Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  When the transition toward more liberal standards came, it came not from the industry itself, but from the government. The newly enshrined JFK administration decided that it wasn’t enough for television to uphold traditional moral standards—television had to push the liberal social agenda. To that end, the FCC reinterpreted the “public interest” requirement. “Minority interests” that required representation on television were reinvented; no longer were “minority interests” the interests of underrepresented economic or religious communities with clear political agendas—now they were the interests of ethnic and racial minorities who were simply assumed to be liberal. Government, given the power to target the television industry, decided to put that power to use.

  In 1961, Newton Minow, JFK’s chairman of the FCC, gave the most famous speech in television history before the NAB. Minow’s views of television’s failures mirrored the concerns of socialists like Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno, who both worried that television laminated the status quo rather than forwarding social change.10

  In the speech, Minow spent the vast majority of his time warning the television industry that if they didn’t up their lowbrow standards—if they didn’t stop catering to the masses and instead try to educate them—they’d be doing a disservice to the industry and would bring the heavy hand of government down upon them.

  He opened by noting the industry’s debt to government. “You earn your bread by using public property,” he intoned. “When you work in broadcasting you volunteer for public service, public pressure, and public regulation. You must compete with other attractions and other investments, and the only way you can do it is to prove to us every three years that you should have been in business in the first place.”

  This was not an auspicious opening—it boded ill for a laissez-faire approach to oversight. It quickly got worse. “I admire your courage,” he averred, “but that doesn’t mean that I would make life any easier for you. Your license lets you use the public’s airwaves as trustees for 180 million Americans. The public is your beneficiary. If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent return to the public—not only to your stockholders.” Minow placed in stark opposition profit and public interest, as if income were a sin, a shameful Cain-like mark on the forehead of the industry. Then he laid down the bottom line: “Clean up your own house or the government will do it for you.”

  His job, Minow said, was to “uphold and protect the public interest.” But he was not going to interpret that rather vague phrase as it had been previously interpreted—he wasn’t going to enforce traditional morality via regulation. And he forcefully rejected Frank Stanton’s definition of the public interest as “what interests the public.” Instead, he defined the public interest as the JFK Administration agenda. “In today’s world . . . with social and economic problems at home of the gravest nature, yes, and with the technological knowledge that makes it possible, as our President has said, not only to destroy our world but to destroy poverty around the world—in a time of peril and opportunity, the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and situation comedies is simply not good enough.”

  Television, Minow assured the NAB, was not doing that. No, it was a “vast wasteland . . . a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. . . . True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few.” This, of course, was false. People did enjoy those shows. During the 1960–61 season, the top ten shows in terms of ratings were Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, The Danny Thomas Show, The Red Skelton Show, Father Knows Best, 77 Sunset Strip, The Price Is Right, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and Perry Mason—exactly the collection of westerns, adventurers, cops, and game shows Minow said nobody enjoyed.

  But Minow wasn’t truly worried about whether people enjoyed the programming. He was worried about what he enjoyed. And what he enjoyed was liberal television. He would use his position, he threatened, to enforce the presence of such liberal television. After all, Minow said, “I happen to believe in the gravity of my own particular sector of the New Frontier.” This was code. The New Frontier was a shorthand term used by JFK throughout the 1960 presidential campaign to signify the entirety of his agenda—and Minow was signaling that he took his job as a JFK lackey seriously enough to restrict television’s role to that of quasi-propaganda arm for the JFK agenda.11

  Not much came of the Minow speech in the end. Many of the network heads publicly dismissed Minow, and one—Jim Aubrey of CBS—went so far as to make fun of Minow by naming the S.S. Minnow on Gilligan’s Island after him. But where the networks did become more sensitive to FCC concerns, they did so in a largely liberal direction, in keeping with the goals of Minow’s speech. That meant increased funding for liberal news departments, as well as standards-and-practices focus on those “minority interests” that Minow cited—liberal interest groups being the most vocal advocates for “minority interests.”

  THE MINORITY TAILS WAG THE NATIONAL TELEVISION DOG

  Minow frightened the television industry. That, of course, was his goal. Minow wanted to make the industry feel that it was under a microscope, that every episode of every show would be watched for the correct and “enlightening” agenda he sought.

  But Minow knew that he couldn’t watch every episode of every show. Therefore, as Minow made clear in his speech, he would rely on the public to act as a watchdog for him.12 That put a good deal of power in the hands of small but active minorities, who quickly made their presence in the industry felt. That wasn’t unexpected, considering that Minow’s boss, JFK, was elected largely because of the support of such minority interest groups. Broadly speaking, there is almost always a tacit agreement in politics between candidates for office and such groups: The groups help get candidates elected, and candidates then turn around and act on behalf of those groups.

  If that’s true for most politicians, it’s especially true for liberal politicians, who believe in the tenets of multiculturalism—fragmentation of American society into constituent groups identifiable by ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual status. To liberal politicians, interest groups aren’t merely tools to be used in election battles. They are fundamental goods in and of themselves, representatives of true democracy at work, since true democracy can only be enjoyed by collectives of Americans rather than melting-pot individuals.

  While the elder generation of Hollywood creators and executives viewed Minow’s words with fear, the younger generation embraced his mantra: interest groups were representatives of a “tolerant” and “diverse” America, and keeping them happy was one of television’s chief obligations. Because Hollywood’s executives and creators are and were generally liberal, they believed in the tenets of political correctness long before such political correctness went mainstream. All interest groups were to be taken seriously—at least at the beginning. Later on, only liberal interest groups would be considered legitimate. But even in the beginning, minority blocs were changing the face of television for the vast and silent majorities watching at home. Multiculturalism was taking root on television screens across the nation.

  For example, in 1959, ABC premiered an action show about Eliot Ness and his band of Prohibition-era agents titled The Untouchables. It was one of the network’s first big hits, rocketing in the ratings from forty-third in its first season to eighth in its second season.13 During that second season, though, ABC head of programming Ollie Treyz was confronted by an Italian-American interest group. He capitulated. “We take out all the Italians and make them Greeks,” he later wrote. “Then the Greeks get mad, so we change the Greeks into Anglo-Saxons, and all the bad guys were named Smith.”14 Viewers weren’t stupid, even if the network was. As Treyz explains, the predictable result was that “the show died. Everyone knows very well that Al Capone was Italian. So we take
the show off the air.”15

  Later, when Soap became the first network television show to feature an open homosexual (Billy Crystal’s Jodie), the creators of the show met with gay advocacy groups to vet their characterization. “Y’know,” Paul Junger Witt, the show’s producer, told interviewer Allan Neuwirth, “we did meet with gay groups who were concerned that the first openly gay character on television would be seen as wildly effeminate . . . we also explained that, you know, there was going to be an evolution.”16

  ABC’s chief censor for thirty years, Alfred Schneider, dedicates an entire section of his book, The Gatekeeper, to dealing with interest groups. Despite his eventual suggestion that “Special-interest groups cannot be allowed to superimpose their wills, their standards, their special objectives and goals . . . on television programming,”17 Schneider tells several stories in which interest groups—almost always liberal interest groups—changed actual programming content. In 1973, for example, long before the gay rights movement gained mainstream credibility and just four years after the Stonewall riots in New York, the Gay Activist Alliance protested ABC for an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. in which a schoolteacher molested one of his male students. Somehow the GAA received entrance to the ABC office building and sat in outside ABC head Leonard Goldenson’s office. ABC decided to allow the GAA to control the debate, striking all references to homosexuality in the episode and contacting affiliates and advertisers to let them know that the episode was not intended to insult gays.18

  Something similar happened in 1981, when a TV-movie script began circulating about a woman who left her husband to begin a temporary lesbian love affair, only to return to her husband. Standards and Practices nixed the last scene, which implied that lesbian discovery was not in fact permanent in all cases. “Don’t you realize that will offend every lesbian in America?” they asked. As Ernest Kinoy, writer of Roots, Roots II, and Skokie noted, it would be near-impossible to make a show or a movie involving “a hero who is a homosexual and is distressed about it and goes to an analyst and they decide that this is not a good way to be, and so he works on it, and because the analyst says yes, this is a character disorder, and he becomes much improved. You can handle homosexuality—as long as you handle it in a lovely, tolerant fashion that will not upset the gay-liberation lobby.” Similarly, Nigel McKeand, one of the producers on Family, told author Todd Gitlin, “no one can (whether you believe this or not) say that, for instance, homosexuality is infantile, and it is an absurd way to lead your life, and it’s an arrested development. You can say two lesbians should be allowed to live in peace.”19

  Eventually, checking with left-leaning interest groups became common practice before airing even mildly controversial episodes. In 1986, NBC invited a select set of public interest lobbying organizations to Florida to take part in a conference in which the interest groups (largely liberal groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) were asked to develop a relationship with the network and provide input on programming.20 This wasn’t out of the ordinary. Jerome Stanley, head of West Coast Broadcast Standards for NBC in the late 1970s, explained the process to Gitlin: “Where we see a property that deals with a special-interest group, and if we feel that there is any potential problem, a derogation, or misrepresentation, we will then get in touch with them, and either send them the script, or we will oftentimes ask the production company to invite them in as technical consultants.” Wary of sounding too self-censoring, Stanley added, “Under no circumstances [though] do they have the right of approval.”21

  But there are some cases when networks do give interest groups rights of approval. In 2010, CBS announced that it would add three gay characters to its primetime shows after receiving a flunking grade from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for diversity. “We’re disappointed in our track record so far,” lamented CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler. “We’re going to do it. We’re not happy with ourselves.”22 So much for the idea that profits are the first priority—CBS won the 2009–2010 ratings season without the gay characters.23

  In the movie business, the same thing takes place with regularity; in the most recent example, GLAAD forced the Vince Vaughn starrer The Dilemma to cut a joke calling electric cars “gay” from the trailer for the film. Vince Vaughn, no flaming right winger he, objected to the censorship, explaining, “Comedy and joking about our differences breaks tension and brings us together. Drawing dividing lines over what we can and cannot joke about does exactly that; it divides us. Most importantly, where does it stop?” The joke stayed on the cutting room floor.

  GLAAD followed that victory up by complaining that the leading gay agenda show on television, Glee, used the word tranny in one of its episodes. Even Susan Sarandon, a woman so liberal that she celebrated being hit with tranny projectile vomiting at an avant-garde New York stage show, thought this was ridiculous: GLAAD, she said, was “getting like PETA—way out of control.” That doesn’t stop Hollywood from screening its films and shows for GLAAD, however.

  Perhaps the most infamous case of a network bowing low before an interest group surrounded one of the only conservative-leaning major television shows in history, 24.

  The show’s popularity was based on its uncompromising view of terrorists and how they should be treated; the show made no bones about the fact that the hero, Jack Bauer, was perfectly fine with torturing terrorists if they could help him stop attacks. Bauer knew that he was “running out of time!” and that he couldn’t worry about the ACLU’s niceties. And he also knew that those who declared war on the United States, whether they were Serbian ex-dictators (season one), German terrorists using Arab terrorists as a front (season two), or ex-British spies and Mexican narcoterrorists (season three), needed to feel the swift hand of justice.

  Well, almost everyone who declared war on the United States. During season four of 24, in 2005, the show ran into an interest group buzz saw in the form of the litigious Saudi-funded terrorist-supporting front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Season four was the first season of the show to actually suggest that Muslims might indeed be terrorists (as opposed to dupes of evil white folks in season two), and CAIR mobilized immediately. They met with agents of Fox and producers on 24 to try to blackmail them into a more friendly portrayal of a Muslim “sleeper cell” family on the show. The spokesperson for CAIR said that 24’s portrayal of Muslims was “very dangerous and very disturbing.” Eventually, CAIR pressured Fox to run a free advertising campaign for CAIR, as well as having Jack Bauer—Kiefer Sutherland—preface episodes of the show with a politically correct disclaimer.

  Thanks to CAIR, viewers of the show during season four were treated to a stone-faced Sutherland explaining, “While terrorism is obviously one of the most critical challenges facing our nation and the world, it is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism. So in watching 24, please, bear that in mind.”24

  Leave aside for a moment the fact that this disclaimer was inaccurate—high-ranking members of CAIR have provided material aid to terrorism supporters, and the longtime CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper believes that Islamic law should be instituted as the governing vision of the United States.25 Focus instead on the fact that a minority group was able to shape the programming policy of a major network’s hit show. Focus on the fact that a group with almost no sway in the American commercial market—a CAIR-initiated boycott of talk show host Michael Savage in 2007 was utterly unsuccessful, for instance—somehow finagled what it wanted out of Fox. There’s something more than merely responding to the danger of an advertiser boycott here. There’s a pernicious tendency in the television industry to kowtow to any minority group that raises an alarm, no matter how foolish or weak the claim or how peripheral the interest group.

  Unsurprisingly, vetting programming by c
atering to interest groups makes television less controversial—and less fun. Even liberals are beginning to recognize the danger. George Schlatter, who created Laugh-In, suggested that the presence of such political correctness destroys comedy, relegating it to simple fart and sex jokes: “Everything’s about sex, and I think that’s unfortunate, because there are other things that are funny. But that’s easy, see, because there’s no groups fighting. You do a joke about an Italian, and you get in trouble. You do a joke about an orgasm . . . and there’s no group writing in to say ‘You’re making fun of my people.’ ”26 He’s quite correct. It was fear of ethnic interest groups that caused ABC to pass on All in the Family, for example.27 If anything, the pressure is far more severe now—there is no chance a show like All in the Family would ever be aired today.

  The Hollywood contingent has gone even further than mere approval for interest groups—it has formed its own interest groups within the industry. These are often cause-driven groups dedicated to pushing liberal messages in programming. Historically such groups have taken on issues ranging from drinking and driving to Earth Day to antidrug messages.28 Today, one of the most active industry insider interest groups is the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF). The EIF suggests that its mission is to harness “the collective power of the entire industry to raise awareness and funds for critical health, educational and social issues in order to make a positive impact in our community and throughout the nation.”29 Its real mission is to promote liberalism on health, education, and social issues.