Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  The show constantly throws unnecessary darts at the right wing. In one episode, the guidance counselor laments the female role models present in the world today: “You’ve got Britney Spears and her shaved head. Lindsey Lohan looks like something out of Lord of the Rings. Ann Coulter.” In that same episode, the caustic female gym coach rips two girls, stating, “You must be two of the stupidest teens I have ever encountered, and that’s saying something . . . I once taught a cheerleading seminar to a young Sarah Palin.” In another episode, when the pregnant teenager tells her dad that she’s been knocked up, he responds by throwing her out of the house. By the way, he’s Christian and a fan of Glenn Beck.

  All this makes sense when we consider the creators of Glee: Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan. Murphy is the creator of the most sexualized television show in basic cable history, Nip/Tuck, which has graphically depicted virtually every possible incarnation of sexuality. Falchuk worked on Nip/Tuck with Murphy; though he grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, as a young Republican, he left that behind when he moved to Hollywood. So far behind, in fact, that after he and Murphy collaborated on Nip/Tuck, they pitched a series to FX revolving around a transsexual gynecologist. As for Brennan, he was the newcomer to the group and based the show on his own experiences in glee club in high school. Brennan says the show was designed for everyone: “We were writing a show that kids and their parents and their college-age siblings would want to watch. . . . I would die a happy man if our show resulted in better communication between parents and children about difficult issues, though that wasn’t our intent.”90

  Murphy, who is openly gay and quite militant about gay rights, makes no bones about the fact that he’s seeking to proselytize with the show. After Newsweek columnist Ramin Setoodeh, who is gay, wrote a column suggesting that Sean Hayes’s performance as a straight man in a Broadway revival of Promises, Promises wasn’t believable, Murphy responded by seeking a boycott of Newsweek. He then issued an invitation to Setoodeh to visit the set of Glee: “Hopefully then he can see how we take care to do a show about inclusiveness . . . a show that encourages all viewers no matter what their sexual orientation to go after their hopes and dreams. . . .”91

  When asked whether he would tackle gay marriage in the show, he said, “That’s a great idea. I think I would love to tackle that in the future but I haven’t thought how.” Murphy plotted out in detail how he wanted to inoculate the public gradually over having the two quasi-lesbian cheerleaders kiss: “I think the key is to do it a couple times so that it doesn’t seem forced.” He also rips shows like Modern Family that don’t show gays kissing. Yet Murphy still feels that he’s censoring himself for the sake of the kids who watch Glee, which demonstrates how cloistered he is in his social politics. “I’m the one who censors that because I have a very young niece who wants to watch the show and I don’t want her to see things that her stepmother has to say, ‘Wait, what?’ I feel a responsibility because young kids watch the show so I had wanted to do the opposite of Nip/Tuck.”92 Unfortunately, the show is hardly the opposite of Nip/Tuck—it’s more like a watered-down, musicalized, high school version of Nip/Tuck.

  Is Glee a good show? Certainly it’s a clever and well-made show. But unlike Desperate Housewives or even Nip/Tuck, which are clearly targeted at adults, Glee is targeted at teens and preteens, which means that its insertion of political messages is more cynical and dangerous than most.

  STACKING THE DECK

  The power of scripted television lies in its ability to twist our emotions. The best dramatists can pull our heartstrings or break tension with a laugh; they can tell us what we feel. That power can easily be used to create and twist situations to the full advantage of particular political agendas. And artists in television do it all the time, whether consciously or unconsciously.

  It’s not hard to do. For example, consider the situation of a young woman who gets pregnant accidentally. Her boyfriend originally decides to stick with her, but he can’t take the heat and begins drinking. In a violent quarrel one night, he hits her, then runs out, abandoning her. She is three months pregnant with the child by now. She visits an abortion clinic, where she is counseled that to have his baby is her choice. She proceeds with the abortion.

  Now consider a second young woman. She is promiscuous and has had a prior abortion. One night she goes to a bar, where she has a quickie in the bathroom with a total stranger. She realizes she’s pregnant, but instead of seeking an immediate abortion, she waits three months simply because she’s been planning a trip to Europe. When she comes back, she gets an abortion.

  The moral equation here hasn’t changed for either side of the abortion debate; in both cases, the pro-choice side would say that abortion is a proper choice, and in both cases, the pro-life side would say that abortion is an improper choice. But in the world of drama, we’re looking solely for sympathy. If you’re going to paint the pro-choice picture in a positive light, therefore, you’d use the first scenario; if you’re going to paint pro-life as the right choice, you’d use the second. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen variation after variation of the first choice on television, and not a single prominent instance of the latter case on TV.

  The solution, of course, is balance in the writing constituency. A few rare authors have the ability to step outside themselves and write the opposing political viewpoint with accuracy and dignity, but many television creators are not even aware of the world outside the big cities (these are the people who think that simply invoking Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, or Sean Hannity can stand in for a laugh line). More than that, many creators don’t feel the necessity to present both sides of a particular debate—and since so few shows do present both sides, these creators face little market pressure to do so. When television drama is a virtual liberal monopoly, why should liberal television creators try to move outside that safe space?

  They should move out of that safe space because open debate makes for better television. There’s a reason nobody buys season tickets to the Harlem Globetrotters—the winner is a foregone conclusion. The same holds true when we watch drama: We want to see the interplay between the forces, and we want the unpredictable. The market is looking for balance, or at least diverging viewpoints.

  But that’s not how liberals in Hollywood see it. Where they come from, the market requests—no, demands—that programming skew wildly liberal. Liberals use the success of liberal shows as a way to shut up conservatives, ignoring the countervailing evidence. The market is the liberals’ most powerful argument. That argument, however, is foolish, ignorant, and cynical in the extreme. It is precisely that market argument we will now debunk.

  “Shut Up and Change the Channel”

  How the Left Uses the Market Myth to Silence Its Critics

  We’ve seen how Hollywood became leftist; we’ve exposed Hollywood’s discrimination against conservatives; we’ve surveyed the most popular comedies and dramas in television history, spoken with their creators, and decoded their hidden political messages.

  Now we must answer the biggest question of all: how does Hollywood justify its continued ideological tilt? How can the industry that attacked McCarthyism and excoriated racism excuse itself for continuing to exclude those who don’t share its ideological viewpoint?

  Their typical initial response to this charge is that such discrimination simply doesn’t exist. Leftists dominate the medium solely due to luck or talent. And if television’s creators and executives happen to be liberal, they say, there’s nothing wrong with infusing politics into their work. After all, they contend, the infusion of politics makes their work more interesting and trenchant.

  “I felt the obligation to be funny,” George Schlatter of Laugh-In and Real People fame explained to me. “Promoting social justice and equity was just one of the ways that we were funny.”1 The late Larry Gelbart, the moving force behind M*A*S*H, told me that his goal was “to use whatever c
raft I had learned, to marry that with issues which concerned me.”2 Susan Harris, creator of Soap and The Golden Girls, said to me that while her goal was to entertain, “If while entertaining, we could inject some social reality, and make some points, that was terrific.”3 Gary David Goldberg, creator of Family Ties and Spin City, stated that the tension between entertainment and messaging was a “tension we welcomed. It’s good to have it. I always thought the higher the stakes, the deeper the laughs, if you can accomplish it.”4

  Executives, too, feel the need to message their programming. Fred Pierce, president of ABC-TV during the 1970s, stated, “We never thought that you could do something that wasn’t commercially appealing that didn’t have a message.”5 Brandon Stoddard, head of programming for ABC during the late 1980s, said that his career was a constant adventure in drawing the balance between “being able to say something but also putting something on the air that was entertaining.”6

  How could it be otherwise? Creative people always infuse their worldviews into their work. Tolstoy wouldn’t be Tolstoy if he wrote simplistic adventure stories; Aaron Sorkin wouldn’t be Aaron Sorkin if he wrote evenhanded scripts about tax policy.

  More than that, though, creative people generally want to feel that their work has meaning beyond the transient value of ratings points. They want to be able to look back at their work at the end of a long career and say that their work deepened human understanding, touched people’s minds and hearts. As Gelbart told me about four months before he passed away, “William S. Paley said television was the best cigarette vending machine that anybody ever thought of, and that’s still pretty much what it is. I’d just like to see it grow up, and really be the best thing it can be.”7 Perhaps Josh Brand, creator of St. Elsewhere and Northern Exposure, put it best: “I suppose each of us has our own conscience.”8

  The “luck” argument requires creators and executives to disown any purposeful political agenda on television. That’s why so many creators and executives shy away from taking credit for their programming progressivism when asked about it directly. When asked about whether their work is designed to proselytize, most claim innocence, perhaps fearing that if the business labels them ideologues of any stripe, they’ll lose work. Gelbart, the king of inserting politics into his shows, told me with a straight face, “We’re worker ants . . . largely we do what we’re told, and so we don’t dictate the liberal or permissive or progressive line in anything.”9 As Gelbart’s own statements about his work show, this is plainly untrue. The “luck” argument simply doesn’t fly.

  Which is why the left comes up with a different, far more insidious argument. The Hollywood left insists that the market demands liberal material on television. Creators and executives down the line state that their moral guide is the Nielsen Ratings, but that the ratings demand odes to gay rights and statements about universal health care. Lee Rich, who headed Lorimar Productions and produced Dallas, Eight Is Enough, and The Waltons, among others, put the argument well: “I’m not out to change their views about politics or religion or anything. I’m there to entertain them. And as long as they like what I give them, they’ll view my product. If they don’t, they won’t.”10

  This makes no intuitive sense. Conservatives know that they watch television, and they know they aren’t demanding the latest exploration into teenage pansexual Wiccan experimentation. How can Hollywood leftists cite the market as the reason for such storylines with credibility? If Hollywood is interested first and foremost in drawing viewers, why does its work take political positions that alienate vast swaths of the American public?

  Up until now, conservatives have utterly ignored this argument. Perhaps conservatives are simply happy to have the left finally agreeing that the free market is a positive good. Perhaps they’re scared off by the left’s free market rhetoric—how can conservatives attack the free market? Perhaps they simply don’t want to engage in the seeming dirtiness of looking inside Hollywood’s business workings, at television’s dirty laundry.

  For whatever reason, the market argument has allowed liberals to dominate television for decades. The question is: Are they right? Does the market truly desire a one-sided political product so strongly that a blacklist in Hollywood can be justified on laissez-faire grounds?

  Of course not. The market in television isn’t free—it’s been corrupted, over and over and over again. Now we’ll explore that corruption.

  THE MARKET MYTH

  Leftists are rarely interested in crediting the free market with anything. The free market, they usually argue, is exploitative, cruel, and inhumane. Yet ironically enough, Hollywoodites are lightning-quick to cite the power of the free market while justifying the monochrome nature of Hollywood politics. The creators of television use the same logic Red Skelton used at movie mogul Harry Cohn’s funeral, when asked why so many people had shown up to watch the tyrant’s burial: “It just goes to show you . . . if you give the people what they want, they’ll come out.”

  The creators’ apparent reverence for the free market is wondrous to behold. When defending their politically oriented creative decisions, writers, producers, and executives constantly cite the power of the free market. Their guiding principle seems to be, “If they don’t like it, they can turn it off.” Success somehow justifies political content on television—the people are the true creators of television, in this view, and television’s moving forces can’t be held accountable for providing what the audience wants.

  Marta Kaufman, co-creator of Friends, told me that while she did push the gay and lesbian rights agenda during the first season of the show, “We never felt we wanted to preach. You know our feeling was always, if you don’t like what you’re watching, forget the V-chip, just turn it off.”11 Billie Piper, star of HBO’s pornographic Secret Diary of a Call Girl, says the same thing: “I think if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.”12 In 1972, Norman Lear summed up the feelings of creators across Hollywood when he told a Senate subcommittee, “The American public is the final arbiter anyway, and it tells us very quickly what it likes and does not like . . . the writer deserves the right to express life as he sees it.”13

  Executives, with slightly more credibility, make the same argument. Tom Freston, former chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, said, “If we programmed to our personal taste, we’d be out of business.”14 “The audience decides [what they want to watch]. And in that sense, it’s a pretty clean business,” Sandy Grushow of Fox told me.15

  This is all nonsense, of course. Creators and executives don’t kowtow to the wishes of the audience (if they did, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Hill Street Blues, Family Ties, and Seinfeld all would have been gone after one season). Creators and executives see the audience as a vast swath of rubes waiting to be manipulated. If audiences boycott a show or decide not to watch it because of its politics, these supposedly free-marketeering creators savage the benighted audience at the drop of a hat. Then they continue to program how they want to program.

  Television creators have a love/hate relationship with the audience. They love the audience when they watch—they hate them when they don’t, since every viewer who doesn’t watch their show is effectively voting for cancelation. In short, TV’s creators only like the market argument when it cuts in their favor. When it doesn’t, they’re critical of it to the extreme.

  Executives are more answerable to the audience than creators. If executives cite the market argument to turn down creators’ shows, creators rip into the executives (and by extension, the audience) with unmitigated righteous ire. The most common word you hear in this context is gutless. Schlatter said, “Business has taken over now . . . there’s so much timidity there.”16 Gelbart railed against what he called the “praetorian guard of corporate types which so profess to care about our morality—these are the people who are on the road probably a good deal of the year staying in hotels, which perhaps their corporations own, which are filled with X-rated stuff, just for the nic
e anonymous charge to your hotel bill.”17 Gene Reynolds, producer of M*A*S*H, Room 222, and Lou Grant, all groundbreaking political shows, criticized the networks’ “ridiculous formula: keep it light, keep it simple.”18 Susan Harris commented, “Television is run like a business, and as long as it’s run like a business and run by huge corporations, they don’t care about the entertainment end of it at all.”19 What happened to the creators’ reliance on the market to justify their politics? Suddenly, the free market is the enemy, and the executives are fifth columnists sent to turn television into a bourgeois instrument of capitalist commerce.

  Peter Mehlman, one of the writers on Seinfeld, colorfully and insistently characterized the networks as content-free zones. “Content is the tenth priority. . . . Content is the last thing they think of.”20 Josh Brand said that for the most part, the networks were playing it “very safe.”21 Gary David Goldberg said the networks are “Detroit. They talk to each other, they have no actual sense of what people are interested in, they have no respect, and they have gotten what they have deserved. Unfortunately they’ve screwed up the whole business.”22

  Chris Chulack, whose excellent drama Southland was picked up for renewal after a few episodes, then canceled when NBC decided it would be cheaper to broadcast Jay Leno during the 10 P.M. hour, had reason to be upset at the networks: “Their bottom line is money money money, every penny, and they’re trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And there is no artistic stand. . . . There’s no opportunity.”23

  Sometimes executives, too, use the market argument as convenient cover for their own political or cultural sensibilities. While executives often invoke the market argument to turn down politically oriented shows, many of them don’t apply the market argument consistently. Executives are just as much in the dark as anyone else when it comes to what gets the numbers. Scott Siegler, former CBS vice president for drama and comedy development, summed up the problem well: “Because it’s a mass audience—it’s an unimaginably large audience—the audience tastes are so diffused and so general that you’ve got to be guessing.”24 For every Mike Dann who based his decision-making on numbers, there is a Fred Silverman, who based his decision-making on his gut response; a Bob Wood, who relied on his instinct; and a Doug Herzog, who uses a combination of all those factors.