Can’t say this is new news – the bias in Hollywood has always seemed clear me. It is a bit surprising to see it so candidly on display, though.
Some snips from The Hollywood Reporter:
Some of TV’s top executives from the past four decades may have gotten more than they bargained for when they agreed to be interviewed for a politically charged book that was released Tuesday, because video of their controversial remarks will soon be hitting the Internet.
In one video, Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman says that when she cast Candace Gingrich-Jones, half-sister of Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as the minister of a lesbian wedding, “There was a bit of ‘fuck you’ in it to the right wing.”
Kauffman also acknowledges she “put together a staff of mostly liberal people,” which is another major point of Shapiro’s book: that conservatives aren’t welcome in Hollywood.
Maybe that’s because they’re “idiots” and have “medieval minds.” At least that’s what Soap and Golden Girls creator Susan Harris thinks of TV’s conservative critics.
However, the ranks of dumb right-wingers has dwindled, according to Harris, whose video has her saying: “At least, you know, we put Obama in office, and so people, I think, are getting – have gotten – a little bit smarter.”
Another video has Leonard Goldberg — who executive produces Blue Bloods for CBS and a few decades ago exec produced such hits as Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels and Starsky and Hutch — saying that liberalism in the TV industry is “100 percent dominant, and anyone who denies it is kidding, or not telling the truth.”
Shapiro asks if politics are a barrier to entry. “Absolutely,” Goldberg says.
When Shapiro tells Fred Pierce, the president of ABC in the 1980s who was instrumental in Disney’s acquisition of ESPN, that “It’s very difficult for people who are politically conservative to break in” to television, he responds: “I can’t argue that point.” Those who don’t lean left, he says, “don’t promote it. It stays underground.”
“Television has been perhaps the most impressive weapon in the left’s political arsenal,” Shapiro argues in the book.
Read it all and watch the video clips.
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Absolutely no surprises here.
Thanks for posting this article, it’s quite illuminating in the details it brings to the fore.
I am left thinking:
If Television Media has resolutely chosen for “the left” – this also means, it has narrowed its vision to a particular vision of the left. Throughout history – things “left” and “right” in politics have always contained various subgroupings – each subgroup doing a bit better in addressing the issues of the other spectrum, and in doing so, playing off the wider issues that can be investigated.
If that other spectrum has been eliminated entirely, it means we have settled on answers for most or all of the various questions the “right” has posed.
For example: “culture.” The Left was terribly divided on this one – with the Maoists insisting on the prominence of culture as a societal force, with stricter Marxists insisting on economic factors which were much more “concrete” and insusceptible to the peregrinations of fickle culture. The Right had its own hesitations, with its own variety of possible answers – ranging from strict insistence upon a cultural “canon” of high arts – to the folk art of Blut und Bodem literatur – to a misquoted Göring fictitiously reaching for his revolver at the very mention of culture.
In today’s society, I’d suggest:
We have rather strict categories for the “good” and the “bad” – in actuality more or less culturally determined, but with the general presupposition that such ethical categories are somehow based upon “science.”
To even begin to describe how ugly, blind, and generally prejudiced a view is, would require many paragraphs.