Mark Twain once said that everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it. In some ways you could say the same thing about television. Critics have been assailing the “vast wasteland” for decades but have done little to reduce television’s dominant role in contemporary culture. Studies show that Americans now watch more television than ever, and it’s hard to go anywhere – airports, neighborhood restaurants, even the dentist’s office – without a TV set greeting you as a square-faced, glowing companion.
Primetime Propaganda by Ben Shapiro is the latest book to critique television, although he does not attack the quality of TV since he thinks most programs are pretty good. Shapiro’s beef is that television programming intentionally supports liberal politics and lifestyles. Primetime Propaganda is designed to explain how this happened and find ways to make TV entertainment more ideologically diverse.
Shapiro has clearly marshaled an impressive amount of evidence in support of his thesis. He traces the history of the major TV networks from their inception to the present day, and his chronicle is chock full of names, dates, and program descriptions from all of television’s well-known eras. Fateful decisions that changed the course of television are identified, and the story is peppered with quotes from producers, writers, and other movers and shakers in the TV world that Shapiro interviewed for the book.
Primetime Propaganda’s provides a number of related reasons for why TV became liberal, but some of the most interesting include business decisions that have little to do with programming content. For example, early in television’s history, a program was typically sponsored by a single corporation, which gave the corporate sponsor a degree of control over the program’s content (the networks’ paying customers are the advertisers, not viewers). When this arrangement was changed to selling advertising in blocks of commercials, corporations had less ability to influence programming or resist the inevitable attempts of writers and actors to push creative boundaries.
Shapiro also argues that the move from live to recorded TV facilitated the move to liberal programming. Networks felt more constrained over the content they could broadcast when they knew it would be sent immediately over the airwaves. When TV became recorded in advance, creative types became more aggressive in challenging networks’ Standards and Practices Departments. Shapiro also claims that the move to recorded TV helped move TV programming from New York to California, which further weakened the link between TV networks and Madison Avenue ad agencies that often acted as a check on programming content.
The shift to liberal programs was also affected by network decisions on which audiences they chose to serve. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, TV networks tried to strike a balance between satisfying rural and urban viewers, as well as appealing to both the young and the old. This affected program content, since young, urban viewers were attracted to edgier fare while older and more rural viewers preferred more traditional shows. The networks intentionally disrupted this balance in the late 60s in order to focus on young urban viewers. This was especially apparent at CBS, which in short order jettisoned popular, rural-themed shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction in exchange for All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Shapiro says this move largely resulted from a 1960s academic study showing that the purchasing habits of the young were more flexible and responsive to ads than those of older customers. This naturally made young viewers a more valuable advertising demographic. Shapiro says this claim has been largely discredited by later research, but avows that it has been very influential in encouraging networks to chase younger viewers.
The TV professionals maintain that programming changes in the 60s and 70s were only responding to the marketplace, which was demanding more “realistic” content. Shapiro believes this opinion reflects an insular Hollywood view of what qualifies as “realistic,” and the shows foisted on the public at the time were deliberately designed to promote liberal views.
In some instances (especially Norman Lear’s early 70s shows like All in the Family and Maude), it’s undeniable that TV programs were sending explicitly liberal messages, but Shapiro never provides a convincing explanation for why the public chose to watch those programs. After all, Norman Lear became rich because his shows were among the most popular on TV at the time.
Given its attention to demographics, it’s a little surprising Primetime Propaganda never considers the impact of the baby boom and the changes it produced in broader American culture. An unprecedented number of children were born from 1946 through the early 60s, which subsequently shifted the 1960s and 70s TV audience towards a younger demographic. Shapiro acknowledges that younger viewers have more liberal tastes, and this tendency was almost certainly magnified in this era by the dramatic changes simultaneously taking place in music, fashion, and film.
Shapiro presents little evidence that the public was rejecting the liberal TV fare it was offered, which suggests that changing demographics, as well as broader changes in popular culture, prompted TV executives’ decision to change programming. After all, the changes in CBS’s primetime lineup were approved by William Paley, a Republican who founded the network and reportedly hated All in the Family. He was not simpatico with Lear’s crusades and would never have allowed them on the air if he didn’t think they made business sense.
Shapiro’s suggestions for improving TV’s ideological balance are for liberals to stop discriminating against conservatives; executives to embrace freedom and conservatives’ business savvy; advertisers to wake up from the illusion that young people are the treasured demographic; and the Right to actually engage with popular culture rather than simply bashing it.
I expect his calls to liberals and TV executives will fall on deaf ears. Their current business model allows them to make oodles of money, enjoy a relatively quiet life, and work with people they like and who share their political views. It may be hard to convince them that the lack of conservative perspectives is a problem that needs to be solved, particularly when the solution is to allow people they view as barbarians inside their gates.
His calls to advertisers and conservatives are more realistic. Given the huge advertising budgets at stake and the enormous sums spent on consumer research, if young people are not the Holy Grail, then advertisers are highly motivated to wake up and change their priorities accordingly. And since television is not going away, certainly conservatives have little to gain by bashing the medium’s worst tendencies (including ideological imbalance) rather than working constructively to correct them.
In this regard, it would have been valuable if Primetime Propaganda had considered the role that technology and the marketplace could potentially play in creating new TV institutions that might provide an ideological counter to the networks’ liberal bent. This has clearly proven to be a successful strategy in other media, especially radio (AM talk radio) and TV news (Fox News). Given the extraordinary technological changes that are making it easier both to produce and distribute video programming to consumers, would it be feasible for conservatives to develop new TV networks devoted to alternative/conservative programming? These networks could be new cable channels or even distributed via the net or other unconventional channels. Shapiro never considers the issue, but it could be more effective than pleading with liberals to allow conservatives to bore from within the institutions they now control (a stealth strategy to bore from within is a whole other animal).
In any event, these are quibbles that do not detract from the interesting, entertaining and provocative book that Shapiro did write. Primetime Propaganda provides a wealth of information on how TV got to be the way that it is, and I found its descriptions of comedies and dramas over the last 60 years to be an enjoyable trip down memory lane. Shapiro’s book won’t be the last one that is written on how to change television, but it is a valuable contribution to the effort.
