Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  No doubt Balcer is correct. Hollywood staple-gunned itself to Obama’s coattails. Obama was only too happy to staple himself to Hollywood’s coattails in return.

  The television contingent gleefully takes credit for Obama’s victory. Michael Nankin, who wrote for and produced Life Goes On, Chicago Hope, and Picket Fences, told me, “I think that creators of television reach out into the world for inspiration and then manipulate it into a world that they want to live in. I mean, I think that the country was ready for Obama, but I think ten years of seeing black presidents on TV and in movies helps.”113

  THE PERFECT SYMBIOSIS

  Normally, industries hedge their bets when it comes to politics. The communications/electronics industry has spent a grand total of $809.6 million on elections over the last twenty years: $475.9 million went to Democrats, and $328.5 million went to Republicans—a 59 percent to 41 percent split. The defense sector has spent $154.3 million over that same period; the donations split in favor of Republicans, 57 to 43 percent. The healthcare sector has spent $904.9 million on politics; the split favors Republicans 56 to 44. Most industry splits are relatively even.

  Except for the labor industry and the legal sector—which, as you’d expect, split 92 to 8 and 71 to 29 Democrat, respectively—the biggest split of all comes in the entertainment industry. Over the past twenty years, Hollywood has given almost $271 million to political organizations and candidates—and 70 percent of it has gone to Democrats.114 Unlike organized labor, which is a traditional and key Democratic constituency, and unlike the legal sector, which has always been at odds with the Republican establishment, Hollywood’s one-sided politics makes little business sense. Where other industries may have business reasons for skewing their donations (is a trial lawyer really going to donate to the tort reform party?), Hollywood has virtually none.

  But Hollywood’s allegiance to the Democratic Party—and the totally ineffective response of the Republican establishment—has resulted in the most powerful medium in human history acting in symbiosis with the party of government. Republicans could have touted their tax cutting to Hollywood; they could have touted their historic ties to the industry. They could have engaged. Instead, they’ve stood aside, glaring at the industry in anger, blaming it for all of society’s ills.

  Yes, liberals in the industry are largely to blame for the industry’s lopsidedness when it comes to monetary, philosophic, and influential support for the Democratic Party. But Republicans are just as responsible for forfeiting their position and allowing the continued dominance of the Government-Hollywood Complex.

  Robbing the Cradle

  How Television Liberals Recruit Kids

  It may be tolerable to insert political messages into shows geared toward adults: At least they have the capacity to analyze what they are watching. Children’s television should be nonpartisan. It should teach basic values—values like care for one’s fellow citizens, patriotism, and hard work—while entertaining kids in innocent fashion.

  But it doesn’t. Today’s children’s television very often inserts liberal messages, generally quite broad and almost invariably connected with self-esteem and tolerance of all behaviors. That’s because children’s television carries an inherent danger that other television programming does not: In order for it to be effective as an educational tool for poorer children, it must be publicly funded. And in order to remain publicly funded, it must make everyone feel good.

  Less economically fortunate parents are a poor target for advertisers because they have no money. That means that for better or for worse, middle-class–to–wealthy families become the catered-to audience. The responsibility for private-sector children’s programming lies with them.

  The left argues that it’s dangerous to leave children’s television in the hands of the wealthy parents and by extension, the private sector—and in today’s day and age, they’re right, thanks to the laxity of parents. More and more, advertisers look to promote their products to children, and what better way to reach children than to program cartoonish violence (Power Rangers) or cute pop stars with a laugh track (Hannah Montana)? And as long as wealthier parents don’t turn off the television, and as long as they keep buying their kids advertised products, the advertisers and show creators get away with noneducational children’s programming. That’s not educational television—it’s watered-down primetime television for kiddies.

  Which means that true educational television is largely relegated to public television. The problem there is that the same folks who staff public television also staff the halls of our federal government. As you can guess, they skew liberal.

  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was created by LBJ in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, with the express purpose of providing “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was created by the CPB, as was National Public Radio. Both are quite liberal.

  Supposedly, the CPB is geared toward balance: the composition of the CPB changes on a rotating basis, with nine board members who serve six-year terms. They are selected by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and no more than five of the members may come from any one political party. During the Bush years, therefore, there were five Republicans; the current president of the CPB is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

  So why is CPB tilted to the left? For the same reason that Republicans in government have failed to cut spending: Members of the federal government bureaucracy need to continually justify increasing government in order to justify their own existence, and few Republicans are willing to stand up to them. As one conservative former member of the CPB board told me, “Just because the board is conservative doesn’t mean the programming on PBS will be.”

  During the Bush years, an open fight broke out between the board of CPB and the president of PBS (who is an employee). Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the CPB board, began investigating PBS’s political bias; Pat Mitchell, the liberal president of PBS, denied any bias whatsoever. “PBS does not belong to any single constituency, no one political party, no activist group, no foundation, no funder, no agenda of any kind,” Mitchell said. “Our editorial standards ensure this, and public opinion polls verify it.”1 Tomlinson went so far as to hire conservative consultant Frederick W. Mann to screen PBS’s news shows for bias. “I hope we never have a situation where journalists perceive intimidation in all this,” Tomlinson explained.2 Tomlinson ended up leaving in disgrace after being investigated for conservative political bias, even though the left objected to any investigation of liberal bias in PBS programming.

  But PBS is just the beginning of the story. Other channels geared toward kids, including Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, have moved substantially to the left over the past two decades, to the point where political liberalism is almost as common on those channels as it is on the main networks or the adult cables. This liberalism isn’t nearly as militant—that would be counterproductive and silly—but it is more insidious because of the nature of the target.

  THE EARLY DAYS

  Originally, children’s television was designed to entertain and inculcate traditional values. Howdy Doody (NBC), the most popular children’s show of the 1950s, starred a marionette voiced by Buffalo Bob Smith, the show’s producer. Howdy had forty-eight freckles, one for each state of the union at the time. One episode featured footage from Independence Hall. The show patterned its look on the popular Westerns of the time, which added yet another patriotic layer. The Mickey Mouse Club (ABC) was similarly innocent. The lead Mouseketeer on the show, selected by Walt Disney himself, was a religious Christian singer named Jimmie Dodd. In each episode, Dodd would tell children his “Mousekethoughts,” which were invariably traditional in orientation. One of Dodd’s favorites was this anonymous advice: “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be
any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, to any fellow being, let me do it now and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.”3 At the same time, local television often broadcast a fifteen-minute religious show produced by the Lutheran Church entitled Davey and Goliath, which was an educational tool for Christianity. The show also broke ground by introducing many African-American kids to children’s television. (To show just how far children’s television has come, The Simpsons—which, pathetically enough, is considered children’s television—has parodied Davey and Goliath at least four times for its open advocacy of religion.)

  The traditional perspective on children’s television began to evolve when one star of the original Howdy Doody, Bob Keeshan, went out on his own and with the help of CBS created Captain Kangaroo.

  Keeshan was politically liberal, although that didn’t come out clearly in the show most of the time. His philosophy of children’s television was directly at odds with that of Buffalo Bob Smith, he later said. Smith’s idea of educational television was “Shouting, loud, fast-moving, very little reference to the education of the child. . . . I felt education and entertainment combined could be of a greater service to young people.”

  To that end, Keeshan revolutionized the business of children’s television by bringing in experts to help tell him what children needed in order to develop emotionally. Keeshan asked the experts to tell him “what the needs of the child are, what’s important in the life of a typical four-year-old, what’s typical in the life of an atypical four-year-old, a child who has this problem or that problem or doesn’t have the kind of home setting that would be ideal in raising a child.” The experts were happy to do so.

  Whereas Howdy Doody’s philosophy was that kids were kids and adults were adults and kids needed to listen to adults, Captain Kangeroo’s Keeshan subscribed to the Benjamin Spock view that children needed their self-esteem padded. He described the theme of the show: “Giving you that sense of well-being, giving you that confidence, that good feeling that you were able to do anything, that you were able to accomplish some things.” Parents, said Keeshan, too often “hear about beat the devil out of the kid and you’ll achieve your purpose. This is the way you destroy a child.”4

  In the 1960s, during a time of great political turmoil, this philosophy wasn’t all bad; by focusing on the welfare of children and their need to feel secure, Keeshan provided kids with a security blanket. And victimized children do need a sense of self-esteem. When Keeshan’s self-esteem thematic is combined with Keeshan’s suggestion that self-esteem comes not from television or educators but from parental involvement, it’s mostly correct. Unfortunately, the same generation that granted unearned self-esteem to children also spent little time with their children, so a generation of thirtysomethings resulted. Furthermore, the reliance on “experts” to insert appropriate messaging for children provided the basis for kids’ TV’s long descent into liberal politics; many of today’s experts are nothing of the sort.

  SESAME STREET: “DIVERSITY,” THE NEXT STEP IN SELF-ESTEEM

  The first shift in children’s television happened in 1969, two years after the launch of the CPB and PBS. The game-changer was a show called Sesame Street, produced by the Children’s Television Workshop and funded by the CPB, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Office of Child Development (the same people responsible for administering one of the great education failures of all time, Head Start).5

  The show was staffed largely by members of Captain Kangaroo’s old crew. “Most of the people who created Sesame Street came from my organization,” bragged Keeshan.6 The show also picked up on Kangaroo’s legacy of research. “They actually measured what [material provided] improvement . . . in a child,” Mike Dann, former vice president of CTW, told me. “They had . . . psychiatrists and doctors who would know whether a red E was better than a green E, or whether the word money was a certain way. . . . If you watch Sesame Street carefully, there isn’t a thing on that show that hasn’t been cleared by a board of very creative people, lovely people.” “Experts,” it should be noted, are usually among the most unreliable sources when it comes to teaching values; they are almost invariably leftist academics.

  The goal of the show was simple, Dann told me. “It was underwritten and created primarily for black children, Spanish-speaking children. It was not made for the sophisticated or the middle class,” Dann said. “And they had a department at Children’s Workshop run by Evelyn Davis, a black lady, who dealt with all sorts of civic activities for black people. And that took a foothold. As a matter of fact, there’s no written material in a black household. But there is television.”7

  Davis was actually a foot soldier, an inner-city Paul Revere designated to inform minority areas about the importance of watching Sesame Street.8 “The task of reaching and teaching preschoolers of poor families of all races can only be accomplished,” Davis said, “by the active interest and participation of all parts of the community.”9

  Because the show was designed to target inner-city children in particular, it swung liberal in its politics. It wasn’t merely about teaching ABCs and counting with the Count; it was about legitimizing urban liberal lifestyles—after all, the goal of children’s television had swung toward the enhancement of self-esteem, and how could urban children gain self-esteem if children’s television didn’t totally embrace the urban liberal lifestyle?

  Unlike other children’s shows, Sesame Street took place in a dingy setting—an urban neighborhood street. One of the characters, Oscar the Grouch, lived in a garbage can. Oscar the Grouch’s presence on Sesame Street was designed to address “conflicts arising from racial and ethnic diversity,” according to Sesame Street historian Robert Morrow.10 The first season of Sesame Street launched an entirely new politics into the world of children’s television. One 1969 episode had Grover parleying with a hippie and learning subtle lessons about civil disobedience.11

  The politics of Sesame Street would become more overt over time. Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of the show, said that she wanted to reflect reality as much as possible, although she did draw a line at teenage pregnancy: “I am not about to put a fifteen-year-old girl with a baby on Sesame Street,” she told New York magazine in 1987.12

  In 1989, though, writer/director Jon Stone (the former Kangaroo staffer) explained that he intended to tackle other big issues. “My two projects for this year,” he said, “are drugs and divorce.”13 They never tackled drugs. The creators struggled with the divorce issue, then finally decided that Snuffleupagus’s parents would get a divorce. The episode showed an inconsolable Snuffy, with one of the hosts explaining to Big Bird why divorce is an affirmative good: “Well, they loved each other when they got married . . . uh . . . and I’m sure they tried very hard to keep loving each other . . . but they probably . . . they just couldn’t love each other anymore.” The creators decided not to air the episode after testing it on an unlucky group of preschoolers, who reacted by believing that fights led to divorce, that divorced fathers abandoned their kids, and that divorced parents don’t love their kids. In other words, the kids ended up learning from Sesame Street precisely what most kids learn from divorce. “This is clearly not what we wanted,” said Ellen Morganstern, director of media relations for the show. She pledged to simplify the messages, and said that “It is very likely that a preschooler will hear the word divorce. We want them to understand what that is.”14 It never happened; Sesame Street shelved the issue.

  The liberalism of the show is overarching. In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the research group for the show, led by Dr. Lewis Bernstein, approached co-executive producer Arlene Sherman and told her, “We have four more shows to write. We have to do something.” The creators settled on a segment about peaceful conflict resolution—an odd message in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack on American soil. In the end, the Sesame Street creators shelved that one, too, after one showing.15

 
; The animating philosophy of the show is “diversity,” which means politically correct multiculturalism. The Sesame Street website lectures parents to examine “your own cultural assumptions and biases” as a “good place to begin your anti-bias work. For example, do you respond differently with your child when a person of another race is coming toward you, such as clutching his hand tightly or locking your car doors?” Sesame Street should start by talking to Jesse Jackson, who once explained, “I hate to admit it, but I have reached a stage in my life that if I am walking down a dark street late at night and I see that the person behind me is white, I subconsciously feel relieved.”16

  Speaking of challenging cultural assumptions, the website also urges parents to “Try to use gender-neutral language. Use plural pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘them,’ instead of masculine pronouns such as ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Use words such as firefighter, flight attendant, garbage collector, and humankind to replace the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun or ending.”17 The website even encourages parents to find toys and books with characters “that break stereotypes about men and women, for example, dolls for boys and building toys and puzzles for girls.”18 This is disgracefully idiotic—even Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and Clinton and Obama official, no ardent right-winger, has explained that such tactics are outmoded by current scientific knowledge.19 Is it any wonder that in a rather obvious inside joke, the show invited gay television star Neil Patrick Harris to appear on the show—as a character called “The Fairy Shoeperson”?20

  Multiculturalism has become another touchstone for the show. Rather than teaching kids patriotism or traditional values, the show encourages educators to “Explore the differences and similarities among the children in your classroom. Together, notice the physical aspects, such as hair and skin color, size, etc., as well as personality traits and such unique qualities as family traditions and languages spoken. Point out how all the differences and similarities make your classroom extraordinary and special.”21 In and of itself, there’s nothing harmful about this—except that it implicitly endorses the values of all of the children and their families, no matter how skewed those values may be. It also separates people into specific ethnic and racial subgroups—which is historically what Sesame Street has done by catering to specific racial minorities and reacting to criticism from their interest groups.22