Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  “Will you put the flag away?” shouts Meathead (Rob Reiner). “It’s Christmas, not the Fourth of July.”

  “I wrote to the president about it, Mr. Bunker,” says the draft dodger, David. “He just couldn’t come up with as many reasons for killing people as I could for not killing them.”

  “Well, what do you know about that?” asks Archie.

  The draft dodger offers to leave. “Certainly he’s gotta go!” says Archie.

  “Look, Arch,” yells Meathead, “what David did took a lotta guts. When the hell are you gonna admit that the war was wrong?!”

  “I ain’t talking about the war. I don’t want to talk about that rotten, lousy war no more. I’m talking about something else! And what he done was wrong. Certainly he’ll go! What do you think, the whole people in this country can say whether or not they wanna go to war? You couldn’t get a decent war off the ground that way.” The audience laughs at Archie’s stupidity, but Archie keeps going. “If all the young people would say no . . . sure they would, cause they don’t wanna get killed. That’s why we leave it to the Congress, cause them old crocks ain’t gonna get killed. And they’re gonna do the right thing and get behind the president and vote yes.”

  It’s obvious how the scene is going to turn out. Archie has made the dumbest possible case against draft dodging. He has not spoken of the duty of citizens of the United States to follow the law. He has not defended the war. He has not talked about the duty of soldiers to one another. He has instead presented the liberal case—that young people are dying for selfish old people, and that the war is wrong.

  And that’s precisely how the scene turns out, of course—in particularly contrived fashion. The Gold Star father pipes up. “I understand how you feel, Arch. My kid hated the war, too. But he did what he thought he had to do. And David here did what he thought he had to do. But David’s alive to share Christmas dinner with us. And if Steve were here he’d wanna sit down with him. And that’s what I wanna do.” Then he shakes the draft dodger’s hand.

  Archie is not an unsympathetic character in this scene, which is a testament to Carroll O’Connor’s achievement as an actor. While Archie is never wholly sympathetic, he is at least partially sympathetic, since he does have a heart when it comes to his daughter and his wife. But he is the villain of the piece, and he is an ignorant villain. Ultraliberal O’Connor deliberately played him that way: “Writing and rehearsing and performing a TV episode in which Archie Bunker confronted a defector from the Vietnam War, I was able to satirize, albeit grimly, the mixed emotions of that uptight majority. Archie was a prototype: his variants were, and are, on all levels of American life, the highest, the lowest and the in-between. They are all bound to the heroic vision of America, though not as Duke Wayne was bound to it in perfect belief; they are all bound by a fearful apprehension about national life: that to analyze its weaknesses and contradictions is to destroy it, to gaze steadily at the mythology of it is the only way to preserve it. Nothing new in this; it is known as patriotism.”41

  Archie’s foil on the show, Michael Stivic, whom Archie not-so-affectionately terms Meathead, is a righteous liberal living off his conservative father-in-law. The role of Meathead was filled by Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, who was just as liberal as his pop. Rob got his start in the business as a writer for The Smothers Brothers, then got his job on All in the Family because of his dad’s reputation in the business. Rob would go on to direct the liberal fantasy The American President (written by The West Wing author Aaron Sorkin, whom we’ll discuss shortly), as well as hits including This Is Spinal Tap, Sleepless in Seattle, and The Princess Bride. Reiner is the definition of a Hollywood limousine liberal—in a Vanity Fair piece on Hollywood/Democratic Party bigwig Stephen Bing, Reiner remarked on Bing’s obviously down-to-earth sensibilities: “Name anyone else with his wealth who has only one maid. You’d be hard-pressed.”42 He’d also go on to use his position in Hollywood as a club to wield against conservatives across the country; in October 2010, just before the historic Tea Party wave, Reiner appeared on Bill Maher’s show, ranting, “They’re selling stupidity and ignorance. . . . My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader, because all they’re selling is fear and anger, and that’s all Hitler sold.”43

  The politics of the show are clear, and they reflect the viewpoints of its creators and stars: it is unswervingly liberal, and perverts the conservative position in order to reach the conclusion it seeks. That’s how Lear tackled almost every issue, from homosexuality to abortion to race. Only All in the Family could dare portray Archie as a boob for dressing in a suit to write a letter to the president of the United States. The hatred for Archie’s positions drips from the screen; in fact, as Archie became more popular, his character was moderated to accommodate his popularity.

  “I think it’s remarkable that it was able to touch forbidden topics at the time,” the show’s longtime director, Paul Bogart, told me. “When Carroll said something outrageously stupid, Rob would sound a reasonable reply. So it was very balanced. . . .”44 Balanced from a leftist point of view—the left always won.

  And the show had reach and impact because it was a comedy. Bud Yorkin, the co-creator of the show along with Lear, put it well, “People, in my opinion, if you lecture to them about what abortion is, or what gay is, nobody’s going to watch that. When they’re laughing . . . when it’s all over, they’ll say, ‘Gee, I guess the change of life is not a bad thing. I can go home and make love to my wife.’ ”45

  The proof of the show’s liberalism is in the pudding. In 1999, Bill Clinton gave Lear the National Medal of Arts, stating, “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”46 Clinton had a lot to thank Lear for. After all, it was Lear who helped legitimize draft dodging.

  THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW (1970–1977): LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE

  A once-divorced out-of-work actress. Her once-divorced television honcho husband. Two of television’s top writers. Put them together and what do you get? Television’s most vocal feminist show.

  Launched at the same time as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a phenomenon. It followed in the footsteps of He & She, which was a protofeminist liberal program, but it went one step further, embracing the memes of the radical feminist movement. Women no longer needed to be married. They no longer needed children. They merely needed an occasional boyfriend and a solid job to find fulfillment.

  The show’s generation began when Grant Tinker approached James L. Brooks and Allan Burns while they were working on Room 222. He wanted to create a show for his wife, Mary Tyler Moore. Moore had been out of television for some time, focusing on her failing film career. Tinker thought she ought to get back into the medium. Together with his wife, he formed MTM Enterprises, which would go on to produce many of the biggest comedies and dramas of the 1970s and 1980s, including The Bob Newhart Show, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, Remington Steele, and St. Elsewhere.

  Brooks and Burns were the perfect choices for MTM’s Moore-starring launch project. Tinker had worked with them on Room 222 as a production executive, so he knew them—they were part of the liberal clique. Tinker knew that they were of like mind creatively and politically. Burns got his start in the industry, after attending the University of Oregon, when he came back to Hollywood and got a job as a page at NBC. He worked on shows ranging from Steve Allen’s show to The Colgate Comedy Hour (where he met a young writer named Norman Lear). After a series of career maneuvers, he ended up writing greeting cards for Hallmark, Gibson, and American Greetings. One day, Burns was watching television and saw The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and decided he could do that. He walked into Jay Ward’s studio, happened to bump into him, and his career was on its way. (He actually invented the character Captain Crunch, but had no rights to it—“I weep every time I go past a display of General Mills food,” he told me.) Burns worked his way up the ranks, working with Leonard Stern on
He & She and Get Smart and working with Brooks and Reynolds on Room 222. That’s when he met Tinker.

  Burns is openly political. “I think television can be a little ahead of where social values are,” Burns told me. “I don’t mean to sound overly poetic about it, but I do think that the consciousness of people writing and producing television kind of sets the standards for the moral values of the country.”47

  Brooks is as liberal as Burns. He is an outspoken opponent of big business, small towns, and a huge fan of New York.48 His career path was similar to Burns’s; he started off as an usher at CBS, then moved to Los Angeles. He met Burns on Room 222, then Tinker. Unlike Burns, however, Brooks says that he attempts to avoid channeling his politics into his work. “I’m very wary of a social conscience being what is behind the writing,” he told an interviewer in January 2003.49 Regardless of whether Brooks tries to inject his politics into his work, he clearly does—his television résumé is a who’s-who list of liberal shows.

  Tinker and Moore, along with Brooks and Burns, decided that the show would center on a divorced woman working as a journalist in Minneapolis. “I think every comedy writer wanted to do a show about divorce,” Burns told interviewer Allan Neuwirth, “because probably two thirds of the comedy writers in town had been divorced, and wanted to write about their own experiences. . . . We were just ahead of the wave that was going to become feminism—women’s lib, as they called it in those days—where women didn’t feel the need to apologize for not having been married.”

  But when they pitched the show idea to CBS, the network balked in colorful fashion. “Well, we sat there,” Burns said, “in a room full of divorced New York Jews with mustaches and heard them say that there are four things Americans don’t like: New Yorkers, divorced people, men with mustaches and Jews. . . . At that point Jim and I really did want to quit the show.”50 They didn’t quit; they just changed the premise. Now Mary had almost been married, but broke up with her boyfriend.

  The network presentation went well. This time, Brooks and Burns created a written presentation for the decision makers. “The whole presentation runs twenty-one pages,” Tinker wrote, “and ends: This series . . . is clearly about one person living in and coping with the world of the 1970’s . . . tough enough in itself . . . even tougher when you’re thirty, single and female . . . [when] you find yourself the only female in an all-male newsroom.”51

  The concept, in short, was unmitigated feminism. And that’s how the series turned out. Mary stayed single for the entire seven-year run of the show. Explained Burns, “I know it meant a lot to women. That it was OK for a woman to be wanting a career, OK for a woman to be over thirty and unmarried . . .”52

  Mary Tyler Moore was the first mainstream show to allow the new, sexually liberated woman out of the closet. In one episode, Mary’s parents stay with her for a night, and she stays out; when they ask her where she’s been, she tells them it’s none of their business. Valerie Harper, who played Mary’s best friend, Rhoda (and eventually achieved her own spinoff, Rhoda), took the show’s messaging perfectly seriously—and she was the perfect feminist to channel that messaging. “I had been doing a lot of reading through the 1960s of Steinem, and Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist—The Female Eunuch—but really, the mother of us all, Betty Friedan,” she told Neuwirth. “That Feminine Mystique was so wonderful, and so earth-shaking. . . . The writers felt it was very important. I think that’s why the show has a real resonance about it.”53

  Ironically enough, Moore, the mother of television feminism, later came to regret her own life choices. “I was, like most working mothers, eager to join the movement and proclaim our right and our need to express ourselves, to be fulfilled and happy knowing that every ounce of our creativity was being used,” she wrote in her autobiography. “And that it was possible to raise children at the same time. I no longer believe that.”54 That certainly wasn’t the message promoted by Mary Tyler Moore.

  The show’s liberalism wasn’t restricted to feminist issues. Many of its stars became powerful liberal spokespeople. Radical left actor Ed Asner, whom we’ll discuss in the context of Lou Grant, gained his voice in Mary Tyler Moore. Betty White, who has been a screen icon for decades and who called Sarah Palin a “crazy bitch” in 2010, gained prominence on Mary Tyler Moore. Cloris Leachman, who recently posed in a 2009 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals campaign wearing only lettuce, met the public gaze in Mary Tyler Moore.

  Mary Tyler Moore is television’s first modern comedy. All in the Family seems dated now, tied to the issues that were hot and the debates that raged during its tenure. M*A*S*H is inextricably intertwined with the Vietnam era. But Mary Tyler Moore was the first show to truly take advantage of its likable characters to infuse social messages that could convert viewers. If you liked Mary, you had to accept her active sex life. If you liked Rhoda, you had to accept the fact that she was thirty and unmarried and fine with it. There is a direct and purposeful line between Mary Tyler Moore and Friends and Sex and the City.

  M*A*S*H (1972–1983): “THE WASTEFULNESS OF WAR”

  M*A*S*H was one of the most successful series of all time, running an incredible eleven seasons, from 1972 to 1983. Its finale rated the highest of any episode of television in history, drawing an unbelievable 106 million viewers.55 The show was far more of a drama than a comedy, though it obviously had its comedic moments; the creators of the show fought with fanatical if unsuccessful fervor to stop the network from inserting a laugh track in the show.

  The show was based on a book by Richard Hooker and a movie based on the book, starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould. The network offered Gene Reynolds the opportunity to produce the pilot of the series-to-be, and he leaped at it. The first writer he thought of was Ring Lardner Jr., who wrote the movie; Lardner wasn’t available. Then Reynolds thought of one of his friends, who was living in Britain at the time: Larry Gelbart.

  Gelbart, you’ll remember, got his start in the writers’ room at Your Show of Shows. I met him at his home in Beverly Hills—the front of the house was modest, but it stretched back seemingly forever, a testament to the successes television can bring. His father had been a barber, an immigrant from Latvia. At age fifteen, Gelbart came to California—and by fortuitous coincidence, his father ended up cutting Danny Thomas’s hair. Thomas was a radio figure at the time (he would later go on to star in Make Room for Daddy), and Thomas met the young Gelbart, then hired him to write for his radio show. The rest was history. The bottom line: Gelbart grew up in the Los Angeles milieu, a full-throated liberal.

  And he was the perfect pick to write M*A*S*H, since he had served in the army during the Korean War—as a member of Bob Hope’s writing staff. “My memories of the place stood me in good stead when fate (and Fox) gave me the chance to tackle M*A*S*H,” Gelbart wrote in his autobiography.56

  Reynolds visited London and asked Gelbart to take on the project. “It was summertime or spring, and it was light late, so we’d go off to the park and sit on the benches in Highgate and dream up something happening in Korea about twelve thousand miles away.”57

  Reynolds and Gelbart were able to find a cast quickly, but they ended up short while looking for the man to play Hawkeye. An agent suggested Alan Alda, an idea at which Reynolds leaped. Gelbart and Reynolds and Alda sat down in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel bar. “So he came down and he met us, the day before we were going into rehearsal,” Reynolds related. “And we talked for about an hour or two hours and he realized where our minds were: that we wanted to point out the wastefulness of war. And that was our signpost throughout all the time we did the show: the wastefulness of war.”58 This is one hell of a simplistic signpost—if wastefulness were the sum total of war, everyone would be a pacifist. But it’s the kind of bumper-sticker liberalism that often animates television programs.

  Alda was a perfect pick for Reynolds and Gelbart. Born Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo in the Bronx, his parents were both i
nvolved in show business (his mom was a former Miss New York). He was a member of the younger generation of liberals—he was born in 1936—and he embraced the new feminist and antiwar movements. Early in his career, he appeared on the hard-left variety show That Was the Week That Was. Later, he became a major supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, winning acclaim from a Boston Globe columnist who called him “the quintessential Honorary Woman: a feminist icon.”59

  Much of the show’s beauty sprang, no doubt, from the creative and political cohesion of the men behind it. Reynolds talked about the ease of “working with Gelbart and with my own sense of what the show wanted to say—and Gelbart had a very strong sense of ethics and morality and so forth—and so did Alda. . . . It would become the whole theme of a show or an episode.”60

  Gelbart described the mission of the show in exactly the same terms as Reynolds did: to point out that “the war was wasteful.” His goal with the show, Gelbart told me, was to “make ’em think more than make ’em laugh. . . .”61

  Richard Hooker (aka Richard Hornberger), the author of the original M*A*S*H bestseller, hated the show because he believed it had twisted the book into an antiwar diatribe. Gelbart admitted the validity of the criticism in his autobiography: “A writer once described the series as ‘shrouded in a serious-minded liberal gloom.’ We certainly tended to be more serious than the film.”62

  That serious liberalism came across in almost every episode. In the pilot episode, Hawkeye jokes, “Throw away all the guns and invite all the jokers from the North and the South in here for a cocktail party, last man standing on his feet at the end wins the war.” In season three’s “O.R.,” Hawkeye is even more on the nose: “I just don’t know why they’re shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back. That’s entertainment.” Or try season six’s “Fallen Idol,” where Hawkeye shouts, “Don’t you know how much this place stinks? Don’t you know what it’s like to stand day after day in blood? In the blood of children? I hate this place.”