TV shows have hidden left-wing propoganda!!!!

Man... Sesame Street, Friends, Happy Days, and MASH?  This guy is really on the cutting edge of cultural criticism.  I await his call for a ban on Catcher in the Rye in school libraries.

Oh god he's right. There's even proof of Big Bird's training:

For almost the entire time I watched Sesame Street, on my PBS (it's jewel in the crown, WNET Thirteen!) it was followed by a program called Villa Alegre.  The first bilingual show I can think of on tv, it was a snappy intro to hispanic culture that I attest I would not gain in any other form (tv, school or otherwise) until well into high school.

I can imagine how a 'beaner' show like this would, in the current climate, drive these right wing lunatics up a fuckin wall.  I've said it before and I'll say it again...I was lucky to have my childhood in the 70s, before the slow strangulation of the nation's cultural soul by the right began in earnest. 

Ben Shapiro is a noted doucherod and one of the obnoxious new breed of "young Republicans" (he's a recent Harvard grad) who've seen how much money to be made by pandering to the Tea Party crowd and jumped on the bandwagon with both feet. His "beat" is the kind of stuff Big Hollywood covers, ranting about pop culture and how out-of-touch with "regular Americans" it is. Half of what he says is just to shock.

As usual, he doesn't believe a word of what he's spouting, but he's one of the more feeble debaters in this regard--at one point he'd argued that movies weren't doing well because people wanted old-fashioned manly-man heroes, TWO SENTENCES after mentioning the Twilight series, which I believe has made a certain amount of money.

So...uh...weren't there ever any shows with a radical right-wing bias?  Dragnet or Lou Grant or This Old House or some shit?

Everything is left wing right wing to zealots on each side and much like any extremist zealots principles and ideas can't be looked at on their own terms they have to be viewed through the prism of the left/right para dime.

People 500 years ago laugh at the irony and so should we.

Quote:

Originally Posted by teledork 

So...uh...weren't there ever any shows with a radical right-wing bias?  Dragnet or Lou Grant or This Old House or some shit?

What are you, some kind of commie?

To be fair, the people who make movies and entertainment are usually at least a little to the left of the American mainstream--these days I'd say they're a LOT to the left, actually, but that's just because the discourse has moved so far to the right. But the key phrase there is "a little". When the right tries to paint it as a "radical" left-wing agenda they sound like raving paranoids.

More importantly, I've always felt that there's a bigger difference between a small bias (which everyone has) and a MAJOR bias than there is between a minor left and a minor right bias. When you're slightly biased to one side, chances are you're attempting to be fair and reasonable to the other side. When you're massively biased in one direction, you're going to be less balanced.

Which is why I find the arguments about Fox News and such providing "balance" to the "left-wing media" to be a crock. I'll buy that the news media has a slight left-wing bias, but most mainstream reporters try to correct for their bias, or used to. Fox News just blatantly stumps for a hard-right viewpoint in the name of "providing a different viewpoint". But it doesn't work that way. The underlying biases of a reporter shouldn't matter as long as there's an attempt at portraying the facts, but once you ditch that and go straight for propaganda, you're not a journalist anymore.

Of course, I could rant and rail about phony balance as well--"Scientists say the sky is not green, but the church of the Verdant Hue says otherwise"--but I won't bother. The crucial point is that whether you're reporting the news or telling a fictional story, you have a certain obligation to the facts of the reality we live in. I mean, you can violate those facts, for SF or fantasy or whatever, but you have to know you're doing so.

To give you an example--and it's a major pet peeve of mine--a lot of shows, even ones that I'm sure Ben Shapiro would deride as "liberally biased", portray torture or intimidation as an effective means of interrogation or coercion. You know, the scene where the hero desperately needs information, so he holds a gun to the villain's mouth, or roughs him up a little. And then the bad guy tells him everything he needs to know. Anyone who's been following the "enhanced interrogation" debates knows that that simply isn't how it works--what's stopping the guy from saying 'Oh, yeah, the bomb's at 5th and King st" and then as the hero races to the scene to find nothing, the bomb goes off at 4th and Main instead. Yet it's a convenient narrative technique, so it keeps getting used over and over again. A perfect example of how entertainment can unintentionally reinforce political values without even intending to.

The fact that the right have increasingly pitched their politics to Hollywood technique--narrative shorthand like stereotypes, information in bite-sized packets in between lots of action and drama that doesn't allow people to overthink the plot holes and logistical flaws, simple narratives with happy endings--gives them, I think, the advantage in this regard. And I think it's one of the reasons it's important for TV and movies to commit to more sophisticated storytelling--they're contributing to the dumbing-down of political and intellectual culture, whether they want to acknowledge that responsibility or not.

How insidious!!!

Fox News is left wing propaganda... satirical news reports at its finest.

To be fair, the article in its entirety includes a breadth of other shows:

http://tv.yahoo.com/blog/tv-executives-admit-in-taped-interviews-that-hollywood-pushes-a-liberal-agenda--3086

To play Devil's Advocate here, that's a considerable amount of programs, going far beyond fare for young children.  One of the stories even includes an openly conservative actor being turned down by a major executive because of his vocal support for Ronald Reagan.  And some of us do bristle at the suggestion that Hollywood is an immense liberal bastion.

Do I think that a conservative alternative would be much different?  No.  Conservative news networks and radio programming are largely insular, just in a format that they tapped into.  But liberalism in Hollywood does contain political elements -- whether it's these executives acknowledging that they included certain things in their shows to slight Republicans (I remember a good deal of storylines in some of the aforementioned shows revolving around the stuffy, exaggerated conservative parents or friends).  All we have to ponder is whether or not that's a bad thing.

And although I am largely left-wing, generalizing liberal positions as "empathy and social justice", whereas all conservatives are the bearded white men twirling their moustaches, is playing into the very stereotypes that are alleged to exist in Hollywood in this particular book.

These examples are more substantial:

Howie Mandel heh that says a lot about what an idiot Paltrow was. Schultz was and is a better actor by far.

For your consideration on that Fat Man and Little Boy.

I'm more shocked that according to that article, people found Alex Keaton lovable. Because I myself still hope there's some never-aired Family Ties episode where Alex gets himself tortured with hot needles for half-an-hour.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Draco Senior 

And although I am largely left-wing, generalizing liberal positions as "empathy and social justice", whereas all conservatives are the bearded white men twirling their moustaches, is playing into the very stereotypes that are alleged to exist in Hollywood in this particular book.

..."Empathy and social justice" seems like a perfectly reasonable generalization of left-wing views. Conservatives seem to consider themselves pragmatists and concerned more with economic stability and military dominance. I'm sorry if that makes their views seem less appealling, but I'm not sure how else to summarize them.

Shapiro's going to be on C-SPAN 3's BOOK TV tonight at 10:00 pm est.

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