Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  ABC, meanwhile, struggled mightily—mainly because it was the smallest, but also because it was the least conservative of the three networks. Robert Kintner, a former White House correspondent and future cabinet liaison for LBJ, led the way.

  Kintner, unlike the communist-fighters at NBC and CBS, was an ardent opponent of McCarthyism. He stood up for closeted former communist Gypsy Rose Lee, braving advertiser boycotts to do it and winning a Peabody Award in the process.17 That move demonstrated his liberal bona fides. He burnished them even more when he insisted on carrying the Army-McCarthy hearings wall to wall.

  His liberalism wasn’t restricted to news coverage. Kintner’s programming strategy focused on the lowest common denominator—he was liberal enough to think that broadcast standards were tyrannical limits on creativity rather than traditional hallmarks of good taste. According to one of Kintner’s subordinates, David Levy, he was the man behind the rise of sex and violence on television, titillating younger audiences with envelope-pushing material.18

  There was a reason for the focus on sex and violence: Goldenson’s smaller station roster created the need for a new sort of strategy. Unlike NBC, ABC could not champion its ratings; unlike CBS, it could not champion its affiliate base. ABC’s affiliates were restricted largely to the major cities, and even there, they did not draw major numbers. ABC therefore needed to come up with an alternative marketing ploy that could work for advertisers.

  In the mid-1950s, Goldenson’s deputy, Ollie Treyz, hit on the winning idea: pushing the young urban consumer as a higher-value consumer for advertisers. The idea was simple—if ABC couldn’t get older, rural viewers for its programs, it would tell advertisers that its young, urban viewers were worth more in the grand scheme of things, with or without the data to prove it. “We began programming for the young families of America,” Goldenson later wrote, “and in doing so revolutionized television . . . we simply had no other choice.”19 This philosophy bore the obsession with the 18-to-49 crowd—and in catering to that crowd, television’s manic obsession with sex and violence was born too.

  While the political allegiances and market manipulations of the executives helped shape the industry on a broad level, on a day-to-day level, the writers, actors, and producers were shaping it in a covertly liberal direction. Most of the early prominent creators of television were Jewish kids who had found their way on the New York entertainment scene—which meant, typically, that their parents had been poor, often socialist, and that they had grown up with vaudeville, which translated exceptionally well to television.

  The early years of television were replete with liberal Jews who were cutting-edge for the time (remember, this was 1950, not 1970). Milton Berle, a liberal Jew, dominated the television ratings—in fall 1948, he had an astounding 86.7 audience rating—meaning that 86.7 percent of the television audience was tuned in to Berle.20 Sid Caesar was Jewish, liberal (his wife was a socialist), and earning a million bucks a year with Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. He hired Jewish liberals like Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and Larry Gelbart—a star-studded Jewish liberal lineup that has to rank alongside the 1927 Yankees in terms of star quality. Phil Silvers was the youngest of eight children, a Jewish kid who made good on television in The Phil Silvers Show and later You’ll Never Get Rich—and in both shows, he satirized the military in a soft, gibing way. The stars who weren’t Jewish were also generally blue-collar kids with poor parents (Jackie Gleason, Fred Allen, Danny Thomas), in line with the FDR-Democratic consensus at the least.

  The heavy concentration of leftist Jews in early television doesn’t spring from some concerted conspiracy. It springs from the fact that artists are generally alienated from society, as we’ve mentioned—and assimilated Jews were alienated from both their religious heritage (making them liberal) and the broader society. Jews were already restricted from many top law schools and medical schools, but they were welcome in the artistic community, which is by definition a community of outcasts. Highly intelligent, highly motivated, highly artistic, and heavily concentrated in New York, the Jewish community was a natural breeding ground for early radio and television. Naturally, as societal outsiders, the liberal Jews in the entertainment industry focused their politics first and foremost on the abolition of racism.

  The creators were liberals from the get-go, but they were hamstrung by the times and the network higher-ups. They also knew their place, and their place was outside the realm of politics. They had to know their place, because this was live television, and networks couldn’t take the risk of hiring off-the-wall zanies to host their programs. They had to have experienced, seasoned entertainers who knew better than to try to skirt the broadcast standards.

  More than that, though, the television creators were also creatures of the time, living in an America that had just defeated Nazism, was fighting the scourge of repressive Communism, was booming economically, and was making racial progress. Soft social satire was the best the TV industry could or would do. Even the creative left in the television industry retained pride in America, the country that had lifted them from poverty and provided them opportunity and wealth.

  Throughout this period, television grew exponentially. In Minnesota in 1948, TV sets were sold for the sky-high price of $300 ($2,715 in today’s dollars)—and that was on the low end.21 In 1954, according to historian James Baughman, just “20 percent of Arkansas homes had a TV set; in North Dakota, 8 percent.”22 Once the television industry realized that the best way to make money from television wasn’t selling television sets but selling advertising on television sets, television exploded. By the end of the 1950s, 90 percent of American homes had at least one television set.23 The television era was here—and the most powerful mass medium in world history began to test its muscles.

  LIBERALS UNDERGROUND

  Liberalism remained a subtle phenomenon on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it was there. Hollywood types pushed consensus issues ranging from racial tolerance to a more overt role of government in the economy; all of it was relatively uncontroversial. As the decade progressed, however, television leftists began to embrace more subversive and dangerous politics. Where the liberalism of the 1950s had aspired to a better world, 1960s liberalism sought to set the world aflame, tearing down the status quo through vulgarity and shock value.

  The decade didn’t begin with that dark, cynical liberalism. It began with the hopeful, triumphant politics of John F. Kennedy, who wasn’t far removed from Dwight D. Eisenhower or even his 1960 presidential opponent, Richard Nixon. It began with the sense that something great was in the air—that America was on the move.

  Executives remained profit-driven—like their predecessors, they sprang from the corporate world. Unlike their predecessors, however, the new breed of executives hadn’t started at ground level—most were highly educated in the mold of Goldenson rather than garment district salesmen in the mold of Sarnoff. Many sprang from the quasi-creative milieu of Madison Avenue, where they had been advertising executives. They were more liberal than their predecessors, as JFK babies, but they still held one value above all: the value of cash.

  The pursuit of bucks meant a transition from live to taped television. Where most of the shows of the early-to-mid 1950s were live specials starring classic entertainers, shows of the mid-to-late ’50s were tape delayed for rebroadcast on the West Coast. Artistically, the death of live television meant less excitement. More important, the transition to taped television actually led the way to greater television liberalism. Before the transition, network censors, whose job it was to ensure that advertisers didn’t freak out over broadcast material, had to be wary of anything that could offend the audience; their motto was “if in doubt, lose it.” That meant more conservative values on television. In taped television, by contrast, everything was preplanned. That meant that programmers could push the envelope more and more often, and they took full advantage, bugging the netwo
rk censors and generally daring them to wield the heavy hand of censorship.

  Perhaps most important, taped television also meant that programming production could move to the West Coast, since the networks didn’t have to broadcast live from New York. While the programming executives remained in New York, the creative folks moved out west. Hollywood was a much smaller, more parochial community than New York—while New York was the cultural center of the world, it was also the financial center of the world, which meant that even its creative community recognized the necessity for entrepreneurship over social messaging. In Hollywood, it was a different story. The creative people ran the town, and they spent their time with like-minded creative people. An echo chamber was created, largely removed from the rest of the country.

  Ever so slowly, a chasm began to form between the creative and business sides that hadn’t truly existed before. While the new executives zealously guarded the capitalist nature of the system, certain creators began to see their role as something more than simply providing a product for people to consume—they were now the stewards of the culture, and the executives were bourgeois exploiters. The executives, thought the creators, wanted to make crap for stupid people; the creators, the executives thought, wanted to do Shakespeare in primetime. The stage was set for real conflict between the two groups.

  The burgeoning executive-creative split forced a covert deal between executives and creators. Executives wanted to make money, so they aggressively courted audiences without worrying about cultural pretensions. Meanwhile, creators fulfilled the market for that lowbrow programming—which was often conservative in tenor and tone—with the understanding that every so often, the networks would allow them to insert highbrow messaging programs, intellectual fare, Kennedy Center–type material. A dichotomy broke out on television: Shows either became dumb attempts to win ratings or elitist attempts to score political points. There wasn’t much in between.

  The dominance of dumbed-down television began at ABC, which had to push the envelope merely to survive. In the late 1950s, Ollie Treyz took over from Robert Kintner—Mr. Sex and Violence—at ABC.24 Treyz took Kintner’s strategy to the next level. He greenlit programs like The Untouchables, a show so violent that tepid TV Guide observed, “In practically every episode a gang leader winds up stitched to a brick wall and full of bullets, or face down in a parking lot (and full of bullets), or face up in a gutter (and still full of bullets) . . .”25 Next, Treyz got himself into hot water when he greenlit Bus Stop, one episode of which depicted the Justin Bieber of the 1960s, Fabian, playing a psychopathic killer who brutally slays an old man. Senator John Pastore (D–Rhode Island) was so incensed by the episode that he held Congressional hearings on it and dragged Treyz in to testify. After the season, the show was canceled and Treyz was fired.26

  Treyz was merely one charter member of the ABC envelope-pushers’ club—all in the name of statistics, of course. Tom Moore, who took over for Treyz, was committed to pushing the same envelopes in terms of sex and violence, since that’s where the dollars were, even though as a born and bred Mississippian, he leaned conservative. Nonetheless, under his tenure, ABC picked up cutting-edge shows like 77 Sunset Strip, Peyton Place, and The Mod Squad.

  Many of these shows were the brainchildren of television craftsman Leonard Goldberg, a former ad agency executive who had originally been a research department clerk at ABC after attending the Wharton School of Business. He returned to ABC under the tutelage of Edgar Scherick, and he quickly imbibed the ABC mantra: “I had always felt that at ABC you had to do something different to attract an audience . . . if you’re ABC, you can’t just play it safe. You play it safe, you lose.”27 That translated into “some show with go-go girls and music on the beach” (Where the Action Is) and a competition show about a “young married couple” (The Newlywed Game). Goldberg’s logic—“What are young women interested in? Young men. What are they most interested in? Romance”—led to The Dating Game. This was not Julius Caesar, but it did sell ad time.28

  Because of ABC’s burgeoning success, ABC’s former executives filtered through the industry. Former Treyz disciple James Aubrey, who had started off in radio before becoming ABC’s head of programming and talent, took off for CBS in 1958. Aubrey was widely disliked but highly successful, a nebbishy playboy with a mind for broads and a penchant for booze. Like Treyz, Goldberg, and Moore, he pursued a strategy of—in his own words—“wild, sexy, lively stuff, things that had never been done before” at ABC. He continued to pursue that strategy at CBS. Aubrey was the stereotypical model of corporate excess and tyranny. He cared nothing for politics, and he cared nothing for “quality TV.” He was something straight out of Mad Men.

  As Life magazine explained, Aubrey’s “code was unwritten but so rigid it permitted few exceptions: feed the public little more than rural comedies, fast-moving detective dramas, and, later, sexy dolls. No old people; the emphasis was on youth.” Aubrey justified his programming decisions the same way his bosses, Frank Stanton and William Paley, did: “People just don’t want an anthology. They would rather tune in on Lucy.”29

  Aubrey programmed “rural junk”—funny, hip shows with special appeal to CBS’s heavily rural affiliate base. He dominated with those programs. Still, the critics—and the liberal creators—demanded a few political sacrificial lambs, and Aubrey’s CBS obliged with The Defenders and East Side/West Side. The Defenders was a controversial lawyer show starring Robert Reed and E. G. Marshall, tackling issues like euthanasia, abortion, and movie censorship, almost always from a liberal angle. Creator Robert Rose explained, “We’re committed to controversy.” When the show aired an episode entitled “The Benefactor,” which uncritically parroted the pro-choice line, several advertisers pulled out. A last-minute advertiser saved the episode, though, and from then on, the show made no bones about its politics.30

  East Side/West Side was another landmark liberal show, starring George C. Scott as a social worker dealing with kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Soon enough, Scott’s character joined an idealistic liberal congressman and became his aide. Simply put, it was propaganda for the big government, Democratic agenda. Aubrey soon stepped in. He did so not because he was conservative, but because he was concerned about the fact that the show was unrelentingly depressing, gritty, and minority-oriented. “Every script dwelt on the problems of Harlem—minority groups, and so on,” said Aubrey. “I went to [David Susskind, the producer] and said, ‘David, look, you can have just as big a problem in Sutton Place. Let’s once in a while take it out of Spanish Harlem.’ They did.”31 It didn’t help. The liberal show went down in flames in the ratings.

  Ratings and revenue remained Aubrey’s first priorities. He did rural junk like The Beverly Hillbillies (which garnered, believe it or not, 57 million viewers every Wednesday night), Green Acres, Mr. Ed (yes, the talking horse), and Petticoat Junction. He was also responsible for Gilligan’s Island, as well as The Munsters (which, incidentally, his boss, Paley, hated). Many of these programs were produced by Aubrey’s personal friend Martin Ransohoff, who told me what the programming philosophy behind his shows was: “I never felt the pressure to include social content in the shows. . . . We just wanted to get in and do successful shows.”32

  It was Aubrey’s personal habits, not his programming strategies, that eventually led to his downfall. He was too fond of partying and womanizing and lowbrow programs that got good ratings, and it embarrassed Paley and Stanton no end. “I don’t pretend to be any saint,” said Aubrey. “If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty girls, I guess I’m guilty.” In 1965, the CBS brass found him guilty and dumped him. When they did, Aubrey had brought them “the biggest profits in TV history—up from a net of $25 million a year in 1959 to $49 million in 1964.” CBS led in the ratings by a whopping 9 million viewers.33

  After Aubrey’s ouster, his profit-seeking, ratings-obsessed subordinates remained atop the networks. One of Aubrey’s former subordinates was
Mike Dann, a numbers man like his former boss. Dann saw the numbers as the only realistic gauge of what would work and what wouldn’t. “The most dangerous thing I could have done is go by my gut,” he told me. “Numbers, numbers, numbers. . . . A show is good if it got numbers, and it was bad if it was canceled. It has nothing to do with quality.”34

  Unlike Aubrey, however, who greenlit highbrow liberal programming as a sop to critics, Dann did it for ideological reasons. He pushed The Defenders, bragging, “[it] was one of the most exciting and socially conscious shows that I ever put on television. . . . I was proud to have been a part of it.”35

  Despite Dann’s continued power, Aubrey’s firing was an early clue that the ancien profit-first régime was on its last legs in television. In dumping Aubrey, the television executives embarrassed by his lowbrow programming cleared the way for a far more dangerous programming ideology: the merger of gutter style and liberal substance. By throwing out a man who made them money, who really did cater to the market, they made clear that television would have to provide something deeper while still earning a profit. “Social meaning” would have to be married to entertainment to provide justification for that entertainment—the simple justification of the buck was no longer enough.

  STARTING DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

  The assassination of John F. Kennedy certainly had something to do with the ouster of men like Aubrey and the shift from so-called “rural garbage” toward “quality programming.” Obviously, JFK’s assassination had a major cultural impact across the country—the hopeful liberalism of the Camelot years was almost instantaneously replaced by an infinitely more cynical, pessimistic liberalism that rejected faith in American individualism and optimism. Perhaps even more than the general public, members of the Hollywood TV community were devastated by JFK’s death, and they suddenly began taking seriously the criticisms he and his appointees, like Newton “Vast Wasteland” Minow, had made about television.