Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  One of the EIF’s latest initiatives was the “Play Your Part America” movement, designed to activate people on behalf of President Obama. According to an industry-exclusive press release, the EIF stated, “President Obama has called for a new era of responsibility.” Based on their allegiance to Obama, the EIF called for the television business to “turn up the volume for service and volunteerism, engage more people, make it part of who we are and what we do to bring our country together.”

  How did the EIF propose to “turn up the volume”? By infusing messages of “service and volunteerism” into programming. They secured an “unprecedented week-long of television programming on all four leading broadcast networks . . . and other networks, beginning October 19.” Such programming would “ ‘organically’ create and produce as many stories as possible about service and volunteerism and connect them in the plots of network dramas, comedies and reality shows.” Notice the EIF’s own scare quotes around the word “organically.” They knew that messaging wouldn’t be “organic”—they just wanted programming to seem authentically integrated.

  Messages to be focused on by the industry included: “Education and children; Health and well being; Environmental conservation and reduced energy consumption; Economic development and financial security; Support for military families.” Some of these messages—“reduced energy consumption”—are clearly concerns of the left. Others are nonpartisan, such as supporting military families.

  But the true leftism of this proposal lay in its attempt to use television entertainment programming as a Trojan horse to drive Americans to Democratic Party–approved sites and events. “We will ask the public,” EIF announced, “to take action through the campaigns resources, namely via an online destination currently in development with the leading web companies.”30

  The website to which the campaign directed its viewers was a leftist tool called iparticipate.org, as well as a website called createthegood.com. As Big Hollywood columnist Larry O’Connor documented, when visitors to the website attempted to get information about “volunteering and service” regarding health care, they were directed to events sponsored by Planned Parenthood, as well as a video entitled “How to Spread the Truth About Health Care Reform.” At IParticipate, the “volunteering” efforts were no less partisan, including an opportunity as “Global Warming Ambassador” and one as a member of the Crane Project, an anti-war outfit.31 Shows participating in the IParticipate campaign included Cold Case, Criminal Minds, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, America’s Most Wanted, Bones, So You Think You Can Dance, 30 Rock, Community, The Biggest Loser, The Office, Cougar Town, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Private Practice, and Ugly Betty, among many others.32

  Despite the mildly troubling leftism of the overall IParticipate campaign, the real problem here is the potential for collusion among networks to push a certain set of values. This isn’t an exception—it happens repeatedly. Each year, NBC spends an entire week coordinating its programs to fit the “green” message. In 2007, this meant that Al Gore appeared on 30 Rock, that the title character in Chuck visited a Stanford University “green” festival, that ER concerned itself with the dangers of a “rolling brownout.” As the Los Angeles Times reported, “almost every prime-time show was mandated by Chief Executive Jeff Zucker to include some sort of environmental theme.”33 And 2007 provided merely the third of the network’s Green Weeks; 2010 marked the sixth Green Week, which was designed to “drive consumer awareness around the environment,” according to Beth Colleton, vice president of Green Is Universal.34 This isn’t entertainment—it’s propaganda.

  CENSORING VIOLENCE, SANCTIONING SEX

  Despite the obviously leftist tilt of Hollywood’s pandering to interest groups, the television community likes to appear evenhanded. They don’t want to be obvious about their liberal agenda. Their solution is elegant and simple: Focus on violence on television rather than sex. Liberals claim that they are conservative by opposing superfluous blood and gore on TV, even as they greenlight every creepy and degraded form of sex for broadcast.

  This supposed attempt at upholding traditional standards by targeting violence and ignoring sex is a fraud, of course. There is nothing inherently conservative about opposing television violence. Violence is neither liberal nor conservative. When Jack Bauer tortures terrorists on 24, he uses violence in a conservative way; when Captain Planet uses violence against polluters, he uses violence in a liberal way.

  In fact, cracking down on television violence across the board, it can be argued, fits with the liberal agenda more broadly. Violence on television is almost exclusively the domain of men. Men with testosterone. Not metrosexuals who read Twilight books. Cracking down on television violence is yet another way to teach young boys who watch television that violence is always wrong—a pacifist line, not a conservative one. Liberals think that violence on television leads to violence in real life; conservatives acknowledge the possibility, but also acknowledge that sometimes violence is necessary. Conservatives believe that violence should be used when required to defend family, to preserve country, to destroy evil. Liberals tend to believe that violence is almost never necessary, and that violence is in and of itself an evil to be defanged. Conservatives don’t talk about “cycles of violence” because conservatives recognize that not all violence is the same—liberals do, because they believe all violence is wrong (which leaves them in the unenviable position of explaining what we should have done to stop Hitler).

  Minimizing sexual content on television, however, is a uniquely conservative position. Conservatives believe that sex on television teaches kids to engage in sex, that children and teenagers are incapable of fully anticipating and understanding the consequences of sex, and that the most fulfilling sex comes in the context of a marital relationship. Liberals believe that sex is a purely physical act, that sexual experimentation is part of finding out “who you are,” and that hemming teenagers in with traditional moral standards is brutal, unfeeling, and unrealistic.

  If the conservative censor got hold of television, he’d leave much of the violence and do away with much of the sex. If the liberal censor got hold of television, he’d get rid of much of the violence and keep virtually all of the sex. It’s obvious which censor controls the small screen.

  The left’s focus on television violence traces its lineage to the earliest days of the sexual revolution. During the 1960s, the FCC and the Democrats in the federal government paid very little attention to the burgeoning sexual revolution brought on by the teenage Baby Boomers. Instead, they held hearing after hearing examining the effects of violent television on juveniles, despite little or no evidence showing that moderate television violence has any effect at all on kids. This provided Congressmen the ability to posture without ticking off those who were buying into the newly forming socially liberal Zeitgeist. (This is also, by the way, a typical liberal tactic: By playing up the relatively minor threat of television violence, liberals shifted attention from the very real effects of television sexual depictions, which affect children far more deeply than car chases and gunfights.)

  In 1962, Senator Thomas Dodd (D-Connecticut), the father of Senator Chris Dodd, focused his laser eye on the television industry’s program schedule, which he said was “overloaded with ‘crime and violence.’ ” In 1964, he held more hearings, this time for the purposes of determining the impact of television violence on juvenile delinquency—as though watching a few episodes of The Untouchables was likely to turn teens into budding Al Capones rather than incipient Eliot Nesses. As ABC censor Alfred Schneider noted, “it became increasingly politically correct for government officials, supported by academic encouragement, to indict television programming. . . . What was lacking was some substantial evidence—research that could prove television ‘caused’ violent behavior.”35

  But lack of evidence has never stopped Congress from posturing. In 1969, despite the relatively low levels of television
violence and the increasing uptick of sexual envelope pushing, the Senate Subcommittee on Communications held yet another set of hearings on television’s brutality. These hearings were led by Senator John O. Pastore (D-Rhode Island), who forced through a pseudoscientific report on television violence, which he released on March 23, 1972. “If the mass media seduce only one child each year to unfeeling, violent attitudes,” he blathered, “and this child influences yearly only one other child, who in turn affects only one other, there would be in 20 years, 1,048,575 violence prone people.” This was idiotic, of course; this sort of pyramid scheme of violence doesn’t work any better than the Social Security pyramid scheme. But Pastore enlisted Nixon’s surgeon general, Jesse L. Steinfeld, who warned, “The broadcasters should be put on notice. The . . . report indicates that television violence, indeed, does have an adverse effect on certain members of our society.”36 This argument does not persuade, it cudgels. Everything on television undoubtedly affects somebody negatively. Television’s depiction of women no doubt has some adverse effects on potential rapists. That doesn’t mean the government should ban women from television. But logic has never been government’s strong suit.

  Even as the government focused on violence on television, it ignored sex on television almost completely. Throughout the 1960s—with a few well-publicized exceptions—increasing sexuality on television went largely unchallenged. The government did challenge open pornography on television—in 1969, Nixon appointed Dean Burch to chair the FCC, and Burch quickly stated that the FCC and Department of Justice would prosecute broadcasters for putting obscenity on the airwaves. But such governmental strictures were directed solely at the most egregious cases, not at the loosening of standards more generally.37

  The government’s laxity allowed the networks to pursue their political leftism when it came to sex. The NAB changed its moral guidelines to reflect increasing sexual permissiveness. By 1972, the NAB had revised its code to provide encouragement to “programs that are innovative . . . that deal with significant moral and social issues, that present challenging concepts that relate to the world in which the viewer lives.” More specifically, the NAB changed Code Section 7. Previously, it read, “sex perversion as a theme or dialogue implying it may not be used.” In 1972, the NAB decided that instead, “special sensitivity is necessary in the use of material relating to sex.”38 That, of course, opened the doors to a more liberal version of sexual politics, of which the networks took full advantage.

  Those at the networks celebrated this new opportunity. Instead of acting as ABC’s censor, Alfred Schneider became, in his own words, “the censor turned advocate.” “While you have to reflect society,” censor Schneider wrote in defending Soap, “you have to inch ahead, too. This is your responsibility.” Later on in life, Schneider could look back with pride, celebrating “how quickly the daring and dangerous taboos disappear.”39

  The predictable effect of focusing on violence rather than sex was that sexual activity on television increased dramatically while violent content was heavily curtailed. In practical terms, this meant more raunchy comedies in the mold of All in the Family, more sexy dramas like Dallas, and fewer Westerns and action-adventure shows. In 1960, 58 percent of ABC affiliate schedules were packed with action-adventure, Westerns, and detective shows; by 1972, the percentage dropped to 32 percent. The networks knew this at the time, and they were largely fine with it. While ABC hired Dr. Melvin Heller, director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Temple University, to help come up with a set of standards to manage violence on television in the 1960s, they largely ignored him when he stated in 1972, “to the extent that you’re successful in curing, limiting in some way, toning down violence, to that extent you will be inviting to fill that vacuum with increased emphasis on sex.”40

  Of course, the networks couldn’t afford to go whole hog and embrace the cable mind-set. In the early 1970s, most Americans were still quite conservative on matters sexual, even if the counterculture was growing in influence thanks to television’s new urban programming strategy. That meant that the networks constantly fought it out with creators on minor matters while leaving major issues unscathed. Larry Gelbart of M*A*S*H stated, “They did let us talk about the futility of war and they did allow us to be highly political. On lesser, sillier matters, we negotiated, script by script, on a daily basis.”41

  Other creators were less blasé about even minor censorship by the networks. Those creators enjoy a self-perception of heroism that far overstates the nature of most of their battle wounds. They’re a lot like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws—a few scratches and bite marks, but no gunshot wounds. Carl Reiner, for example, did walk away from a show, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, when the network nixed an episode in which Dick Van Dyke’s screen daughter walked in on him having sex. Reiner put his money where his mouth was in defense of his bobo ideals. But that doesn’t mean he was standing up to ruthless McCarthyism. He was standing up to some poor network shlub who didn’t want kids to see Bert from Mary Poppins shtupping on network television.

  THE “FAMILY HOUR” FIASCO

  The television industry isn’t interested in taking on sex. They’re interested in promoting sexual content. In fact, they’re so uninterested in taking on sex that they can’t even agree to cut it out to shield children. The best example of the industry’s reliance on sex: the death of the so-called Family Hour.

  Ironically enough, the attempt to create a Family Hour free of sex started because of fears about television violence. In 1974, based on the furor surrounding NBC’s made-for-television movie Born Innocent, which featured a young girl (The Exorcist’s Linda Blair) being raped with a broomstick by several other females in a juvenile facility, the government began investigating violence on television once more.

  In an attempt to head off the government at the pass once again, CBS President Arthur Taylor took the lead in condemning television violence. This was no surprise, since CBS’s main programs were sexual rather than violent in nature; industry self-regulation of violence would chiefly affect CBS’s rivals. Taylor proposed, quite reasonably, that television add a three-pronged standard to its programming: first, programming in the 8 to 9 P.M. hour should be family-appropriate; second, when non-family-friendly specials were broadcast during that timeslot, they should be preceded by a notice to parents; third, in the other primetime hours, notices should be provided to adults when material offensive to a large portion of adults was broadcast.42

  ABC, unsurprisingly, took the lead in opposing CBS. More of ABC’s programming was based on violence, which meant they had to oppose CBS’s measures in order to maintain share. NBC, too, didn’t like CBS’s proposal, which felt too much like a competitor dictating terms to the entire industry.

  This all came to a head at the NAB Code Review Board meeting on January 7, 1975. CBS insisted on a family viewing policy before 9 P.M. ABC, led by Schneider, opposed it—or at least wanted it extended to cover sexual situations, not out of principle, but out of desire to ensure that CBS would feel the burdens of its proposals. “Well,” said Schneider, according to transcripts, “if you are not going to move the goddamn program ‘All in the Family,’ we are not going to move the goddamn ‘Rookies.’ ”43

  In the end, CBS got its industrywide standard regarding violence, and ABC got to tie down CBS on matters of sex. In April, the NAB passed a proposal stating, “Entertainment programming inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience should not be broadcast during the first hour of network entertainment programming in prime time and in the immediately preceding hour.” The NAB Code Authority would be designated as the appeals authority if anyone believed a particular network program was unsuitable for the so-called Family Viewing Hour.44

  It was one thing for the networks to come together to restrict violence on television, according to the creators. It was quite another for them to agree to hold back the rising tide of the collective libido. Norman Lear, who wanted All in the Fa
mily to continue in its massively successful Saturday 8 P.M. slot, was particularly fearful of the new policy.45

  Seeing no other choice, Lear joined with Danny Arnold (Barney Miller), Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), and the Writers Guild to file a lawsuit against the networks.46 Luckily for them, they were assigned a liberal judge, Warren J. Ferguson. Ferguson issued a ruling striking down the Family Viewing Policy on the grounds that the NAB had colluded to restrict First Amendment rights and that the FCC’s informal imprimatur of approval made the Family Viewing Policy unconstitutional. The decision is utterly legally fallacious, absurd. Ferguson makes several unsupportable claims, including the incredible announcement that “neither the FCC nor the NAB has the right to compromise the independent judgments of individual station owner licensees.”47 As a broad matter, this is obviously untrue. The NAB is an independent private organization; whatever influence it wields is legitimate so long as it violates no antitrust law. The FCC routinely weighs in on local station issues. It constantly wields the threat of license withdrawal in order to maintain certain standards—just ask Newton Minow.

  But the Family Viewing Hour was effectively killed, to the delight of the creators and many of the executives in Hollywood. It is worth noting once again that it was killed because the creators insisted on their sexual content, not their violence. For years they’d dealt with censorship of violent programming, but it was only when sexual content came under close formal scrutiny that they rebelled in toto.

  It is also worth noting that sexual mores came into play only due to competitive rivalries between the networks—not because anyone at any of the networks was interested in actually upholding traditional standards of American sexual propriety. The same folks at ABC who pushed for a Family Viewing Hour ban on All in the Family later pushed for cultural acceptance of Soap.