Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Fred Silverman, who at one time or another ran all three major television networks and was criticized for being a proponent of “jiggle TV,” said, “I would hope in some ways that we kind of led the audience, that we didn’t follow the audience, but that on some of the shows we were at the forefront of movements.”89

  Brandon Stoddard explained that his goal was to find material that was able to both “say something but also putting something on the air that was entertaining.”90 Marcy Carsey agreed, telling me that social messaging and marketing were not in competition.91 Barbara Fisher of Hallmark Channel (and formerly of Lifetime) said, “I’m not paid to do the Barbara Fisher initiative or my pet projects. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I don’t bring some of my personality—I do.”92 Even Mike Dann—the same Dann who told me that the ratio of social responsibility to entertainment in his mind when it came to greenlighting was “About five to one”—said that he hoped his legacy in television would be “shows . . . like East Side/West Side,” a commercial flop and a commonly cited masterpiece among liberals.93

  Still, executives say that their programming choices are market-based.

  The myth survives because it is only half-myth. The executives do want to make money—otherwise they’d be fired forthwith. The networks aren’t PBS. But that doesn’t mean that executives are worried exclusively about the buck in Ayn Rand style. They’re concerned with their messaging—a praiseworthy concern, but one that becomes troubling if the executives are universally liberal.

  And essentially, they are. By now, it’s become a self-perpetuating system. Today’s television executives grew up on television, mainly in urban areas, attained high levels of education, and know the ins-and-outs of typical Hollywood fare. They’re young because everyone is seeking the “young” audience. Larry Gelbart describes network executives in typically colorful style: “Why do our TV sets seem like copy machines with moving pictures? Everything we see on the box represents choices made by network executives, who tend to be young.”94 Hollywood’s executives tend to think alike, vote alike, and program alike. And when they’re seeking to “do good,” they push the same political messages.

  HOLE NUMBER FOUR: AUDIENCES DON’T CHANGE THE CHANNEL

  Television creators and executives claim that the market bears out their artistic choices because, after all, viewers can change the channel if they don’t like what they’re watching. For example, I quizzed Michelle Ganeless on how Comedy Central can call itself an “adult” channel while catering largely to kids. (Ganeless admitted to me that at least 20 to 30 percent of the Comedy Central audience is below eighteen years of age.) She answered, “We have standards, obviously, standards and practices the network lives by, but if a parent doesn’t want their ten-year-old watching a show, the parent needs to be responsible for that at any network, not just ours.”95

  There are a couple of problems with the assumption that people will simply switch the channel if they don’t like what they’re watching. The first is the most obvious: Many people simply don’t. Whether the remote has died and they’re glued to the couch or they’re taking in whatever content the television spits out, viewers aren’t quite the perfect consumers the television honchos would have us believe. Scientists say that television is addictive. You wouldn’t hear liberals making the argument that smokers can always throw out their packs of Marlboros. Instead, they call for regulation of the tobacco industry.

  The second problem with the “turn the channel” argument is that it assumes there’s something to turn the channel to. If you don’t like the political take on Friends, you can always find something more conservative; if you don’t like All in the Family, you can always find a Waltons. Again, that’s false. Viewers have a limited selection of politically motivated programming from which to choose. Aside from 24, it is difficult to think of a single conservative-oriented entertainment show on television over the last decade. The best conservatives can do is innocuous fare like Everybody Loves Raymond or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which aren’t conservative so much as apolitical. Liberals, on the other hand, can pick from several shows every night of the week.

  Actually, conservative viewers do turn the channel when they don’t like what they’re watching—but they turn the channel to less liberal shows, since conservative shows aren’t available. Ironically enough, their viewing choices are far more predictive of a show’s success than liberals’ viewing choices. In November 2010, the Hollywood Reporter ran an astonishing story about a study by leading media-research company Experian Simmons. The study looked at the viewing habits of self-identified conservatives and Republicans, and compared those viewing habits to the viewing habits of self-identified liberals and Democrats. Here are Republicans’ favorite shows, in order of preference: (1) Glenn Beck, (2) The Amazing Race, (3) Modern Family, (4) American Idol and V (tie), (6) The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist (tie), (8) Survivor, (9) Dancing with the Stars, (10) Desperate Housewives, (11) NCIS, (12) The Bachelor and Lie to Me (tie), (14) How I Met Your Mother, and (15) Two and a Half Men. These shows are all hits, and are all immensely popular. None except Beck, V, and NCIS could be described as remotely right-wing (and even V is a stretch), but Republicans choose these shows because they come closest to being apolitical or at least not openly insulting to conservatives.

  Democrats’ top shows, by contrast, draw far smaller audiences: (1) Countdown with Keith Olbermann, (2) Mad Men, (3) Dexter, (4) Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami, (5) 90210, (6) Private Practice and Brothers & Sisters (tie), (8) 30 Rock, (9) The Good Wife, (10) Damages, (11) Community and Law & Order: SVU (tie), (13) Friday Night Lights, (14) Parks and Recreation, and (15) Breaking Bad. As reporter James Hibberd noted, “if you look at the list of broadcast shows that are Republican favorites, it closely mirrors the Nielsen top 10 list, whereas Democrats tend to gravitate toward titles likely to have narrower audiences. To Hollywood, the data suggest a potentially disquieting idea: The TV industry is populated by liberals, but big-league success may require pleasing conservatives.”96

  Disquieting? This should be breathtakingly exciting to folks in Hollywood, who are supposedly interested only in reaching the broadest audience and raking in the dough. Imagine you’re a car manufacturer, and you suddenly discover a new country full of people dying to buy cars. Wouldn’t you be excited? The same should hold true for the television creators and executives. It means that they’ve been ignoring an enormous chunk of the market that they can exploit.

  But they’re not excited. They’re frightened. If, in fact, the market for their shows demands conservative content, they can’t keep their market myth alive. They’ll have to—horror of horrors!—open up the industry to conservatives.

  For now, at least, the industry remains one-sided, with creators and executives ignoring the market data. 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. And as the television industry has discovered, it isn’t who votes or watches—it’s who counts the votes and the watchers. They measure the audience. They slice and dice up those measurements and then market them to the advertisers. And the advertisers decide whom they want to target based on that faulty information. But leaving aside the internal politics of the industry and the business demands of the networks, there are two external forces that also drive the television industry to the left. These forces have far more sway over what you see on your television than you and a hundred million of your friends. These partners in crime control the means of production, the means of distribution, and the public debate.

  They are, of course, liberal interest groups and the government. Together with the television industry, they form a Celluloid Triangle. And that Celluloid Triangle is far more powerful than the military-industrial complex ever was.

  The Celluloid Triangle

  How Interest Groups, Government, and Hollywood Conspire to Keep TV Left

 
The markets may not dictate programming. The audience may not dictate programming. But two outside forces do combine to dictate programming: liberal interest groups and the government. Both of them want conservative programming shut down and conservatives shut out of the business altogether.

  Television has a broad and deep impact on American hearts and minds. The government therefore has an interest in regulating the television industry—and in particular, the government has an interest in promoting pro-government politics. To that end, the government intervenes in the television market on a regular basis.

  But because the government helps control the television airwaves, constituents contact the government when they see something that upsets them. When interest groups decide to make a fuss, they often call in their government representatives to do their dirty work. Legislators fear vocal pressure groups and respond to them, knowing that when mobilized, such groups can sink reelection campaigns. So legislators often take constituent views on television programming seriously—far more seriously than the networks themselves. A few dozen letters may get a Congressman mobilized to pick on a network, whereas a few dozen letters directly to the network would likely end up in the paper shredder.

  At the same time, members of the government don’t want to tick off the television industry by consistently cracking down on them—they know full well that the television industry can make and break them. They remember Richard Nixon, relentlessly skewered by television anchormen and comedians. They remember Sarah Palin, who was mocked and savaged by the television community, turning her from a mainstream heroine into a representative of the “fringe” right wing. And they certainly know about Barack Obama, who was the first media-created president in American history.

  The government therefore engages in a corrupt ménage à trois with liberal interest groups and the television industry. Here’s how it works: liberal interest groups and their media allies require that television include certain messages, messages that television executives are all too happy to insert; government enforces those requirements by threatening troublesome interference with the television honchos; television bows to both the other players and in return receives accolades and government goodies.

  Why does this work only with liberal interest groups? Actually, for a change, it doesn’t. On the rare occasions when conservative interest groups mobilize and protest what they see on the tube, and when they find receptive ears in government, television responds accordingly. The difference is that while television’s powers-that-be respond to liberal interest group criticism with sensitivity, understanding, and the shocked expression of the backstabbed fellow traveler, television’s liberals respond to such conservative crusading with anger. Television fights conservative groups and legislators with righteous fury; it responds to liberal groups and legislators with conciliatory humility.

  “THE PUBLIC INTEREST”

  To understand how the Celluloid Triangle works, we must first examine government’s power to control the industry. It is only because government has the power to control the television business that government can parlay with creators and executives and liberal interest groups to help create a coherent leftist agenda on your television screens.

  The main body tasked with regulating the television industry is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It is governed by two groups of constituents: Congress, which can override the FCC’s regulations at any time, and the interest groups, which often control Congress.

  The FCC and the television industry have a love-hate relationship. The television industry loves the FCC when it’s controlled by liberals and hates it when it’s controlled by conservatives. Fortunately for the television industry, the FCC has almost universally abdicated its role as policeman of the airwaves in favor of an anything-goes attitude—at least when it comes to sex.

  The television industry works well with the FCC when the FCC promotes the liberal agenda. The FCC has historically intruded into the television business when it wants to “elevate” the public—in other words, when liberals at the FCC, in Congress, and in lobbying organizations want to use the airwaves to promote their political agenda. The television industry rarely says “boo” to such intrusions. Their ire is reserved for the legislators and regulators who don’t want to promote the liberal social agenda or hear the F word emanating from their television screens.

  The FCC’s power springs from the 1934 Communications Act, which states that only those radio and (later) television stations that best serve the “public interest, convenience, and necessity” would be granted licenses. The notion here was that the airwaves were a public good and had to be used to everyone’s benefit. To that end, regulators required that licensees direct some programming toward “minority interests.” Minority interests were those interests understood to be underrepresented in the public debate, such as rural communities. “In building programs for the majority of listeners,” wrote NBC executive Judith Waller in 1944, “no radio station can wholly forget that there are minority groups which must be considered. They have a place in our democracy; they must also have a place in radio.” Bill Paley said, “We have a responsibility to minority tastes, minority groups.”1

  Moral standards, too, were governed by the “public interest.” “The Columbia Broadcasting System has no thought of setting itself up as an arbiter of what is proper for children to hear; but it does have an editorial responsibility to the community,” CBS told the public in 1935. This meant that “deviant behavior must never go unpunished.” NBC felt the same way, stating in its 1948 program policies manual, “The sanctity of marriage and the home must be maintained.”2 The standards, obviously, were very conservative in nature.

  The original television executives hated these standards. These were sophisticated New York and Los Angeles folks, after all, and they weren’t interested in gauche notions of traditional morality. “On matters pertaining to sex, America as a whole proclaims itself to be one way and acts another,” spat one network executive.3 But they knew where their bread was buttered—both government and advertisers supported the law. Those advertisers, who had to deal with the public at large and couldn’t afford to tick them off, actually set the networks’ early broadcast standards and practices.

  At Young & Rubicam, for example, David Levy helped develop Father Knows Best, Maverick, and The Life of Riley, among other shows (he went on to become vice president of development at NBC). He knew that his sponsors would not tolerate controversial material that generated boycotts. He wrote letters to producers across town, explaining, “We will not have any profanity. We will never take the Lord’s name in vain. There will be no exceptions. None, because if you do that, you start a hole in the dike.”4 Levy’s words were prophetic—as soon as the television creators and executives found the leeway to push the envelope, to begin the ball rolling down the slippery slope, there was no way to stop them from encroaching more and more into radically leftist moral territory.

  Young & Rubicam wasn’t the only advertising agency seeking to control content. Procter & Gamble was the industry’s largest advertiser, and it required that “The moral code of the characters in our dramas . . . be synonymous with the moral code of the bulk of the American people.” Stockton Helffrich of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) explained, “We don’t dictate to the audience. The audience dictates to us from the sanctity of its living room.” That meant, in practical terms, more traditional and patriotic fare.5

  Conservative sponsor control of content didn’t make creators happy. Some of that unhappiness was justified; sponsors sometimes shut down episodes because of fears about anti-racist messages.

  But most of the unrest among the creators was simple liberal angst. The host of CBS’s Seven Lively Arts complained, “On television, what love there is, is always terribly connubial. Everyone is married. The suspicion exists that animal passion is frowned on because the advertiser doesn’t want to distract attention from
the toothpaste.”6

  THE NETWORKS TAKE CONTROL

  The networks responded to advertiser concerns about serving the traditional audience in two ways. First, they created a new business model, allowing advertisers to disperse their ads over several programs rather than sponsoring single programs. This allowed more creative freedom to the writers and producers, who no longer had to listen to one advertiser. At the same time, it allowed sponsors to hedge their bets—if one program drew large numbers but was controversial, the advertiser, as one among many, wouldn’t be boycotted. Even better, advertisers wouldn’t have to spend inordinate bundles of cash to fund an entire program.

  Second, the networks installed their own standards-and-practices departments—as Frank Stanton of CBS put it, the networks became “masters of our house.”7 The networks instituted an industrywide set of self-regulations to be enforced by the in-house standards-and-practices departments. In 1952, the NAB, the chief lobbying group for the radio and television industries, set the Television Code. The Code stated that programs had to avoid trampling on the sensibilities of the American people. That meant that programming had to avoid presenting “cruelty, greed and selfishness as worthy motivations”; criminality had to be “presented as undesirable and unsympathetic”; the “use of horror for its own sake” had to be banned; law enforcement had to be “upheld,” and officers had to be “portrayed with respect and dignity.” In other words, no vanguardism.

  The Television Code was an attempt by the industry to make an end run around “the shadow of incipient censorship by Government regulation,” as Thad H. Brown, director of television for the NAB, put it before a subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in the House in 1952.8 It worked. The FCC largely went along with the networks’ end-around.

  Standards and practices took control of the industry. At the beginning, they stalwartly ensured that the Television Code was maintained. Sometimes this took the form of absurd notes from network executives, as Leonard Stern has documented in his hilarious booklet, A Martian Wouldn’t Say That! For example, CBS executives asked that Norton from The Honeymooners be made something other than a janitor, since “you can’t expect people to watch a sewer worker while they’re having dinner.”9 Overall, though, there wasn’t much for standards and practices to do—it was a different time, a cleaner time.