Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Working in television is paradise. The cash is stunning, and you get it by writing fiction. If you’re a member of the Writers Guild of America, one hour-long episode of scripted television will earn you $30,000, plus residuals if your episode is rerun. That’s a lot of green for a very small amount of work. And that’s just for lower-level writers. If you’re a showrunner, the cash is even better. If you’re a show creator and writer, you can start looking for prime real estate on the south coast of France.

  When I started interviewing the creators and executives in the industry, I thought I was immune. Not even close. It started when I interviewed Leonard Goldberg, a former head of programming at ABC and the man responsible, along with Aaron Spelling, for Charlie’s Angels, Family, Starsky & Hutch, Fantasy Island, and other massive hits. He was also on the board at CBS.

  At the interviews, I habitually wore my Harvard Law School baseball cap. That served two purposes. First, it informed the interview subject that this was going to be a well-informed, serious book. Second, it put interview subjects at ease; many liberals in Hollywood fear conservatives in an almost pathological way, believing that they’re all nuts, and the Harvard Law cap assured them that I would be reasonable.

  Goldberg spotted the cap, of course, and asked me about it. I told him a few Harvard Law stories. Then he leaned forward and said, “You know, you’re a great talker. And I know you’re a great writer. Why don’t you write a pilot for a series about Harvard Law?”

  I sat there for a minute. Then the butterflies started fluttering in my stomach. There’s nothing more exciting than having a major producer ask you to write a television series.

  So I wrote the pilot. Goldberg liked the basic material, and we started developing it. Everything was going great. I was learning at the feet of a true master. Then Goldberg got caught up producing a new movie, Unknown, with Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Frank Langella, and January Jones, and then after that, a new TV show for CBS called Blue Bloods.

  I had to wait—a not uncommon phenomenon in Hollywood, where everyone is waiting for the big break. In the meantime, I decided to write another pilot and pass it around town to see if it drew any interest. To my delight, it drew interest from a major agent in town, who called me in for a meeting.

  Now, meetings in Hollywood are a big deal. If you’ve ever seen Tootsie, you know that it’s almost impossible to get in to see your own agent, let alone to get a meeting with an agent who isn’t representing you. This agent didn’t just set a meeting—he told me he was bringing along two of his agent colleagues.

  The meeting went well. It went so well, in fact, that when the meeting ended, the top agent suggested I write a spec script for CBS’s The Good Wife—that’s how most writers break into the business, by becoming staff on an already-existing show. He also told me as I left that this had been one of the best meetings he’d had in decades.

  I drove home singing to myself.

  I watched every episode of The Good Wife (I hadn’t seen any at the time), then wrote the one-hour spec script. The agent made some pertinent comments, which were well-taken. I made the edits and turned it back in. This whole process took about three weeks.

  After several weeks, I hadn’t heard anything back, so I called to check in—I’d heard from other writers that staying on top of your agent was par for the course. I left a message.

  A few minutes later, the agent called back. “One of our agents Googled you and found your website,” he told me. My stomach dropped. “I’m not sure we can represent you, because he thinks your political views will make it impossible for you to get a job in this town.”

  Just like that. Straight out.

  I called up a high-ranking lawyer at Fox Broadcasting, a wonderful person I trusted—and a liberal. The first two words out of the lawyer’s mouth were: “Holy shit.” The lawyer couldn’t believe that this was even an issue—or rather, that it was hitting me square between the eyes. “This is crazy,” said the lawyer. “Sure, there’s a blacklist in this town, but you’re not discussing politics with these people. You’re not an extremist.” The lawyer recommended that I write the agent an e-mail.

  In the e-mail, I respectfully told the agent that my politics didn’t matter and that I would never bring politics up on the set—a requirement for conservatives, since liberal talk on the set is the only kind of talk that falls into the “approved speech” category. I told him I wasn’t abrasive, and that I’d spent years at UCLA and Harvard Law talking to liberals—that, after all, the agent had spoken with me several times and politics had never come up. That I had plenty of close friends who were liberals. That I should be judged on my talent alone, not on my politics.

  He called me back and agreed. “Listen,” he said, “I have no problem with your politics. It’s just that my agent started sending your sample around, and it got to a producer on one of the shows. He said that he knew who you were, and that he’d never work with you. The whole reason I’m even dealing with you is because your writing has what I’m always looking for—that sparkle. But let me get back to you.”

  The agent wasn’t trying to be a bad guy. He was just warning me that I’d have trouble getting work because of the McCarthyesque nature of the business. And he was right to do so—he only makes money if I get a job. Finally we decided to give it a go anyway.

  I’m not the only conservative in Hollywood. There are thousands of us, but we remain in the shadows. Outspoken conservatives are less likely to get jobs, as many of the liberal television folks I interviewed openly admitted. Conservatives are less likely to get meetings or pitches. They are more likely to be excluded from social circles—and Hollywood is a social business. Can conservatives succeed? Only by exercising incredible discretion. Do conservative storylines make it onto television? Only occasionally, and in general, only when they’re innocuous. Is it possible that conservative writers don’t make it in Hollywood because they stink? Yes. But if 50 percent of the country is conservative, you’d expect at least 30 percent of the Hollywood crowd to be. It isn’t.

  It’s a leftist oligarchy. Television is written by liberals, produced by liberals, and greenlit by liberals. Americans watch it because it’s clever and fascinating. And they’re taken in by the pernicious political messages inserted by the creators, whether consciously or unconsciously.

  In Primetime Propaganda, you’ll learn how the industry truly operates. You’ll learn who the decision makers, the power brokers, the influential artists who create our programming truly are. You’ll find out what you’ve really been watching all these years, and how those behind the scenes have shaped hearts and minds across the globe.

  Some readers, no doubt, will shy away from this exposé of their favorite shows, networks, producers, and writers. Americans feel about television the way we feel about sausage and magic tricks—we love to consume them, but we don’t want to know their secrets. We feel that knowing how sausage is made, magic tricks are performed, or television is created will somehow detract from our enjoyment.

  Understanding the television industry, however, doesn’t tarnish the magic of the final product—it actually enhances it. When we realize how many elements it takes to bring a vision to the screen, we’re awed. When we understand what was going through the creators’ heads from inception to filming, we love television even more.

  At the same time, though, we must understand that television is the exclusive domain of a select few who use the mystique of the industry to mask their own political propagandizing. We must correct that state of affairs if we want to improve television.

  After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll be awakened to what’s really going on behind the small screen, and you’ll be stunned to learn that you’ve been targeted by generations of television creators and programmers for political conversion. You’ll find out that the box in your living room has been invading your mind, subtly shaping your opinions, pushing you to certain sociopol
itical conclusions for years.

  The next step is fixing the problem. After looking at television from every angle, thoroughly scrutinizing it, we’ll learn how to stop this liberal living-room invasion by engaging with the industry rather than running away from it.

  There is no more subversive social force than culture—and there has been no more powerful voice in our culture than television. Television has been weaponized by those who would use it to cajole, convince, and convert. Until now, we have been ignorant of what goes on behind the curtain of that Great and Powerful Oz.

  Now we raise that curtain.

  Introduction:

  The Political Perversion of Television

  For millennia, the power to convey thoughts and images to millions of people simultaneously was restricted to God. According to the Bible, when God appeared at Mount Sinai, he provided evidence of his omnipotence by demonstrating his omnipresence. “You have been shown in order to know that God, He is the Supreme Being,” Moses told the Jews. “From Heaven he let you hear His voice in order to teach you, and on earth He showed you His great fire, and you heard His words amid the fire.”

  Today, such pyrotechnics could appear on any episode of Lost, and they could reach a hundred times the number of people God spoke to directly at Sinai. Jesus, restricted as he was by human form, didn’t engage in global telepathy. If Jesus had appeared today, he would have had it much better—as Andrew Lloyd Webber put it in Jesus Christ, Superstar, “If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation—Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.” That is, as long as Jesus didn’t have to go up against American Idol in primetime. In that case, Jesus would have been canceled by ex-NBC president Jeff Zucker within three weeks.

  The power of an instrument that spoon-feeds tens of millions at a time on a twenty-four-hour basis is almost unimaginable. We are addicted to television as a constant source of information, entertainment, a break from our dreary workdays, an escape. We may not like everything that’s on the TV, but we can’t turn it off. According to Nielsen statistics, U.S. viewers spend four hours, thirty-five minutes per day watching television. And they don’t always do it because they love what’s on—they do it because it acts as a sort of narcotic. TV isn’t crystal meth (unless you’re watching Twin Peaks), but it’s certainly alcohol for the senses. According to Scientific American, people watching TV “reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading. . . . Habit-forming drugs work in similar ways.” In short, scientists conclude that “TV does seem to meet the criteria for substance dependence.”1 The power of television ought not to be taken lightly.

  Yet it is. Despite the unthinkable reach and draw of television, intellectual snobs have derided it as “the boob tube” for decades. Television watching, in this view, is the escapist pastime of morons, who consume ever-increasing amounts of homogeneous tripe day in and day out. And because television is so manifestly awful, it has barely any impact on the tides of history. Steve Jobs of Apple sums it up: “You go to TV to turn your brain off.”

  This sort of snobbery—the idea that television is garbage, that people are irresistibly drawn to garbage, and that garbage has no impact on people’s worldviews—is as wrong as it is snooty. Television is largely not garbage: It’s generally well written, well produced, well acted, and well shot. Yes, much of it exploits sex and violence. And yes, much of it relies on clichés and jokes dating back to the Cretaceous period and tortuous plot devices that strain credulity. But by and large, television has provided a medium for an artistic explosion that rivals any in human history.

  That is not the whole story, though. Television isn’t just a tool for artistic expression. Here’s the untold secret: For almost its entire existence, television has been gradually perverted by a select group of leftist individuals who have used its power to foster social change through cultural “messaging.” The “television is garbage” meme is a criticism designed as a call to action for those in the television industry: a call to make TV an artistic vanguard for liberal social change, rather than a conduit for basic entertainment.

  Vanguardism is the buzzword in Hollywood. Those who inhabit the golden shores of Malibu and the sweeping lawns of Sunset Boulevard are of an almost uniform political bent—virtually all vote Democrat, fervently support gay marriage, see abortion as a sacrosanct human right, approve of higher taxes, despise religion, think guns are to blame for crime, maintain that businesspeople are corrupt and union organizers are saints, feel that conservatives are racists, sexists, and homophobes, and sneer at rural right-wingers in “flyover country.” Almost all voted for Barack Obama. Almost all hated George W. Bush.

  And yet almost all of them are also quite wealthy, the ironic beneficiaries of a capitalist system many of them openly criticize as biased and unfair. How can they justify benefiting from that system even as they hold their liberal beliefs with such fervent conviction?

  By attacking the status quo. Many if not most successful television creators lived in relative poverty before hitting it big, a fact that shapes their perspective for the rest of their lives. Since creative success is as rapid as it is unpredictable, many writers feel that they’ve made it to the top almost purely on luck, and they extrapolate from their own experience to the capitalist system at large. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail is simply a matter of luck, in this view, which is why Hollywood types (and liberals in general) like to speak about the “fortunate” and “less fortunate” rather than the rich and the poor. These creators, who feel that capitalism has somehow worked out to their benefit, but who also remember a time when capitalism worked against them, have to reconcile their newfound lifestyles with their socialist sensibilities.

  At the same time, many of these artists were cultural outsiders in their original small-town communities and therefore rejected the values of mainstream society as a defense. This is to some extent the nature of the artistic beast: Artists of all sorts consistently engage in the self-aggrandizing “outsider” delusion that their job is to “speak truth to power.” The result is a liberalism that continually attacks the prevailing power structure.

  The history of such cultural liberalism is long and celebrated. It stretches back all the way to the 1863 Salon des Refusés, when artists rejected from the Paris Salon formed their own salon celebrating avant-garde art. For today’s artists, however, it’s not just about rejecting the status quo—it’s about shock value in toto. It’s not enough to reject society—they must forcibly enlighten the society that rejected them. They do this by shocking middle-class sensibilities. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks points out that the “hallmark of the bourgeois-bohemian feud” was “Epater les bourgeois!”—literally, to shock the middle class.2 But shocking the public is no longer merely an incidental hallmark of liberalism—it is the dominant goal for the television left. During the 1960s, artists and creators went out of their way to shock the American middle class in order to forward their liberal agenda: feminism, gay rights, racial preferences, bigger government. When the smoke cleared, however, the artists had largely gotten what they wanted—with their help, the civil rights movement had achieved its major goals. This presented a problem for television liberals—how could they continue to rebel against the status quo if there was nothing left to rebel against? And so Hollywood has become largely oriented toward shock for shock’s sake; its continuing rebellion against bourgeois morality and taste is the sign of a vestigial avant-garde impulse that has become detached from any serious moral purpose.

  Why does Hollywood continue to push this empty vanguardism? Because it has no other choice. They’re stuck in their ways; their heroes were rebels, and in order to justify their own success, they too must rebel. Just as every journalist still wants to be Bob Woodward, every television writer still wants to be Norman Lear. The problem is obvious�
�Lear had Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, and racism. Today’s writers have . . . transfats. But the quest to push the envelope persists. Brooks’s description of bobos—the class of bohemian bourgeois that now dominates the political and cultural heights of our society—perfectly characterizes the Hollywood elite: “The people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.”3

  Vanguardism has been a significant and growing strain within television since the beginning. The story is a generational one. Although the original television executives were generally successful conservative businessmen, the intellectuals who commented upon television were influential Marxist thinkers like Theodor Adorno, who ripped television as a medium that reinforced capitalist conformity.4 Adorno’s former boss, television researcher Paul Lazarsfeld, suggested in Congressional hearings that the government mandate “quality” programming at the expense of ratings and endorse collusion among broadcasters rather than competition; the audiences, Lazarsfeld said, would be adjusted to the programming, rather than the other way around.5

  These sorts of criticisms were taken seriously by government regulators—so much so that by 1961, JFK-appointed FCC Commissioner Newton Minow famously told the National Association of Broadcasters that television was “a vast wasteland.” We’re not talking about the era of Married . . . with Children and Roseanne—we’re talking about the era of Gunsmoke and Howdy Doody. In that speech, Minow actually threatened government action against broadcasters: “Clean up your own house or the government will do it for you.” Quoting JFK, he explained, “I urge you, I urge you to put the people’s airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom.”6 (Minow, not coincidentally, was a supporter of Barack Obama throughout his law school days—Obama met his wife at Minow’s Chicago law firm—and supports his agenda through and through.)