Primetime Propaganda
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Michael Brandman, a former HBO executive and now a producer of the Jesse Stone made-for-television movies for CBS, described the Obama Administration in demigodlike terms. “Ironically, in the days of the Obama administration, the most important messages of our time are being delivered as part of an ongoing drama and television is allowed into this drama more than it has been allowed into anything of this kind in my lifetime,” Brandman stated.75
It’s not just that the television community loves Obama. It’s that they actively utilized their power to push his candidacy. Leave aside the press’s nonfeasance when it came to reporting on Obama’s views and background—it was the entertainment industry that made Obama what he became.
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, during the campaign, Obama received advice from former ER star George Clooney “on things such as presentation, public speaking and body language.” Apparently, the granite-jawed actor was also sending Obama texts and e-mails “about policy, especially the Middle East.”76 Actor Edward Norton followed Obama around with a film crew during the campaign.77 When Obama spent his campaign cash on a half-hour infomercial airing on CBS, NBC, Fox, Univision, and some cable networks in October 2008, he got help from Deadwood producer and director Davis Guggenheim to put it together.78
Comedienne Sarah Silverman tried to convince Jews to vote for Obama by posting an inane YouTube video accusing older Jews of being racists. “If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next president of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews,” Silverman nasally intoned. “You know why your grandparents don’t like Barack Obama? Because his name sounds scary, his name sounds Muslim, which he’s obviously not.” Then, with her trademark cutesy smile and cognitively dissonant potty mouth, she said, “Vote for McCain, to me you’re a shit stain. I just made that up off the top of my head!”79 Kal Penn, one of the actors from House, phone-banked for Obama—and was later appointed to the Obama administration, which necessitated an awkward suicide on the show. Edie Falco, star of The Sopranos, also spent her time ginning up support for Obama.80 Hill Harper, an actor who stars on CSI: NY, served as a member of Obama’s national campaign finance committee and helped produce the “Yes, We Can” YouTube video.81
The list goes on and on. It is fair to say that the Hollywood community mobilized behind President Obama with force and verve unsurpassed since their anti-Nazi mobilization in World War II. With this much backing from Hollywood, it was no wonder that in July 2008, Obama granted his first whole-family interview to none other than Access Hollywood.82
And when it comes to Hollywood fund-raising, Obama made Clinton’s Wasserman dinner look like a tea party. As early as January 2007, Obama was receiving help from his friends in Los Angeles; at the beginning of the year, DreamWorks heads David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg teamed up to send a letter to seven hundred Hollywood figures asking them to show up at a $2,300-per-person event at the posh Beverly Hilton Hotel.83 At one fundraiser in September 2008 sponsored by Barbra Streisand, he raised $9 million. Each seat cost $28,500.84 Hollywood raised almost $12.7 million for Democrats during the 2008 cycle.85 Then Hollywood provided Obama the cash for his unprecedented inauguration celebration. Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, producer James Lassiter, MTV president Christina Norman—all handed over $50,000 apiece to help Obama pay for his anointment. Overall, the entertainment industry forked over $2.3 million for the big day.86
HOLLYWOOD’S HOPE-AND-CHANGE MACHINE
It wasn’t just money. The television industry should have received an executive producer credit on the Obama campaign. Obama’s biggest Hollywood supporter was, of course, television mogul Oprah Winfrey. She announced on May 1, 2007, on Larry King Live that she would support Obama’s campaign for president—and she announced precisely how she would support him: “I think that my value to him, my support of him, is probably worth more than any check.”87 Oprah turned her show into a yearlong infomercial for the Illinois senator; she appeared alongside Obama at his campaign rallies in South Carolina and Iowa. Campaign estimates stated that Oprah put ten thousand new volunteers into action for Obama per rally. Oprah paid a price for her support of Obama—her favorability ratings, and her actual ratings, dropped dramatically and have never recovered.88 But her support was so invaluable to the Obama team that when Obama left his Senate seat to take his Oval Office seat, opportunistic and corrupt Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich considered appointing Oprah to the vacated Senate slot.89
The daytime hosts universally rallied to Obama’s side. Ellen DeGeneres also supported Obama, dancing with him on her show in October 2008 and testing him on such topics as Halloween costumes and George Clooney.90 Meanwhile, when Ellen interviewed McCain in May 2008, DeGeneres grilled him on gay marriage: “Women just got the right to vote in 1920, blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870, and it just feels like there’s this old way of thinking that we’re not all the same. We are all the same people. All of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same.”91 Never mentioned by Ellen was the fact that Obama’s position on gay marriage was identical to McCain’s: Obama opposed it. Incredibly, Ellen even released a statement after the election that simultaneously celebrated Obama’s election—“Change is here. . . . We were watching history”—and derided California’s Proposition 8, maintaining the traditional man-woman definition of marriage—“I was saddened beyond belief. Here we just had a giant step toward equality and then on the very next day, we took a giant step away.”92 Again, it went unmentioned that in California, the high black turnout for Obama’s presidential election likely won passage for Proposition 8.
The women’s vote was key to Obama during the 2008 election cycle—so important that when his approval ratings slid to crisis levels in 2010, Obama quickly booked an appearance on The View—the first presidential appearance on a daytime talk show since the advent of television.93 Fortunately for Obama, the daytime hosts universally worship him.
Daytime talk show hosts helped Obama. But when it came to the campaign, comedy was key, as it always has been. Saul Alinsky was completely on the mark when he wrote, “Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.”94 The entertainment community has acted on that principle for decades, from their relentless Nixon-bashing on Laugh-In to Dana Carvey’s George H. W. Bush impersonation (Hollywood’s takes on Clinton and Carter have been downright respectful).
The most successful take-down of all time—at least up to the 2008 cycle—was probably Chevy Chase’s devastating Gerald Ford impression during the 1976 election cycle, when he played Ford, the former All-American athlete, as a bumbling clown. Ford did his best to cope by laughing at himself—he appeared on Saturday Night Live from the Oval Office and did a political dinner alongside Chase—but Ford was never able to overcome the perception that he was a klutz. Chase knew what he was doing was unfair, but he did it because he despised Ford. “Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest is the physical joke,” Chase said in 1976.95
In 2008, Obama escaped all scrutiny from comics entirely. “We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” explained Mike Sweeney, head writer for Conan O’Brien. “The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way. He’s not a comical figure,” agreed Mike Barry, comic writer for David Letterman. Then there was the race question. “Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” Letterman’s executive producer, Rob Burnett, opined.96 Chris Rock said that Obama was a “comedian’s worst nightmare,” because “He’s just one of those guys, you know, like Will Smith. There’s no Will Smith jokes. There’s no Brad Pitt jokes. . . . [With Obama] it’s like, ‘Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids. You’re the first African-American president.’ You know, what do you say?”97
This was all cover, of course. These comedians were simply holding up the
ir end of the bargain; by playing nice with Obama, they hoped to get him elected. D.L. Hughley admitted as much: “I think before [the election], there was so much trepidation, that everybody wanted this to happen so bad that nobody wanted to upset the apple cart. Nobody wanted to do anything that made the proposition less likely.”98
The bias was so egregious that one study of late-night political jokes found that comedians were obviously avoiding humor about Obama, even as they savaged outgoing President Bush, Senator McCain, and Senator Hillary Clinton. Between January 1, 2008, and July 31, 2008, the study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman only made 169 jokes about Obama, compared with 428 about Bush and 328 about McCain. Hillary Clinton drew almost as many as Bush, 382.99
Comedy Central comedians supposedly were more even in their treatment of Obama and McCain/Palin, according to the study. Stephen Colbert made 129 jokes about McCain during the study period, to just 91 for Obama. Jon Stewart, by contrast, made more jokes about Obama than McCain.100
That study, though, is misleading. It doesn’t suggest what kind of jokes were being made about McCain or Palin versus Obama. And the simple fact is that while Palin and McCain were being destroyed by the media, most of the jokes about Obama played on his brilliance, his eloquence, his aura.
Chief practitioner of this subtle art of titular balance, substantive bias were Stewart and Colbert. Together, they were perhaps the biggest factors in Obama’s winning campaign. Gary David Goldberg summed up the impact of Stewart and Colbert well: “I don’t think you could get Barack Obama elected without [Stewart and Colbert], I think. And they just make the other side look stupid.”101
They both played at balance. “We’re carrion birds,” said Stewart. “We’re sitting up there saying ‘Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let’s attack.’ ” But Stewart didn’t attack Obama. He jibed him softly. That’s because Stewart was an Obama partisan—when he announced Obama’s election, he actually teared up on camera. “How we gonna make this shit funny?” Stewart asked in the aftermath of Obama’s election, while the media fêted Obama with laurels.102 There’s no question that Stewart is a liberal; in an interview with Entertainment Weekly from September 2008, Stewart claimed, “You ‘good values people’ have had the country for eight years, and done an unbelievably s----ty job. Let’s find some bad values people and give them a shot, maybe they’ll have a better take on it.”103
Colbert is similarly left-leaning. “Any change is as good as a vacation at this point,” Colbert said during election 2008. “I don’t know if you’ve paid much attention to the past eight years, but it has been a s----burger supreme. If somebody gives me an empty burger, it’s better than eating s----.”104 Colbert is, of course, the same man who used his opportunity as host of the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner to level his guns directly at George W. Bush and ridicule him as an ignoramus and a fool.
Both of their routines were biased toward Obama. When Entertainment Weekly asked them what the “prevalent comedic take” was on Obama, Colbert quickly responded, “He’s a hope-ronaut. He’s in a rarefied level of hope where the rest of us have to take tanks up with us.” This paean prompted even the interviewer to ask, “Is that really a comedic take? Seems more like a compliment.”105
Stewart’s interview with John McCain was extraordinarily contentious. Stewart asked McCain whether he should be nicknamed “Grumple Stiltskin.” By contrast, all of his interviews with Obama were odes to civility in which the famed comic asked questions like “How are things going?” And “Tell me about this half-hour special that aired earlier tonight.” Stewart’s audience was so well-trained that on the rare occasions when Stewart did poke at Obama, his audience of hardened liberals actually stood up to him, prompting Stewart to grumpily respond, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.”106 But how could Stewart possibly expect them to know that? After all, he hadn’t been laughing at Obama. It should be no surprise to learn that after Obama’s election, The Daily Show’s writing staff provided him material for the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner.107
Doug Herzog, president of MTV Networks Entertainment Group and one of the people responsible for putting Stewart on the air, acknowledged that Stewart was biased in his coverage of the election. “I think there is no discussion where Jon’s heart lies,” he responded when I asked him why Stewart treated Obama with kid gloves. “I think he wears it on his sleeve to a certain degree. . . . It’s hard for me to separate my own personal politics from that discussion, but I think George Bush was an easier target.”108 Michelle Ganeless, president of Comedy Central, was more defensive about Stewart’s bias. In fact, she claimed he had no bias. “If any of those people watch the show on a regular basis, they’d know that Jon takes on every political figure, every public figure. . . . I think [conservative critics] are people who don’t watch the show on a regular basis.”109 Stewart can be mildly even-handed; he does attack people on both sides. But during election 2008, that simply wasn’t the case.
The biggest problem with Stewart and Colbert during the 2008 election cycle is that when it came to liberals, they just weren’t funny. That should be a cardinal sin when you’re broadcasting on Comedy Central. “Job one for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert . . . is to make you laugh,” said Herzog. “Now if they can make you think while doing it, if they can make you laugh at something and bring to life social issues, that’s great too, but their first job is to make you laugh.”110 But laughter is only possible when it’s relatively nonpartisan. Stewart’s famous interview with CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer, in which he raked Cramer over the coals for half an hour, did not even attempt comedy. Stewart often wants to play the Edward R. Murrow journalist when he interviews right-wingers but pass himself off as a comedian when he interviews left-wingers. The result, at least in 2008, was tremendous bias. (That bias didn’t stop in 2008. Stewart’s anti–Glenn Beck, anti-Tea-Party rally in Washington, D.C.—which he called the Rally for Sanity, implying that anyone who opposed the Obama agenda was psychologically disturbed—wasn’t just unfunny, it was insulting.)
Meanwhile, John McCain and Sarah Palin were pilloried by comics. Palin, in particular, became the entertainment industry’s chief enemy. They didn’t like McCain, but the sheer hatred they held for Palin was shocking to behold. You couldn’t mention her name in public in Hollywood without someone jumping down your throat. Stewart was particularly vicious: “[Palin] is like Jodie Foster in the movie Nell. They just found her, and she was speaking her own special language,” Stewart said, guffawing, on October 9, 2008. “Have you noticed how [Palin’s] rallies have begun to take on the characteristics of the last days of the Weimar Republic?”
“You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly: F--- you,” he growled on October 17, 2008. In case she didn’t get the message, a couple of days later he reiterated: “What I meant to say is, ‘F--- all y’all.’ ”
Colbert was just as vitriolic. Right after her selection, Colbert joked, “We’re still waiting with bated breath for the big news: Who will John McCain pick as his running mate. . . . Is it Romney? Is it Pawlenty? Wait, . . . she is?! Are you serious?! Who the f--- is Sarah Palin? What? The sexy librarian?!”
Stewart and Colbert weren’t alone in going after Palin. The most effective attack against her came from comedienne Tina Fey, who did a brilliantly spot-on impersonation of Palin for Saturday Night Live. Of course, it didn’t help the McCain-Palin cause that Saturday Night Live’s most brutal sniping at Obama consisted of pieces such as a sheepishly awful faux musical number entitled “Solid as Barack,” praising Obama’s virility.
Much of the Hollywood entertainment establishment mobilized to destroy McCain and Palin. In a particularly awful example, an October 2008 episode of Family Guy featured Stewie Griffin and Brian (his talking dog) stealing the uniforms of a couple Nazis. Stewie looks down at his uniform. “Hey, there’s something on here,”
he intones. Then we get a close-up of a McCain-Palin button. “Huh, that’s weird,” Stewie says. The obvious implication: only Nazis vote McCain-Palin.
After the election, the triumphalism began. Boston Legal had James Spader’s character, Alan Shore, castigate the half of America that didn’t vote for Obama: “Almost 47% of this country didn’t vote for Obama, perhaps because they disagreed with him on the issues, which is fine. But some, no doubt, because they thought he was Muslim with terrorists on his speed dial, and others because they were convinced he was not only socialist, but even worse, a bad bowler, and others still because they simply loved those cream-colored jackets Sarah may have to give back. But there’s one thing all those idiots have in common. . . . They still get to vote.”111 Law & Order’s post-election episode had a reporter asking Sam Waterston’s character, “Mr. McCoy, is it true you’ve been asked to join the Obama Administration?” René Balcer, producer of Law & Order, joked that if Obama had lost, they would have had to use computer-generated imagery to place black armbands on the cast.112