The Leftist Television Plot
I was looking through this book by one Ben Shapiro, about the big Liberal Television Machine. — Primetime Propaganda, I guess it’s called.  He runs through the list of television shows which have served as liberal propaganda, with producers who have consciously worked to reshape America in a leftist image.
Here’s some of the shows which he explores in his book.
Your Show of Shows
The Mod Squad
The Twilight Zone
Star Trek
The Simpsons
The Family Guy
The Cosby Show
Friends
Seinfeld
Sex in the City
MASH
St. Elsewhere
Family Ties
Soap
Three’s Company
MacGyver
Charlie’s Angels
Seasame Street
Happy Days
Cops
That 70s Show
All in the Family
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Get Smart
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Ellen
Laugh-In
The Honeymooners
Roseanne
Family Ties
The list is endless. Some of the reasons cited are curious and maybe telling. We have too many bad-guy-busting-shows that steer clear of using big ammo — MacGyver, for instance, with its “make due by knowing how to fissure sticks of gum and battery acid into high explosives”.
Cops’s sin is in not showing enough black criminals.
There’s a certain amount of “breaking new ground against conservative moores” here. So there’s Mary Tyler Moore — working woman. There’s Ellen — gay. And there’s Cosby. And “Your Show of Shows“:
I also don’t buy Shapiro’s argument that showbiz liberals have used TV to promote causes because they are outsiders determined to “forcibly enlighten the society that rejected them.” He calls Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” a “socialist paradise.” I think Sid was, ahem, just trying to be funny.
The Twilight Zone had too many cold war parables against nuclear destruction — the Fallout Shelter episode, right?
What’s interesting about All in the Family is that, perhaps they were skewring that bigot in the family, though maybe they were actually showing a sympathetic portrayal of a bigot, but really — Archie Bunker was, at the time, picked up as a cultural icon in Spiro Agnew’s America.  But it seems that the Leftist plotters can’t win in their portrayal of the struggling lower-middle class. Shapiro lombasts them for Archie Bunker, and then lombasts them for Roseanne Barr. For the record, when hearing an identified liberal, a host on KBOO, discuss television — she identified Roseanne as closer to reality and All in the Family as a “out of step elite liberal’s view” — but shows the liberal part of the Liberal Plot: they realized they had lost these Reagan Democrats with their earlier elitist contempt, and now had to get them to vote for Clinton.
Meantime, liberal talk show host Thom Hartmann has held that our entertainment options on television have gone from having a healthy number of, for instance, sewage workers on The Honeymooners, to tilting too heavily to the affluent — from Dallas on through our reality programs about the Kardashians. A bit lost to Shapiro, and maybe Hartmann: Married With Children pretty well charts its seeds back through The Honeymooners.
The problem with Family Ties:Â the liberals are making Michael J Fox look bad!
Wondering what Ben Shapiro would offer up for alternative fare — where Hollywood would gear us if not for it being a liberal propaganda machine, luckily for us, Ben Shapiro has written up for National Review a compiled list of twelve counterpoints, fighting the good fight…
1. 24
2. The Cosby Show
3. Magnum, P.I.
4. Leave It to Beaver
5. Dragnet
6. Gunsmoke
7. The Waltons
8. King of the Hill
9. Everybody Loves Raymond
10. South Park
11. Walker, Texas Ranger
12. Lost
We see the “other options besides blowing things apart with big ammo” lay aside in favor of Magnum PI and 24. And Dragnet — need I say more?
See, Cosby pulled a fast one. They thought they were doing a show of liberalism — er, normalizing blacks by portraying an upper-middle-class professional black family full of conservative family values (?), but those conservative family values got in the way of the message, and…
Everybody Loves Raymond?
Maybe it’s generational with South Park, as Chris Wallace seemed confused by why anyone could be considered “smart”.
I am stuck on “King of the Hill”, which I suppose could be said to give a polite kidding on a rural Texas milieu and thus can be considered conservative, or it could be said to give a polite kidding on a rural Texas milieu and thus be considered liberal.
Back to the other side of the political culture wars, we get this for David Sirota’s “80s Culture Attack” book :
Most telling, “All in the Family’s” formula of using sixties-motivated youth and progressivism to ridicule fifties-rooted parents and their traditionalism had been replaced atop the television charts by its antithesis: a “Family Ties” whose fifties-inspired youth ridicules his parents’ sixties spirit.
The liberals are making fun of themselves — just as, I suppose, they were with the fairly obnoxious character of “Meathead” on All in the Family. Hm. It’s kind of swerving in all directions. Say — why can’t these two shows (three if we toss in King of the Hill) make both the “conservative” and “liberal” lists, sitting right there alongside Cosby?