by Ben Shapiro
The election of Richard Nixon in 1968, however, allowed the executives and creators to come together once more. No longer was Vietnam a liberal war; now it was a conservative war. And the executives didn’t have to worry about cultivating Nixon and his allies in order to maintain market share—they knew Nixon didn’t like them, and the feeling was mutual.
Nixon’s hatred for the media began with the news media, which he felt had always unfairly targeted him, a perception that was true to some extent, particularly in reference to the 1960 election, when he was raked over the coals while the sycophantic media played up to JFK. Later, Nixon’s hatred for the media would lead him to cover up Watergate, the move that would shatter his presidency. William Safire, a Nixon speechwriter who would later become a media member, summed up Nixon’s attitude: “When Nixon said, ‘The press is the enemy,’ . . . he was saying exactly what he meant: ‘The press is the enemy, to be hated and beaten.’ ” Safire saw this perspective as Nixon’s “greatest personal and political weakness and the cause of his downfall.”16
Nixon’s hatred for the press extended to a deep-seated hatred for the television industry. It was a hatred no amount of Hollywood kowtowing could have appeased even had they tried (which, of course, they didn’t). Nixon tried to force the FCC to deny license renewals to particular stations he thought were unfairly critical of his presidency. Spiro Agnew, his vice president, castigated the “small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts who provided only instant analysis.”17 Nixon called television reporting “outrageous, vicious, distorted.”18 Agnew actually went even further, insulting the heads of the networks themselves: “Is it not fair and relevant to question [television’s] concentration in the hands of a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?”19
Nixon wasn’t unhappy just with network news—he was unhappy with the urban programming shift that resulted in shows like All in the Family. On May 13, 1971, Nixon went off on All in the Family in the White House, as can be heard on the Nixon tapes. Nixon laments the fact that he was watching a baseball game on CBS when All in the Family came on the air. It was, says Nixon, “the damndest thing I ever heard, two magnificent, handsome guys and a stupid old fellow [Archie Bunker] and a nice girl—they were glorifying homosexuality . . .” Nixon goes on to describe the episode—“Judging Books by Covers”—in colorful language, and concludes, “I turned the goddamned thing off. I couldn’t listen to any more. . . . I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality.” Finally, Nixon avers that homosexuality and “dope” destroy societies, which is why “the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff: they’re trying to destroy us.”20
It was no wonder that in 1971, Nixon attempted to break apart the networks by threatening them with continuing antitrust lawsuits. “If the threat of screwing them is going to help us more with their programming than doing it, then keep the threat,” said Nixon. “As far as screwing them is concerned, I’m very glad to do it.”21
Nixon’s negativity toward Hollywood was the first step in the total disintegration of the right-wing presence in Hollywood. Already the left dominated the industry. But with Nixon’s visceral hatred for the media and for the television industry, he made it possible for Hollywood to root out anybody remotely conservative. Despite the fact that Nixon helped pave the way for Hollywood’s beloved investment tax credit,22 the television industry’s new principle was simple: If you were a friend of Nixon, you simply couldn’t be a friend to Hollywood. When Taft Schreiber, an executive at Music Corporation of America (MCA), tried to hold a fundraiser in Los Angeles for Nixon, he was rebuffed over and over, despite the fact that he told Hollywoodites that Nixon would help the television industry with an investment tax credit.23 After talking to dozens of members of the television industry who were active during the Nixon era, it is clear that Hollywood hated Nixon the way they later hated George W. Bush.
Once Nixon took office, the quid pro quos between government and the television industry began to shift almost solely toward the Democratic Party. Now television executives and creators engaged in open back-scratching with liberal politicians while concentrating their fire on Republican politicians. Gerald Ford, as innocuous a Republican as has ever walked beneath the sun, was attacked savagely, particularly after he allowed the Justice Department to sue the networks for violation of antitrust laws.24 Jimmy Carter, by contrast, received tremendous backing from Hollywood superagent Lew Wasserman, who recruited his friends and supporters to sign checks for the diminutive man from Plains, Georgia.25
Hollywood despised and ignored Reagan, despite the fact that he was a lifelong friend of Hollywood and a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, because he was a conservative like Nixon (in actuality, Reagan was far more conservative than the economically liberal Nixon). Reagan, unlike Ford or Nixon, attempted to help the television creative community by pushing to keep the so-called Fin-Syn rules that prevented networks from owning large chunks of programming outright. In fact, Reagan’s action on Fin-Syn cut directly against his laissez-faire economic approach.26 Still, the Hollywood creative community did not give him credit for his generosity. Gene Reynolds, producer of M*A*S*H, Lou Grant, and Room 222, for example, told me the consolidation of the industry “definitely started with Reagan.”27 Michael Brandman, formerly of HBO, credited Reagan with “singlehandedly destroy[ing] the relationship between the artist and the museum that presumably hung their art.”28
Bill Clinton, by contrast, benefited from the total weight and force of the Hollywood creative and executive community. Lew Wasserman raised $1.7 million for the Arkansas governor in a single $10,000 per plate dinner in his home—what he termed “the most successful dinner in a private home in American political history.” Wasserman was worshipful of Clinton, just like the rest of Hollywood: “I am crazy about him. If you got me going on the subject of Bill Clinton, I’ll sound like a love-struck teenager.”29 Clinton was similarly worshipful of Wasserman: “He helped me become president. He helped me stay president. He helped me be a better president.”30 David Geffen personally signed Clinton a check for $120,000.31
During the 1990s, the Democratic Party raised $8 million per campaign cycle from the Hollywood contingent. Remember, that’s three campaign cycles every year. Some of the biggest donors: Geffen, at $200,000 per year; Jeffrey Katzenberg, then at Disney, who clocked in at $125,000 per year; ABC Family network head Haim Saban, $250,000 per year; Disney as a whole, $1 million per year; AOL Time Warner, $500,000 per year.32 One estimate stated, “Hollywood had given the Democratic Party contributions roughly equivalent to what Republicans received from their friends in the oil and gas industries.”33
Clinton was Hollywood-produced all the way, from playing the sax on Arsenio Hall to talking about pot smoking and boxers on MTV. MTV held a “Rock n’ Roll Inaugural Ball” for Clinton, featuring the Eagles, Don Henley, and U2.34 During his first 125 days in office, he entertained stars at the White House, including Billy Crystal, Barbra Streisand, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, Richard Dreyfuss, Richard Gere, and Sharon Stone, among others.35
Once again, Clinton engaged in that typical left-wing misdirectional tactic when it came to legislation—focusing on violence on television. Through Attorney General Janet Reno, he pushed mandatory inclusion of the V-chip in television manufacture, as well as a bill that would allow Congress to regulate violent programming.36 Clinton also appointed FCC regulators who did their best Newton Minow imitations. Kids, said Reed Hunt, chairman of the FCC under Clinton, live in a “wasteland of crime . . . scenes of violence fill television.”37
What came of Clinton’s supposed “hard hand of regulation”? Nothing. Rather, Clinton gave Hollywood what it was looking for: favors. That meant consolidation of the cable industry through deregulation, as well as tax cuts for the Hollywood upper crust. The 199
6 Telecommunications Act eliminated restrictions on cable pricing without doing anything about local government-created monopolies, leading to skyrocketing cable prices and profits. Meanwhile, Clinton instituted a “research and development tax credit,” according to film scholar Ben Dickenson, worth $1.7 billion to the industry. By acts of deregulation, Clinton even helped the television industry move to Canada to take advantage of tax subsidies (talk about shipping jobs to foreigners!).38
It was no wonder that the television industry supported Al Gore in 2000. When Gore was on the verge of becoming president in 2000, he asked NBC president Jeff Zucker whether he’d join the Gore administration as press secretary. Zucker turned him down, but that didn’t stop Zucker from heading NBC’s coverage of the Gore-Bush election. Zucker’s bias bugged GE chairman Jack Welch so much that he accused Zucker of turning the Today Show into Pravda (Welch is close friends with Zucker and was a key mover and shaker behind Zucker’s career trajectory, which shows just how much Zucker’s bias bothered him).39
Despite Gore’s ties to Hollywood, the television industry became less than enamored of him when he selected cultural moderate Senator Joe Lieberman (then D-CT) as his running mate. Lieberman had spent a good deal of time bashing the entertainment industry for both violence and, more important, sexual content. And the industry didn’t like it, not one little bit. Gore’s campaign suffered from lukewarm Hollywood industry support. It wasn’t until later, when Hollywood regretted the election of George W. Bush, that they finally rewarded Gore with an Oscar for his soporific and faulty documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Once Gore was history, George W. Bush became the chief target of the television industry, which saw him as an enemy despite the fact that his tax cuts benefited the television industry honchos at a disproportionate level. And as Nixon did, the Republicans saw Hollywood and the television industry as enemies. They acted accordingly. In 2004, for example, Democrats included $1 billion in tax credits in an international tax bill. Republicans sliced it out. The media speculated that those tax credits ended up on the scrap heap because the Motion Picture Association of America had hired Democrat Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture under President Clinton, to head the organization. One Republican lobbyist summed up the situation: “They were not overly helpful to Republicans, so Republicans don’t want to be overly helpful to them.”40
Similarly, Bush’s FCC regulators were far more conservative in their interpretations of applicable laws. Originally, like their more liberal predecessors, they ignored the ire of groups like L. Brent Bozell’s Parents Television Council (PTC), a secular moral descendant of the Wildmon/Falwell conservative lobbying groups of the 1970s and 1980s—the FCC called letters about sex and profanity from the PTC “spam.”41 But things really heated up when Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson’s bustier during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show in a staged act of gratuitous quasi-nudity. The FCC cracked down, issuing a ruling for a $550,000 fine against CBS.42 That year, the FCC under Michael Powell levied $3.7 million worth of fines, doubling the aggregate proposed fines in the prior decade.43 Frightened, Fox put all of its live shows on a five-minute tape delay, ABC put the Oscars on tape delay, and CBS canceled its Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.44
FCC commissioner Kevin J. Martin (later FCC chairman) soon threatened, “If cable and satellite operators continue to refuse to offer parents more tools, basic indecency and profanity restrictions may be a viable opportunity.”45 “Certainly,” wrote Martin in a letter to the PTC in 2003, “broadcasters and cable operators have significant First Amendment rights, but these rights are not without boundaries. They are limited by law. They also should be limited by good taste.”46 Republican Senator Ted Stevens (AK) suggested that broadcast indecency rules be applied to cable channels. He focused particularly on sex: “We wonder why our children are sexually active at a young age. . . . The public airwaves are increasingly promoting sex. . . . Cable is often worse.”47
This sort of censorship drove members of the industry up the wall. “The FCC is loaded with conservatives, it’s three to two conservatives,” lamented Gene Reynolds. “When I was producing shows through a variety of administrations, I saw the Democrats, I saw Reagan in there, I saw Clinton, I didn’t see Bush. But I could feel a different breath coming from the networks depending on the administration.”48 During the Bush years, the networks got together and founded the TV Watch, a front organization designed to fight off groups like the PTC. “Everybody should be frightened by the notion that this process could be hijacked by a very few people,” spokesman Jim Dyke said. “They are trying to make decisions about what our children can see.”49 “It’s scary,” one cable executive said of Stevens’s proposal. “It’s raised everyone’s antenna,” said another. “You used to be able to get away with a lot more butt crack than you can now,” observed Mark Cronin, president of Mindless Entertainment and the man responsible for VH1’s The Surreal Life. “We’re in the eye of the storm of moral America,” explained yet another cable executive. “That’s just the climate of the country right now.”50
There’s a reason the television industry hated Bush: the Bush Administration represented the first true attempt by any Republican since Nixon to fight back against the irreversible liberal slide of the culture. It didn’t work, for a variety of reasons.
And the result was President Barack Obama. Obama, as we’ll see shortly, was the most slickly produced, widely backed television candidate in the history of the medium. If Clinton was worshipped in Hollywood, Obama is the object of Aztec-type figurative human sacrifice. The cult-like obedience with which the faithful imbibe his words is truly Biblical in nature.
That’s just on the surface. Behind the scenes, Obama is subject to the same back-scratching quid pro quos as every Democratic president since FDR.
The patented Hollywood-D.C. back-scratch became an intensely common phenomenon during the Obama Administration. After greasing Obama’s path to victory in the 2008 election, Hollywood quickly received benefits from its new friend in the White House. In June 2009, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be focusing on Internet piracy of Hollywood’s copyrighted wares. New FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who was a former counsel for industry honcho Barry Diller, began to ignore all of the indecency regulations and the investigations of rising cable TV prices. “We feel like we’ve got the wind at our back,” said Warner Bros. chairman and Obama donor Barry Meyer. “We’re getting a good hearing on the issues that matter to us.”51
A couple of extreme examples stand out. In November 2009, NBC’s Green Week included concerted storyline changes designed to focus on environmental issues. Historically, NBC’s Green Week has been a way to promote GE’s products—NBC premiered its Green Week efforts in 2007, two years after the May 2005 launch of their “Ecomagination” advertising campaign geared toward demonstrating “GE’s commitment to address challenges such as the need for cleaner, more efficient sources of energy, reduced emissions and abundant sources of clean water.”
But now, Green Week was being expanded. The reason? GE was using its programming as a payoff to the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress, attempting to gin up public support for GE’s legislative agenda. General Electric, which owns NBC, spent 2008 and 2009 focusing its lobbying efforts on creating “green jobs” via governmental stimulus. According to the 2008 GE Annual Report Letter to investors, “In the US, stimulus will target clean energy and smart grid technology. GE is well positioned to capitalize on these investments.” GE’s Green Week was simply another way to promote such legislation.
The logic was simple. GE took a major hit in 2008, but the company’s energy sector grew by 19 percent—and GE expected that sector to grow even more in 2009 if it could win some of the government’s stimulus contracts. Jeff Immelt, the head of GE, was an ardent supporter of the ineffective Obama stimulus package and Obama’s healthcare agenda, stating, “We at GE will continue to support and
advocate swift passage of legislation that is acceptable to the Senate, the House, and the Administration, and that can be promptly signed into law by the President.”
Immelt, like his corporate counterparts, is close with President Obama (though he seems to waver depending on the day). What’s more important, his lobbyists are close with President Obama. According to Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner, during the fourth quarter of 2008, even as GE’s stock fell 30 percent, GE used $4.26 million to lobby Congress for legislation like the Climate Stewardship Act, the Electric Utility Cap and Trade Act, the Global Warming Reduction Act, the Federal Government Greenhouse Gas Registry Act, the Low Carbon Economy Act, and the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Over the course of 2008, GE spent $18.66 million on lobbying for such causes. Could that be the reason that when GE was investigated for massive financial fraud in August 2009—an investigation resulting in a $50 million fine from the SEC—Immelt kept his job? “GE bent the accounting rules beyond the breaking point,” explained Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. In Obama’s America, such malfeasance usually results in the decapitation of high-ranking executives. At GE, it resulted in Immelt keeping his job with no questions asked. No wonder Immelt labels the Obama Administration a “financier” and a “key partner.”52
Perhaps the most egregious example of Obama-television back-scratching came on July 22, 2009. On that date, President Obama held one of the most boring news conferences in the history of televised presidential events. This one was an attempt to restart his stalled healthcare agenda. For nearly fifty minutes, Obama talked about private and public health care plans, red pills and blue pills, costs and benefits. During the last five minutes of the conference, Obama finally awoke slumbering viewers with some controversial comments about the Cambridge Police Department and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. But the press conference, which was broadcast on ABC, NBC, and CBS, received atrocious ratings—among the coveted 18-to-49 crowd, a 1.8 for ABC, a 1.7 for NBC, and a 1.2 for CBS. Fox actually won the night with So You Think You Can Dance.