Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Lazarsfeld’s concept was simple and brilliant. It was also weak. The social science data to support these assertions were tenuous at best. The 1950 census shows men aged 14–24 had a median income of approximately $1,054 for veterans of World War II, $2,185 for non-veterans. Men aged 25–44 had a median income of $2,904. Men aged 45–64 had a median income of $2,644. Taken together, men under 45 actually had a lower median income than those over 45 according to these statistics. Lazarsfeld was correct that urban families earned significantly more than rural families—$3,429 for urban families versus $2,552 for nonfarming rural families and substantially less for farming rural families.40 But there was a tremendous income gap in urban areas that only escalated over time; by the end of the decade, almost half of poor Americans lived in metropolitan areas.41 This meant that while there were many middle-class families living in the cities and the suburbs, there were also large numbers of people who had no money. Targeting young urban audiences meant targeting poor people, at least a large portion of the time.

  It is also worth noting that Lazarsfeld’s analysis focused on income, as opposed to savings. Americans who are older often have more disposable income than those who are younger, particularly in a day and age when older people receive government benefits while younger people pay for those benefits. Even in 1950, homeowners were disproportionately older—67.9 percent of homeowners were at least 65 years old.42 Those were the people who didn’t have to pay for rent and could afford to spend money on other products. Today, U.S. citizens over age 65 now comprise a higher percentage of the population than teenagers; over-55 households have double the assets of 45- to 55-year-old households. Households led by those aged 45–55 spend 17 percent more money than the average American household; 55–64-year-olds rank second best, spending 15 percent more than the average household.43

  As for Lazarsfeld’s contention that the elderly were less prone to switch their viewing and purchasing habits, social science data is mixed at best. Some studies suggest that there is “no evidence to suggest that older consumers were likely to be less innovative in their consumptive behavior.”44 Others state that “older adults have been shown to be among the last to adopt a product, service, or idea innovation.”45 However, many of those studies about the difficulty of persuading older people to buy products note that older consumers are more likely to buy when prodded by mass media, as opposed to younger consumers, who rely on friends and family.46 One national telephone survey of 1,000 Americans suggested that while those aged 55–64 were more skeptical of advertisements than other age groups, they also believed more strongly than any other age group that most advertising is informative, that advertised brands worked better than unadvertised brands, and that the government should not regulate advertising.47

  Lazarsfeld’s endorsement of younger audiences was unequivocal, however. ABC swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  This suggests an obvious question: Just who in the hell was Paul Lazarsfeld? According to Lazarsfeld biographer Michael Pollak, Lazarsfeld grew up in the house of a militant Social Democrat in Austria; his father, a lawyer, gave free legal services to those charged with political crimes, and his mother used to give tea parties for socialist pseudointellectuals. When Lazarsfeld became a researcher, “he made an effort to coordinate his research with the political priorities of the [Social Democrat] Party.”48 Two of his closest clients were Max Horkheimer, famously of the Frankfurt School, and the Socialist Party. Lazarsfeld’s relationships with members of the Frankfurt School lasted throughout his life; he helped members of the Frankfurt School immigrate to the United States.

  What was the Frankfurt School? It was a group of philosophers dedicated to “cultural Marxism,” the implementation of Marxism in capitalist countries through cultural means—in other words, they wanted to take over countries by taking over American institutions like campuses, the media, and Hollywood. The Frankfurt School saw that traditional Marxism had been unable to penetrate capitalist society in pure economic terms, and they decided to direct their efforts toward a cultural takeover.

  While his biographer argues that Lazarsfeld’s emigration to America “marked the end of Lazarsfeld’s political involvement,” Lazarsfeld’s political agenda came across in his actions. Lazarsfeld got Frankfurt School member and socialist Theodor Adorno a job with the Princeton Radio Research Project, despite the fact that Adorno was not a researcher. During World War II, he worked alongside Frankfurt School members like Herbert Marcuse at the Office of Strategic Studies in the War Department (the OSS was the predecessor to the CIA—a bizarre place to store Marxist intellectuals).

  He finally landed at the Columbia Sociology Department, a far-left department dedicated to remaking “social science, if not the world,” according to student Seymour Martin Lipset. His biographer admits that “Where possible, [Lazarsfeld] accepted research projects that corresponded to his earlier political commitment. . . . His writings in media sociology and his Austro-Marxist traditions suggest that he firmly believed that administrative and marketing research would help the elites manage society more enlightenedly in accordance with ‘what the people really want.’ ”49

  Lazarsfeld was a through-and-through top-down elitist when it came to television. In testimony before the FCC in December 1959, Lazarsfeld stated that he believed television standards should be set by “a group of competent and detached people . . . a standards committee composed of artists, psychologists, and research technicians.” He also suggested that networks be allowed to collude openly with one another to prevent competition for ratings—such competition, he felt, could only lead to an attempt to garner the most viewers. In short, he said, “In a democracy, the basic decisions are made by the public. And yet, we do not determine the programs of our schools or of our health services by referenda. On certain cultural and scientific issues we accept the guidance of experts. Television should be one of those issues.”50

  Lazarsfeld felt that mass media presented the very significant danger of reinforcing the capitalist status quo. “These media have taken on the job of rendering mass publics conformative to the social and economic status quo.” The American people, he said, were suffering from “narcotizing dysfunction.”51

  What does any of this have to do with Lazarsfeld’s dubious findings on the merits of marketing to younger viewers? A lot. By directing programming at younger viewers, Lazarsfeld had to recognize that programming itself would become more liberal—it would attack antiquated notions about sexuality and family life that the Frankfurt School despised. Younger viewers are always more likely to be critical of social mores and standards, more open to government redistributionism, less likely to be offended by the imposition of foreign morality on American shores—or on American television. Lazarsfeld must have known this—his mother, Sofie, wrote tracts explaining that “Generally, there is a tendency on the part of young people to ‘chase after’ sexual pleasure, almost to the exclusion of everything.”52

  This isn’t to say that Lazarsfeld purposefully biased his research due to his political persuasion. There’s little evidence for that proposition. But like artists, scientists generally allow their political viewpoints to bleed into their research, creating conclusions and then directing their research toward those preconceived conclusions. Lazarsfeld was strongly political all of his life, and his conclusions just happened to support his liberal ideals. Perhaps that was coincidence. More likely, it was not.

  What certainly wasn’t coincidence was ABC’s decision to take Lazarsfeld’s results at face value. It would be one thing if the people at ABC thought Lazarsfeld was right when he argued for the value of the younger viewer. But they had good reason to doubt his conclusions. After all, ABC was getting its posterior handed to it both in terms of revenue and in terms of ratings. From 1950 to 1970, ABC had a grand total of twenty shows that hit the top ten. That’s one per year. And there were only three networks.

  All ABC had to sell was their flimsy n
umbers based on Lazarsfeld’s research and their rural weakness. Leonard Goldberg, head of programming at ABC during the mid to late 1960s, told me as much: “We used to sell those [specialized] ratings because once you got out [of those statistics], you died. . . . We used to sell the 18 to 49, the 18 to 34 ratings. This was back in the early 1970s. And people would say, ‘Who cares?’ We had presentations . . . about the value of those people who hadn’t set their patterns. . . . We did it out of self-preservation, it’s all we had.”53

  Advertisers bought into the ABC cooked-book concept. Perhaps it was because most advertising executives are younger than fifty.54 Perhaps it was because advertising executives were more interested in pushing dollars toward more liberal, sexier programming—after all, advertising agencies are nearly as liberal as Hollywood. But in any case, advertiser comfort with what ABC was selling translated into bucks for networks willing to skew young and liberal.

  ABC’s new strategy frightened the more straight-laced, affiliate-wealthy folks at CBS and NBC. They were bamboozled by ABC’s marketing efforts and the burgeoning advertiser frenzy for youth audiences. Mike Dann, the senior vice president of CBS from 1966 to 1970, bought into the ABC marketing effort. “We were the hillbilly network,” he said to me. This despite the fact that as of 1968, CBS featured six of the top ten shows on television, while ABC featured zero.55

  But now, the numbers weren’t good enough. Now they had to be the right kind of numbers. “ABC definitely had the young people’s crowd, because they had all these Warner Bros. hours that were scheduled from eight to nine o’clock, a Sunset Strip kind of thing,” Dann averred. “Their early hours were so geared to a pack of young men and women, and they just knocked us out, you see.”56 By any objective measure, ABC was still getting crushed at the time. But that didn’t stop the movement at CBS.

  One day, Dann got called into the Big Boss’s office. “I got called in by Bill Paley,” Dann remembered. Paley grilled him about ABC’s programming. “[ABC was] very able to dance us off our feet, because our programs were entrenched and their programs were new. Now that’s a big difference,” Dann remembered. He sighed. “They were very, very good. They were so good that they frightened us at CBS.”57

  Scared of the ABC strategy (and no doubt by the harsh criticism of Bill Paley), Dann told me he was instrumental in picking up All in the Family, which was “so dramatically not the hillbilly network.” He wanted instead to focus on the urban audiences. “Big cities and boroughs became seventy percent, seventy-five percent of our audience” during this period, Dann said. When I pressed Dann on the statistics, he admitted, “We weren’t even sure of that. Those estimates were always made up and argued with Nielsen, where our audiences were, because many advertisers did not like the rural audience. They were interested in seeds and hay and that kind of crap and they stopped viewing at ten o’clock. They were asleep. It was the urban centers that became predominant.”58

  In other words, the numbers relied upon by the advertisers were just as flukey and phony as anything else in the TV industry. Leonard Stern, who produced Get Smart and He & She, among others, told me that he actually fought this battle with the executives at CBS. “I remember speaking out against it,” he said. “I spoke at CBS on this . . . I was always looking for evidence to prove that the networks were lying on statistics.” In fact, Stern went so far as to commission research on the Nielsens, which he says showed that their information was deeply flawed.

  “We did battle the best we could, and we proved to our satisfaction that the Nielsens were consistently off the mark,” Stern explained. Stern’s research featured viewers using—you guessed it—Lazarsfeld’s viewer tests. And surprise, surprise: Stern discovered that the results of those tests were flexible. “I remember one of the scientists saying that the results were malleable but they could be interpreted as being 100 percent correct four percent of the time,” Stern laughed. “You could introduce bias subtly into the questioning process, and the result could reflect what you wanted.”59

  The burgeoning urban movement was tinsel, but it was effective in changing the entire face of the industry. That’s because motivated advertisers and executives and creators wanted that change. They’d had enough of catering to the “hillbillies”—that word came up frequently in conversation with the former executives. Now they wanted to cater to their neighbors and friends.

  In all likelihood, it wasn’t Dann who bought into the ABC youth-first version of reality—it was Bob Wood. Wood, whom Paley promoted over Dann to head CBS in toto, took credit for the movement away from rural programming. When he was made president of the network, Wood’s first priority was asking, “What can we do to maintain the leadership of our network while at the same time putting it through a test—of changing the character of the network from more bucolic material to more fresh or updated, contemporary, whatever you want to call it.”60

  Fred Silverman, then working under Wood and Dann, backed up Wood’s gambit.

  “What was behind the programming shift?” I asked him.

  “Money,” he answered. “Simple economics. We were a rural network . . . from a demographic point of view, an age point of view, the audience was ancient. . . . And ABC was making a lot of money with a lesser schedule by appealing to the eighteen-to-forty-nine audience. . . . So here we were with this old hillbilly audience. And it was a matter of survival.”61

  It wasn’t quite simple economics, though. “To me,” said Silverman, “I said it’s great. . . . We in one year cancelled ten shows with a collective share of audience of a 36. These were shows that were top-ten shows.” Why would Silverman be happy about this? Only for ideological reasons, not fiscal ones.

  The substitutes? In Silverman’s words, they were “initially, really terrible shows. There wasn’t a show that was a keeper in the whole group.”62

  The man most hosed by the industry’s sea change was Marty Ransohoff, the profit-first programmer who saw his babies—The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction—canceled in one fell swoop. “In the early 1970s, these shows all went off the air,” Ransohoff said as he sipped wine at a trendy Los Angeles restaurant. Ransohoff’s shows were pure entertainment. “We weren’t concerned with politics when we made these shows. We were making shows for an audience. That was the only way to stay on the air.”63

  Not after the programming shift. Now, targeting a specific audience was the best way to stay on the air. Preferably, programming liberal to target a specific audience. It didn’t matter if All in the Family started rough out of the gate—it was pulling that young, urban audience in a hip, liberal manner. Said Silverman, “All in the Family just singularly made the CBS television network. It gave us that one hit, that one defining show. Not only was it an enormous audience hit, but it just was kind of a model for what Bob Wood and I wanted that network to look like: being very, very progressive . . . being very, very urban . . . being very cutting edge.”64 Broad-casting was entering its final death throes. The time of the hand-picked audience had begun.

  To this day, targeting young audiences remains the advertisers’ goal. In the United States as of 1998, advertising agencies paid $24 per 1,000 audience members to reach people 18–35, as opposed to $10 per 1,000 for older audiences.65 Because of CBS’s high numbers among older viewers for the past few decades, M*A*S*H writer Burt Prelutsky told me, they commissioned a study asking about the consumption habits of older viewers. “They wanted to prove that this whole concentration on youth was nonsense,” he said. “They were already the old kocker network. They found, first, that old people were just as likely as young people to try a new product [and] even though the young people had more discretionary income because their folks were paying their bills, the older people were making so much more money, that even though it was a smaller percentage, it was still more.

  “As an example of the stupidity that was rampant in ad agencies and with sponsors, there was a show called Tour of Duty,
which was in the 60s in the ratings rankings, but it skewed young . . . and at the same time, Murder, She Wrote was on the air, which was either first or second each week,” Prelutsky related. “Tour of Duty was charging $165,000 a commercial minute; Murder, She Wrote was $95,000. And yet there were more people in the target group watching Murder, She Wrote than all of them watching Tour of Duty. What are they thinking?!”66

  What are they thinking, indeed. Goldberg, who pushed the 18-to-49 concept, believed the theory back in the 1960s and 1970s—but now, on the board of the highly successful and older-skewing CBS, he thinks it’s outdated. “I don’t think it’s still true to the same extent, although now that’s all everyone talks about, the 18-to-49 crowd. Also, if you look at what age people lived to back in the late 1960s, early 1970s versus today, sixty is the new forty. So I think it’s exactly the reverse. . . . Now when they’re pitching it, they say, . . . ‘Oh, CBS is an old network. Yeah, they’re number one, but not in the 18-to-49, they’re just number two there.’ I say, ‘So what? Who do you think is going to buy anything of value? Who has the damn money?’ ”

  When I mentioned to Goldberg that targeting the young audience skewed liberal and lost the viewers in Birmingham, Alabama, he nodded vigorously. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “And that is why CBS under Les Moonves is number one by a wide margin every year. He puts on shows for the television audience. . . . All the media darlings [compete with each other] every week, but who comes out number one every week? CBS.”67 Goldberg’s right. CBS does it with older viewers. And the younger viewers make for bankrupt networks. This year, CBS live primetime viewers’ median age was fifty-six. The youngest median viewers visit the CW network. Who’s first? CBS. Who’s last? CW.68