It’s a common complaint among the right wing that Hollywood has a liberal agenda, what with actors and directors always supporting Democrats come election season, and too many shows with sympathetic gay characters, and not enough story lines where families go to church, blah blah blah. It’s the sort of thing I always dismissed with a wanking motion because it’s just television. Can’t I just sit on my couch and shut off my brain without viewing everything through a political lens?
The answer to that question is apparently “no,” because a new book by Ben Shapiro called Primetime Propaganda features several interviews where TV executives and writers admit to discriminating against and belittling conservatives. Shapiro is releasing a series of “Hard Copy”-like YouTube videos (see below) containing snippets of the interviews to drum up publicity for the book — videos that will cause the sort of left-versus-right flare-up that makes it a pain in the ass to live in the middle. Let the facepalms begin:
[One video shows Vin] Di Bona, who created America’s Funniest Home Videos, becoming remarkably blunt about his approval of a lack of political diversity in Hollywood. When Shapiro asks what he thinks of conservative critics who say everyone in Hollywood is liberal, Di Bona responds: “I think it’s probably accurate, and I’m happy about it.” […]
The late Bruce Paltrow knew that [Dwight] Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: “There’s not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!” The part went to Howie Mandel. [THR]
Anyway, without defending these liberal morons too much, reasonable human beings will recognize that a lot of the stories come from shows that were made twenty or thirty years ago, and that a lot of the execs are merely admitting the existence of a bias that pretty clearly exists. It’s roughly equivalent to interviewing a bunch of black dudes and then writing a book called Black Men Admit They Love Women with Big Asses.
