Ben Shapiro - Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV

PRIMETIME PROPAGANDA

The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV

Ben Shapiro

To my wife, Mor,

whose love, comfort, and understanding make our life journey

such a magnificent adventure

Contents

The Political Perversion of Television

How Television Became Liberal

How Television Stays Liberal

How Television Comedy Trashes Conservatism

How Television Drama Glorifies Liberalism

How the Left Uses the Market Myth to Silence Its Critics

How Interest Groups, Government, and Hollywood Conspire to Keep TV Left

How Hollywood Became the Federal Governments PR Firm

How Television Liberals Recruit Kids

How to Fix TV

Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.

Homer Simpson

I was born in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. When the doctors pulled me out of my mom in 1984 at Saint Josephs Hospital in Burbank, California, I was two blocks down from the beige buildings housing the sound studios of NBC, where they were busily filming Night Court , starring Harry Anderson. Across the street was the headquarters for Disney, which looked a bit decrepit; a few years later, Disney would refurbish the Team Disney building by adding a faade of the Seven Dwarfs holding up the roofand a few years after that, Disney would add the ABC buildings to its Burbank estate. Drive down Alameda Boulevard for about a mile, and there stood the massive Warner Bros. studios, complete with enormous posters advertising upcoming TV shows and movies. Keep going, make a right on Lankershim, and youd be staring at Universal Studios, where Mr. T and the cast of The A-Team were filming on the back lots.

Ive loved Hollywood ever since.

Both of my parents work in Hollywood. My cousins, who lived around the corner from our small two bedroom house in Burbank, were Hollywood dreamers too. My aunt got two of my cousins into the movies. One cousin had a bit part in the Tom Hanks vehicle Turner & Hooch . His younger sister became a true Hollywood star, playing the little girl in Mrs. Doubtfire , Richard Attenboroughs Miracle on 34th Street , Matilda , A Simple Wish , and Thomas and the Magic Railroad .

My family isnt unusual in Los Angeles; everybody in Hollywood wants to be in the biz. Every waiter writes scripts, goes on auditions, or attends acting classgenerally, all three. Everyone has a project. Nathanael West labeled California the place where people come to die. More accurately, its the place where people come to wait tables.

I narrowly escaped an acting career in Hollywood myself. When I was fifteen months old, my moms friend, Jean, was making a documentary about child care. She asked if my dad could bring me to the filming. Dad agreed, and he talked with me in front of the cameras. Because I was an early talker, Jean was favorably impressed, and suggested that Dad get me into commercials.

Hes cute, hes bright, hell be a natural, she told him.

You must be nuts, said Dad.

That was the end of my Hollywood acting career. If it hadnt been for Dad, maybe Id be giving an inane Oscar speech right now. More likely, Id be waiting tables.

Dad kept me out of TV and movies because he wanted me and my three younger sisters to have a Norman Rockwell childhood: two-parent home, no drugs, no alcohol, no premarital sex. That also meant that Dad monitored the sort of TV we watched. When I was growing up, Dad used to go to the video store and pick up old copies of The Dick Van Dyke Show , one of the cleanest shows of all timeRob (Van Dyke) and Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) have a son, Richie, apparently without copulating, since they sleep in separate beds.

As we grew up, Dad tried to ban us from watching most of the contemporary TV shows. The Simpsons was off-limits, as was Friends . Forget about Murphy Brown . These were shows, Dad said, that promoted particular social agendas: the stupidity of fathers, the substitution of friends for family, the normalization of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Good luck, Dad. My sisters and I ended up watching all the shows our friends watched. So Ive seen virtually every episode of The Simpsons . I currently own all ten seasons of Friends my wife is a huge fan, and I gave them to her as a Hanukkah present. I know the ins and outs of Dawsons Creek , the trials and tribulations of The Practice , even the ups and downs of Becker (theres not much showing at 3:00 P.M. on TBS). During finals week of my first year at Harvard Law School, I watched the first two seasons of Lost . When I was in college, I staked out a shoot of near my parents house for five hours to get a picture with Kiefer Sutherland.

Then one day, as I was watching Friends , it struck me: Dad was right. It was The One with the Birth. Rosss lesbian ex-wife, Carol, is having his baby. And Ross is understandably perturbed that Carol and her lesbian lover will be bringing up his child. While Ross is going quietly cuckoo, Phoebe approaches him. When I was growing up, she tells him, you know my dad left, and my mother died, and my stepfather went to jail, so I barely had enough pieces of parents to make one whole one. And heres this little baby who has like three whole parents who care about it so much that theyre fighting over who gets to love it the most. And its not even born yet. Its just, its just the luckiest baby in the whole world.

Pregnant lesbians and three-parent households portrayed as not only normal, but admirable. This wasnt exactly Dick Van Dyke .

And it wasnt one random episode of Friends . The propagation of liberal values was endemic to the industry. While Ross was busy walking his lesbian ex-wife down the aisle for her wedding to her new lover, Samantha was chatting graphically about oral sex with Charlotte on Sex and the City ; Shavonda and Sarah were going topless and French kissing each other on The Real World: Philadelphia ; a gay man and a single woman were considering whether to have a baby together on Will & Grace ; Kate was deciding in favor of abortion on Everwood ; and the city of Springfield was legalizing gay marriage on The Simpsons .

It hit me that I was watching the culture being changed before my eyes. These werent just television episodesthey were pieces of small-scale, insidiously brilliant leftist propaganda.

And they werent merely anecdotal incidents. They were endemic to the industryno matter where I turned, I began to see that liberal politics pervaded entertainment. The shows that pushed the cultural envelope received the greatest media attention and often the greatest number of viewers. The shows that embraced traditional valueswell, there werent any shows that openly embraced traditional values.

The overwhelming leftism of American television was too universal to be merely coincidence. It had to be the product of a concerted effort, a system designed to function as an ideological strainer through which conservatism simply could not pass. And the more I investigated, the more I saw that Hollywood was just that: a carefully constructed mechanism designed by televisions honchos to blow a hole in the dike of American culture. Televisions best and brightest wanted to set America sliding down the slippery slope away from its Judeo-Christian heritage and toward a more cultivated, refined, Europeanized sensibility.

And they succeeded. This book tells the story of that success, a success planned by some, coordinated by others, and implemented by a vast group of like-minded politically motivated people infusing their values both consciously and unconsciously into their work.

It is no great shocking revelation that television is liberal. Conservatives like Robert Bork and Donald Wildmon, among others, have criticized television for years.