Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  This initial bias against conservatives means that conservatives must spend time infiltrating the industry before revealing their politics. They have to make friends and influence people before announcing their identities. In order for conservatives to come out of the closet, they must first convince those around them that in spite of their political viewpoint, they aren’t baby-eating barbarians who want to use the poor for dog food.

  In fact, there are many such conservatives—people who focused on career and social circle first, then revealed to a select few where they stood. These conservatives tend to talk about Hollywood in warmer language than Schultz, Klavan, Chetwynd, or Sayet. Robert Davi, star of CBS’s Profiler, told me, “In the early career, my politics didn’t come up.”53

  That didn’t mean that Davi didn’t run into industry bias once he did become more politically vocal. “I had different issues on different shows,” he said. “It wasn’t said definitively, but it was inferred that if you wanted to make a character a born-again Christian, make them a hypocrite, or a nymphomaniac . . . there’s definitely a tendency towards ridicule.” On one occasion, there was a party for Gore; Davi supported Bush. “There were repercussions,” he recalled. Davi wanted to make clear to me that he wasn’t looking for “conspiracies in Cheerios. I’m reasonable,” he continued, “I have close friends who are absolutely left, who are good guys. . . . But all work is social. It’s social networking. . . . It’s the cultural milieu.”54 Davi retains his friendships in the industry, and so he gets along just fine. In 2010, Davi appeared in an episode of Nip/Tuck, an episode of Criminal Minds, and was working on several movies.

  Adam Baldwin, one of the more successful character actors in television—he plays John Casey on Chuck, and played Jayne Cobb on the cult classic Firefly—is an outspoken conservative. I met him on the set of Chuck to discuss what it’s like to be a conservative in Hollywood. Baldwin is soft-spoken and tolerant. “I have wonderful, wonderful nice friends who are very hard left,” he said. “And I love them and I’m happy to know them . . . I would never want them in office.”55 Whether Baldwin’s strong work record is a result of his reasoned nature or his long history in Hollywood prior to his political conversion remains an open question. But there is no question that Baldwin is correct that conservatives would do well to tone down their rhetoric when it comes to the entertainment business.

  If the first type of successful Hollywood conservative is the quiet conservative—the conservative who stays in the closet, at least until he or she has already found success—then the second type of successful Hollywood conservative is the social liberal. Not all conservatives are created equal in Hollywood—it’s tolerable to be antitax and pro–war in Iraq, for example. It’s utterly verboten to be openly anti–gay marriage or anti-abortion.

  Don Bellisario, one of television’s most successful producers and the man responsible for the massive hits NCIS and JAG, said he felt less discrimination in Hollywood than other conservatives. “No, no,” he said when asked whether those in the industry had criticized him for his nonliberal programming. “Hollywood is very liberal, very left. They always have been,” he told me. But, he said, he had never been blacklisted.

  How did Bellisario make it? Part of that has to do with his immense talent. Part of it has to do with the fact that he has never used his programming as a vehicle for his politics. Part of it also has to do with the fact that he’s not conservative on social issues.

  “The thing is, I’m conservative—I’m pro-military and I’m conservative—not a Bible thumping conservative,” he explained. “I mean, I’m liberal in a lot of things. I’m liberal about the right to choose. There’s plenty I’m liberal about. So I don’t pick a label to put on me as just conservative.”56

  This is the acceptable answer in Hollywood. You’re never an across-the-board conservative in public—you’re an independent. You’re never pro–traditional marriage—you’re open on the question. You’re never pro-life—you believe it’s a woman’s choice. This is the code, and everyone is expected to abide by it. That’s because many in Hollywood are under the misperception that being pro-traditional marriage means being intolerant of gays or that being anti-abortion means being intolerant of pro-choice Americans. That’s far from the case. But that inherent distrust of social conservatives is difficult to overcome.

  Social liberals who consider themselves conservative on other grounds, like Bellisario, generally have little problem getting along in Hollywood. Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives, is a case in point. “Yeah, I’m an odd duck in the sense that I’m a gay Republican,” Cherry told me. “On certain issues I’m very very conservative, and on other issues I’m as liberal as anyone in Hollywood.”

  As a gay Republican, Cherry said he has never experienced anti-conservative discrimination in Hollywood. “First off, I think it’s always difficult to get work, and two, if you’re really really good at your job, that comes first . . . most people didn’t know what my political beliefs were starting out, and no one ever cared until Desperate Housewives became a hit. . . .”57

  The fact that there is some small debate in conservative Hollywood circles—and yes, there are conservative Hollywood circles—about the depth of the discrimination in Hollywood allows certain liberal journalists in Hollywood to claim that no discrimination actually exists. These journalists defensively assert that all conservative complaints boil down to sour grapes. They establish a catch-22: If a conservative is successful in Hollywood, he has no cause for complaint; if he is unsuccessful, it must be that lack of success driving his complaint rather than actual discrimination.

  One of the chief practitioners of this odious manipulation is Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times. “Today’s conservatives are still complaining about [what] they say is Hollywood’s rigid ideological slant,” Goldstein wrote in a May 18, 2010, piece, “but they apparently aren’t brave enough to actually name names.” Goldstein focused on Jonathan Kahn (aka Jon David), a singer-songwriter who has performed at Tea Party events around the country using a pseudonym to avoid the blacklist. Kahn told the Wall Street Journal that he used an alias “for protective reasons. In Hollywood, being a conservative is the kiss of death.” But Goldstein essentially called him a liar, since Kahn “only managed to direct one film . . . which earned lukewarm reviews and barely got a release.”

  “Based on that very limited output,” Goldstein wrote, “it’s [sic] seems like quite a stretch to say that Kahn’s politics have held him back. But that’s what all too many conservatives do. They put the blame for their stalled careers on liberal Hollywood, when lack of marketable talent might be a far more likely source for the problem. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Hollywood isn’t lousy with liberals. It is indeed an overwhelmingly liberal community. But it is also very much a free-market community where the best ideas, scripts and talent ultimately rise to the top. . . . If a political conservative (in or out of the closet) wrote a hot action script that looked like a global tent-pole hit, all those squishy liberals would be pushing their best friends down elevator shafts left and right trying to get the rights to it.”

  Finally, Goldstein implied Kahn was a coward. “If Kahn really thinks otherwise, he’d better start naming names, because this story line of shadowy Hollywood liberals squashing the careers of righteous conservatives is getting pretty old indeed.”58

  Goldstein’s argument is vapid, empty-headed in the extreme. He’s essentially suggesting that conservatives cannot complain about “shadowy” discrimination (even though liberals do this on a routine basis—just look at the continuing case for affirmative action) because they won’t name the names of those in Hollywood who discriminate. But as we’ve seen above, there are plenty in Hollywood who discriminate on a regular basis, and there are even a few who openly cop to it and celebrate it. Conservatives often don’t want to name names for fear of retaliation by those they expose.

  Those few v
ocal liberals aren’t the real problem, though. The real problem is the shadowy liberal discrimination, because it sets the bar too high. Hollywood produces a “hot action script” that becomes a “global tent-pole hit” maybe once every five years or so. Stating that liberals in Hollywood would buy such a script off a conservative is utterly uncontroversial. It’s just as uncontroversial as stating that if a black man came to Bull Connor holding the Hope Diamond, Connor would be willing to buy it off of him for a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t make Bull Connor an emblem of racial tolerance. It makes him a non-moron.

  Nobody argues that conservatives can’t sell blockbuster scripts. But just as in the Bull Connor/Hope Diamond scenario, the problem is getting through the door. High level executives don’t take random meetings with one-shot-wonder conservatives. Generally, those who create hot action scripts are people who have worked in the industry a long time, who have honed and perfected their craft. In other words, to get to the level Goldstein is talking about—the level of the million-dollar script—you have to move your way up the ranks first. And that means getting jobs in writers’ rooms, making indie pictures, immersing yourself in the industry.

  People like Goldstein often point to successful conservatives like Joel Surnow of 24 fame and mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI, The Amazing Race, Without a Trace) as examples of folks who have made it, as though their mere existence proves that discrimination in Hollywood is a fantasy. But nobody is challenging whether a Surnow or a Bruckheimer can get ahead. The true question is, Why should a conservative have to be Jerry Bruckheimer or Joel Surnow to get ahead? There are literally thousands of writers in Hollywood who have never written anything of quality, who make unprofitable movies on a routine basis, who create bomb pilot after bomb pilot—but who still make a living. How many of those people are conservatives?

  Oddly, the same people who proclaim that discrimination against conservatives in Hollywood doesn’t exist suggest that racial discrimination in Hollywood—for which there is substantially less evidence—remains a paramount concern. Goldstein himself wrote a column in the aftermath of President Obama’s election suggesting that Hollywood segregates blacks and whites in its movies and television shows (and dismissing the stardom of Will Smith and the box office and critical success of movies like Dreamgirls and Ray). “If Hollywood really wants to show some respect for the Obama revolution,” Goldstein penned, “it’s time for the movie business to break some ground of its own.”59 Goldstein is far less interested in breaking ground in the area of ideological tolerance than he is in promoting tolerance for different levels of melanin.

  Goldstein wrote a column in November 2009 about Universal Pictures’ terrible decision to remove a black couple from the British poster for the Vince Vaughn vehicle Couples Retreat. “I’ve talked to enough frustrated black filmmakers over the years to know the real underlying issue behind these kinds of gaffes,” Goldstein wrote. “The real solution to this kind of issue would be for Hollywood to find a way to hire a decent sampling of African-American executives so its decision-making wouldn’t look so clueless and out of touch with the diversity in the rest of our culture.”60 Switch out “conservative” for “black” and “African-American” in that last paragraph, and Goldstein would disown his own paragraph, despite the fact that there are likely more successful blacks in Hollywood than successful conservatives of any ethnicity.

  Aside from the direct evidence of anti-conservative discrimination in the business, there is strong circumstantial evidence as well. One element of that circumstantial evidence is Hollywood’s emphasis on youth. The focus on the 18-49 crowd is both a result of and a rationale for Hollywood’s liberalism—young people are liberal, so programmers prefer to target them, and by making the case for targeting young people, programmers justify their own liberal programming. The natural outgrowth of the focus on the liberal 18-49 crowd is age discrimination in Hollywood. Walk around any network programming or development office in Los Angeles, and you’re more likely to see a unicorn than a man or woman over age fifty. If you’re over age forty in this town, the chances of getting a job are significantly lessened. Not coincidentally, if you’re over forty in this town, there’s a far higher chance that you’re conservative than if you’re under forty (the same holds true for the general population).

  That’s why in January 2010, seventeen networks and production studios, as well as seven talent agencies, settled a class action lawsuit for $70 million based on age discrimination.61 One of the lead plaintiffs was Burt Prelutsky. “Some might find it ironic that Hollywood’s liberals, who are still inflamed over a blacklist that took place 60 years ago, not only condone it in their hometown, but practice it every day of their lives,” Prelutsky wrote.62

  Ageism isn’t directly correlative with discrimination against conservatives—God knows there are scores of older writers who are liberals. But the same emphasis on youth that forced television to the left in the 1970s forces it left today—and forces out those who are “too old” to evolve with the ever-liberalizing morality of the times.

  LIBERALS: TV ISN’T TRANSFORMATIVE ENOUGH

  Liberals in Hollywood tend to believe that their shows are not transformative of the audiences who watch them—rather, they say, they are reflective of prevailing realities. These creators and executives see themselves as documentarians of inarguable truths, not propagandists attempting to change hearts and minds.

  This may seem bizarre to those of us who have actually met people who live in Alabama or Texas or Kansas and have a different take on life than those who sip lattes at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in West Los Angeles.

  But the liberals in Hollywood aren’t dissembling. Their shows do reflect prevailing realities as they see them—which is to say, through the prism of their sophisticated urban liberal outlook. Their programming not only reflects big city liberalism—it transforms everybody who isn’t one already into a big city liberal.

  Hollywood leftists refuse to recognize this obvious truth. To the contrary, they actually believe that their shows aren’t transformative enough—in fact, they think their shows are too conservative.

  “I think when television is living up to its greatest potential, it would be transformative,” Tom Fontana, creator of Oz, told me. “When it’s groping for ratings, it’s reflective. When it’s reflective, it’s trying not to offend too many people. And if you’re going to try to change the world for the better, you have to be willing to offend some people.”63 Fontana, you may recall, is one of the few honest liberals in Hollywood who will admit that the industry needs more balance—but even he seems unaware that the programming on television generally reflects liberals’ reality, not conservatives’. From where Fontana stands—the hard left—television seems neutral. More than that, he believes that the only truly transformative programming is that which is offensive to common standards.

  “I don’t think television has been a force for change,” Susan Harris, creator of the massively transformative series Soap, told me. “I think it’s reflective and I think it’s behind the times. . . . You’ve got a Miss America contestant causing an uproar because she just believes in opposite sex marriage, and that’s no longer a popular opinion,” Harris continued. “So we’ve come that far in our social thinking . . . [but] I think it’s not reflected on television.”64 Harris’s opinion reflects the inside-the-bubble thinking so pervasive in Hollywood. Huge swaths of the country saw Carrie Prejean’s destruction at the hands of Perez Hilton as a despicably inappropriate ambush on someone with a mainstream opinion on gay marriage. Harris saw that same incident as evidence that Prejean was wholly out of the mainstream—and even more ridiculously, she saw the Prejean incident as evidence that television, which is the culture’s most ardent advocate of gay marriage, should stump even harder for it in order to keep up with the times.

  Harris is uncomfortable with the “commotion” that Americans cause when they see radical liberalism on television.
That commotion is generated by the vast disconnect between the world of Susan Harris and the world of middle America and the South. Despite the parochialism of the Hollywood crowd, millions of conservatives still watch their shows and disagree with the social values portrayed on those shows. In fact, millions of so-called ignoramuses often strongly object to the portrayal of rural values on television—they think that the liberals in Hollywood are out to unfairly ridicule them, as Chris Chulack, producer of ER, pointed out: “If [television is] done by people who grew up and only know urban values, they’re the ones that are interpreting or portraying rural values as well—there’s going to be a bit of a [twist].”65 Nonurban nonliberals have a legitimate beef. But when networks react to those viewers, creators react by blaming the networks for acting as a stodgily conservative barrier to liberal programming.

  Hence the viewpoint of Gene Reynolds, producer of M*A*S*H and Room 222, two of the more transformative shows in television history. “I think [television is] more reflective than pushing,” he stated. “I remember getting a lecture from an NBC executive. I had shot the pilot of the Ghost and Mrs. Muir and I had directed the first three episodes. . . . And [the executive] said, ‘I don’t want to have anything new on the show. We [should] deal with issues that have already been dealt with before.’ And he was a Southerner. ‘But we certainly don’t want to be in the vangaaahd.’ ” Reynolds mimicked the executive’s pronunciation with a long, Southern drawl “[T]hey don’t want to be in the vanguard. They don’t want to get into stuff that could be controversial.”66