Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Law & Order is easily one of the most addictive shows on television, because it is plot-driven rather than character-driven. For a lawyer, it’s a pleasure to watch because it is meticulous in its adherence to legal standards, and until very recently, most of the episodes have attempted to argue both sides. The writing is tight, and the stories move quickly. So quickly, in fact, that unless you’re watching, you might miss what has now become the dominant politics of the show. But whether you miss it or not, it’s there.

  COPS (1989-PRESENT): WHITE CRIMINALS WANTED

  It’s not truly honest to classify Cops as a drama; it’s really a reality show, of course, following the exploits of law enforcement officers across the United States as they chase down and capture the bad guys. Its success—2010 marks its twenty-third season on the air—stems from Americans’ love of police officers and hatred for criminals.

  Because Cops is a law-enforcement support show, it has become the target of hard-left types like Michael Moore, who interviewed producer Richard Hurlin for his hit-piece documentary Bowling for Columbine. Hurlin tells Moore, “If you look liberal up in the dictionary I think my picture will be in there somewhere.” Moore then proceeds to grill Hurlin about the supposed racism of the show, saying that racism raises the ratings. “Maybe because we in the television business tend to demonize black and Hispanic people, then those watching it at home are going, ‘I don’t want to help those people. I’m not going to do anything to help them because I hate them now because they may hurt me.’ You know what I’m saying?” Moore asked/demanded. Hurlin, who clearly did not know what Moore was saying, answered, “I know what you’re saying, I don’t know that’s what we’re doing. I’m not sure we’re demonizing black and Hispanic people particularly.”

  Cops does have a lot of minority criminals, but that’s because there are a lot of minority criminals. John Langley, the creator of the show, rejected Moore’s argument head-on. “What irritates me sometimes is critics will watch Cops and say, ‘They misrepresent people of color,’ ” Langley fumed. “That’s not true. Au contraire. I show more white people than is statistically what the truth is in terms of street crime. If you look at the prisons, it’s sixty-something percent people of color and thirty-something percent of white people. If you look at Cops, it’s sixty percent white and forty percent people of color, it’s just the reverse. And I do that intentionally, because I don’t want to contribute to negative stereotypes.”76

  Even the conservative shows are liberal in Hollywood.

  THE REAL WORLD (1992–PRESENT): NOT THAT REAL

  MTV spent most of the 1980s as a music video station, providing little but cutting edge fast-cut rock and roll. It was specifically geared toward young, disenfranchised audiences—the crowd that wouldn’t watch The Cosby Show. And despite its supposedly cutting-edge content, MTV remained relatively tame for cable.

  Then came The Real World. Doug Herzog, who was an executive at MTV at the time, remembered the origins of the show. “We were trying to develop a soap opera, a teen soap opera, or an adult soap opera. . . . And we gave [creators Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray] some money to go shoot a test over a long Thanksgiving weekend in a SoHo loft with seven strangers.”

  The result was The Real World: New York, which tackled issues of sexuality, gender, race, and class. It’s pure liberalism all the way around, with episodes dealing with homelessness (one of the castmates lives in a homeless shelter for a night to learn about the subject), pornography (one of the castmates has posed nude for advertisements), homosexuality (one of the castmates is gay and scores a boyfriend), among other hot topics. The voyeurism of the show was undoubtedly based on having young attractive singles living together in one house; in later seasons, that situation would devolve, predictably enough, into sexual arrangements among the housemates.

  One of the most provocative storylines on the series came during the second season, The Real World: San Francisco, when one of the housemates, Pedro, revealed that he was HIV positive. His affliction was treated with sensitivity and acceptance by everyone, particularly a young woman named Cory and another young woman from a conservative family, Rachel. Everyone, that is, except David “Puck” Rainey, a politically incorrect dirtbag who put boogers in the peanut butter and wore a shirt with a swastika made of guns emblazoned on it. Rainey constantly irritated Pedro to the point where Pedro’s health was endangered, at which point the castmates threw Rainey out of the house, in an ultimate triumph of tolerance over xenophobia. Pedro ended up taking part in a same-sex wedding ceremony with his boyfriend.

  Herzog knew at the time that this was liberal politics masquerading as entertainment. “MTV was started by and continues to be run by a group of people that believe . . . that through the medium of television we try to make the world a slightly better place,” he told me. “For me, one of my proudest moments was Pedro and Cory’s story on The Real World, way back when, and bringing the issue of sexuality and AIDS to TV.”

  Over time, The Real World has only gotten more liberal, featuring threesomes with housemates, as well as other fringe behaviors. When I asked Herzog about some of the criticisms of The Real World—namely, that the show was at least partially staged, Herzog laughed. “We’re not making documentaries, we’re making TV,” he said.77

  ER (1994–2009): THE CLINTONIAN CONSENSUS

  In the aftermath of the 1992 election, President Clinton attempted to ram through a health care proposal that would have dramatically reshaped the American medical system. It frightened Americans, and it made them worry about the sustainability of private-sector health care.

  Television’s liberal creators provided two solutions, both of which were geared toward promoting the Clintonian universal health-care agenda. First, David E. Kelley’s Chicago Hope placed liberal doctors in a private charity hospital, a fantasy land where everyone was cared for equally, without regard to cash or status. Second, there was ER, a show taking place entirely within an emergency room—another area of the medical system where money is no object. “This is a place where you go and you sort of know who the people are, and you feel that they care about you,” explained show creator and massive liberal John Wells. Newsweek magazine featured the cast of ER on the cover, emblazoning it with the headline, “A Health-Care Program that Really Works.”78

  And what a cast it was. George Clooney. Julianna Margulies. John Stamos. Shane West. William H. Macy. Maria Bello. Angela Bassett. The cast of ER reads like a who’s who of television and film stardom. That makes sense, since the show ran a whopping fifteen seasons, finishing first in the ratings three times and within the top ten no less than ten times.

  In the aftermath of St. Elsewhere, and going up against the David E. Kelley medical vehicle Chicago Hope, ER was expected to fall apart early. Instead, it exploded out of the gate. Chris Chulack, the longtime producer of the show and the quick-witted and down-to-earth writer of many of its finest episodes, sat down with me in his offices on the Warner Bros. lot, which were decorated with sketches from another one of Chulack’s shows, the short-lived but excellent Third Watch.

  Unlike many of those I talked to, Chulack got into the business through the technician’s door. He actually split his time in college between studying and driving a moving truck. Then he realized that he had a distant uncle who worked in television as an editor on Hawaii Five-O. Chulack worked his way up from a low-level position in the editors’ room to riding his bicycle around the Warner Bros. lot delivering dailies and movies to projection rooms. Eventually, he became an apprentice film editor, then an assistant, then an assistant picture editor, then an assistant sound effects editor, then a sound effects editor, and then a looping editor. “I kind of moved up and really kept my mouth shut and my nose to the grindstone, ears open,” he said. Finally, he became a producer and a director, and signed an overall deal with Lorimar, then run by Les Moonves.

  That’s when Chulack met Wells, who was working on a project bas
ed on an old Michael Crichton script entitled EW (Emergency Ward). Wells is more of an outspoken liberal than Chulack; even as he produced ER, he worked with Aaron Sorkin to create The West Wing, which we’ll discuss momentarily. Just before the 2010 election, he held a major Hollywood fundraiser for Obama.79

  Through a series of odd circumstances, Chulack ended up as a producer, director, and sometime writer on the show. “It’ll probably be nine [episodes] and out,” Wells told him at the time. “But we’ll have fun.” Fifteen years later, the show wrapped.

  ER restored the glory of drama to television. After a decade in which drama had ruled the roost—the weakness of comedy in the early 1980s has already been well-documented—sitcoms had taken over, with Cosby, Roseanne, Family Ties, Cheers, and the other big comedies of the day eating drama’s lunch. “ER came and had this different rhythm,” Chulack noted. “It wasn’t just a medical show; it felt like an action show because of the nature of being in an ER, where time is heart muscle, as the doctors say.”

  Social messaging wasn’t at the top of Chulack’s heap when it came to priorities. “I don’t think anybody set out to put any political messages.” Chulack admitted that the creators of the show and the writers of certain episodes had their own “particular slant, and sure, that’s going to come through, but at least for my money, being in the room, and I was in the room, the discussion was always about ‘was that interesting?’ . . . We tried to arm both sides, if you will, and tried to have an honest dialogue.”

  The characters, Chulack said, may be liberal—they “may carry a political torch”—but the creators tried to balance it “the best way we could. . . . So I don’t think that we put a message out there, but I think we asked a lot of questions on a lot of levels. . . .”80

  In the television business, political balance very often means merely giving passing attention to opposing points of view before settling on the correct, liberal position. For example, in the season-twelve episode titled “If Not Now,” a pro-choice doctor who is Catholic convinces an underage teenager to allow him to induce a miscarriage after she is raped, citing the Bible. The pro-life position is presented but rejected from a religious point of view, a political oddity to say the least.

  ER was clearly a show of the left, with Christian characters counseling abortion, liberal treatment of gay and lesbian issues, and even jibes about the war in Iraq. ER differed from some of the other dramas of its time, however, in that it presented the other side before rejecting it. ER countenanced the debate, at least; unlike comedies of the same time period, or other dramas of the same period, it didn’t dismiss arguments out of hand, even if it finally rejected most conservative positions. ER’s politics were Clintonian in nature: Everyone’s pain was felt, even if not everyone’s position was legitimated.

  THE WEST WING (1999–2006): THE LEFT WING

  John Wells went from working on ER to working on a show called The West Wing, with a creator named Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin was yet another member of the new generation of liberal writers—he grew up a privileged yuppie child in New York. Sorkin spent his early career in New York, struggling to find work as an actor. Finally, he penned an antimilitary piece titled A Few Good Men, which made it to the screen directed by none other than hard-left Rob Reiner. The movie was well-written and respectful of the military—read Col. Jessup’s famous “you need me on that wall” speech out of context, and it is Patton-esque—but it also suggested that high-ranking officers routinely sanction abuse of enlisted men in order to “toughen them up.” That was his ticket; soon he was writing mainstream liberal hits.

  His next movie, The American President, abandoned the purported balance of A Few Good Men and skewed wholly liberal. In that propaganda piece, a nefarious conservative senator, Bob Rumson, exposes the president’s lover when he discovers that she burned a flag in college. That leads to this long-winded speech by the liberal president (Michael Douglas): “For the record: yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But the more important question is why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question: Why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? . . . You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.” And so Sorkin turns flag burning into a vindication of American freedom.

  Not long after Sorkin wrote The American President, he was scheduled to have lunch with Wells. He didn’t expect to be pitching an idea but quickly realized that Wells was looking for a pitch. “And so, on the spot,” Sorkin recalled, “I started saying, ‘What about the White House . . . ?’ ”81 Out of such meetings are legends made.

  And The West Wing was a legendary show: legendary for its liberalism, legendary for its insane amounts of dialogue, legendary for its preachiness. It lasted for seven seasons, reaching a high in the ratings of number seven during its third season, before experiencing gradual decline to number seventy-two in its seventh season. Sorkin’s main character, President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, was a saintly liberal hero who supports the leftist agenda on every point. Bartlet’s point of view invariably won, and Bartlet was invariably the good guy in all of his arguments. The show pursued the same “ripped from the headlines” strategy as David E. Kelley and ER; it was designed to respond to current events. In one episode, the show commented on Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s famously controversial comments on homosexuality by having Bartlet lecture “Dr. Jenna Jacobs” about gay rights, citing supposedly obsolete proscriptions from the Bible—a strategy Sorkin allegedly cribbed from an anonymous online letter to Dr. Laura. That was rather typical of the show, which made Republicanism look ignorant and foolish on a weekly basis.

  The West Wing wasn’t quite as bad as The American President—the occasional conservative was portrayed in a mildly sympathetic light, though always as a dissenter from his/her own party or as a potential convert. Annabeth Schott (Kristin Chenoweth) started off as an assistant to the Bill O’Reilly knock-off Taylor Reid; she ended up joining the Bartlet Administration in the press department. Bruno Gianelli (Ron Silver) was a political strategist based on Dick Morris; after working for Bartlet, he ended up campaigning for a moderate Republican, Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda), whom he routinely directed to ignore his more conservative base (Silver, who became a Republican in 2004, was routinely mocked around the set as “Ron, Ron, the Neo-Con”). Vinick himself was so liberal that he ranted at his conservative base when they simply asked him to attend church.

  Overall, however, The West Wing brutalized right-wingers. The premiere episode of the show had Bartlet ejecting conservative ministers from the White House; the ministers were ignorant (they didn’t know the First Commandment), stupid, and loathsome. The episode ended with Bartlet preaching to them about religion: “Now, I love my family, and I’ve read my Bible from cover to cover so I want you to tell me from what part of Holy Scripture do you suppose the Lambs of God drew their divine inspiration when they sent my twelve-year-old granddaughter a Raggedy Ann doll with a knife stuck through its throat? You’ll denounce these people Al, you’ll do it publicly, and until you do you can all get your fat asses out of my White House.”

  Demonstrating his complete lack of political understanding outside the cloister of New York and Los Angeles, Sorkin stated, “I would disagree this is a liberal show.” Wells agreed, stating, “Nothing goes into the show without a full pro and con.” Well, almost nothing—when it came to gun control, Wells said, “I don’t think any of us really believes in the other side of the argument very much.”82 No wonder—the staff was stacked. On it sat Patrick Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s former pollster; Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked for Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and now has his own hard-left show on MSNBC); Dee Dee Myers, former Clinton White House press secretary. Ev
ery one of the show’s political consultants was a Democrat.83 Yet Sorkin averred, “I don’t think that television shows, or, for that matter, movies or plays or paintings or songs can be liberal or conservative. I think they can only be good or bad.”84 This is patent nonsense.

  Sorkin sums up the goal of The West Wing well: He wants to entertain with liberal politics. If a by-product is mass political conversion, so much the better. “I think we’re all very flattered when we hear that the show illuminates certain things. . . . We’re delighted when we hear that, but that’s not our goal. Our goal is the same as David Kelley’s goal on The Practice and Ally McBeal and John [Wells’s] on ER, and Steven Bochco and David Milch’s on NYPD Blue. It’s simply to captivate you for an hour. . . .”85 Sorkin’s right, of course—entertainment obviously has to come first for everyone, including liberal ideologues. It’s just that Sorkin’s politics are so ubiquitous in the milieu he inhabits that he doesn’t bother acknowledging that by entertaining, he’s foisting his politics on millions, just as Kelley, Bochco, and Wells do.