Schultz told me. “This is very typical, very mild. This is the type of thing you’ll get. Or, ‘He’s an asshole like George Bush.’ . . . You never saw it during the Clinton years. It’s only conservatives. And it’s every day.”47 Schultz doesn’t describe the industry’s discrimination against conservatives as a blacklist. Instead, he describes it as a “liberal Bastille. . . . It’s a social network. . . . But the social aspect of this business is, to a large degree, everything there is.”

  Schultz’s first honest-to-goodness run-in with the liberal Hollywood establishment, he says, came when he was reading for Bruce Paltrow, producer on St. Elsewhere—he was auditioning for the part of Fiscus, a part that eventually went to Howie Mandel. The episode truly led off several months earlier, when both Schultz and Paltrow were attending the Williamstown Theater Festival. Paltrow spotted Schultz praising Ronald Reagan. “Dwight,” Paltrow piped up, “so you’re a Reagan asshole!”

  Fast forward a few months. At the St. Elsewhere audition, Schultz ran into Paltrow, the show’s producer. “Dwight!” Paltrow called. “What are you doing here?” Schultz blanched—when the producer asks what you’re doing at an audition, you’re finished. Schultz told Paltrow that he was there to read for the part of Fiscus. “There’s not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!” Paltrow stated authoritatively. That was the end of that.48

  Later, Schultz, told me, he couldn’t take it anymore. “It’s not worth it,” he said sadly. “It’s simply not worth it . . . you can’t go after what they say because it becomes too personal, and then you lose your self-respect to a certain degree. So I ended up in withdrawal from Hollywood.”49

  It’s outspoken conservatives like Schultz and Moriarty who fall out of favor with the Hollywood establishment. That’s because the typical liberal take is that all conservatives must be raving lunatics who are honor-boun
d to destroy chemistry on sets and in the writers’ rooms. More than that, liberals believe that conservative artists are almost literally missing a part of their hearts or brains—the part that contains empathy and social conscience, without which no great artist can operate. This is xenophobia of the highest order, but it is viewed as rational discourse in the industry.

  “You know, I think for the most part, scripted television is very liberal. Because of the kind of people it attracts to it,” said Michael Nankin, writer for Life Goes On and producer on Chicago Hope and Picket Fences, in a typical explanation. “TV writers are very literary, for the most part socially conscious artists. And that’s the personality that you need to succeed in that business, that’s the personality that it attracts. . . .” Liberalism, Nankin continued, was about “this very old-fashioned idea that art was meant to ennoble and lift up.”50

  “[Artists are] the intellectual community, that’s why [they’re liberal],” said Allan Burns, co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and producer on Lou Grant, agreeing with Nankin’s derision of conservatives on television. “Writers have always had a social conscience. That’s no surprise. I don’t mean to sound arrogant about it, because I don’t consider myself to be an intellectual, but I do consider myself to be a person who empathizes and thinks about what’s going on in the world.”51 This borders on malicious—conservative works from authors such as Ray Bradbury to George Orwell to Alexander Solzhenitsyn have captivated readers and audiences the world over. But the big-hearted leftist versus the cruel, stupid right-winger is a liberal conceit that just won’t die in Hollywood.

  Barbara Fisher was similarly outspoken about the perception in Hollywood that liberals are simply nicer people than conservatives. I asked her whether the programming tended to be more liberal at Lifetime (ex-slogan: “Television for Women”), where she had been executive vice president of entertainment, than it was at Hallmark Channel (slogan: “Make Yourself at Home”). She said that while she didn’t consider the programming at Lifetime to be more liberal, “when you’re sort of a prosocial place and you do get involved with public affairs, I think people immediately think it’s left-leaning.”52