Hollywood liberals consistently deny that they "blacklist" conservatives, or that center-right political views are routinely and overtly excluded from the entertainment industry's collective voice. But in a strong riposte, Ben Shapiro's new book, "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV", provides extensive documentation on Hollywood's political clout, demonstrating the crippling hand the entertainment industry has in pushing Americans to readily accept its left-wing agenda as a truthful reality.
It's no secret that Hollywood discriminates against conservative actors, but Shapiro works to expose a different problem: the concerted efforts by entertainment industry executives to shape Americans into Hollywood's liberal mold. After interviewing over one hundred Hollywood kingpins, Shapiro found that not only will they readily admit that Hollywood has a strict anti-conservative agenda, but further, that many of their TV shows have underlying political messages meant to influence the way their audiences think.
While viewers might believe they can separate themselves from the subliminal messaging, Shapiro counters that idea.
You get home from work, kick off your shoes, and plop down in front of the TV, hoping simply to chill out. Instead, you get unmitigated liberalism pouring out of your TV. But you continue to watch because it’s great. It’s fun, thrilling, dramatic, or hilarious. We think it has no impact on us.
But it does. Television made Barack Obama. Television it supported bigger and bigger government, from Welfare to health care; pushed abortion-on-demand and the radical gay agenda into the mainstream; it stumped against war and for meaningless buzzwords like diversity and dangerous buzzwords like multiculturalism. Television has done more to change the politics of our nation than simple politics has.
Television has manipulated us. And those who create television have done it purposefully, and elegantly. They have weeded out conservatives in the industry wholesale. They have worked hand-in-glove with liberals in government to forward the leftist agenda. They have turned pure entertainment into a vehicle for propaganda.
Shapiro prodded his way into Hollywood and found many executives who willingly admitted to this bias. One of his interviews was with Hallmark Channel VP Barbara Fisher, who agreed with Shapiro's hypothetical that an actor wearing a McCain t-shirt would elicit a much different response than an actor wearing an Obama t-shirt (her statment comes at the 1:20 mark).
Another TV honcho, producer George Schlatter, openly makes fun of Rush Limbaugh in this clip, proclaiming him as a crazed buffoon who leads the Republican party, a position never bestowed on Limbaugh by anyone besides Schlatter.
Shapiro points to a litany of thoroughly researched cases to support his argument, not limited to his examples of the hand-picked liberal cast hired by Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman, the anti-Vietnam agenda of Happy Days, and the openly liberal themes of Sesame Street.
Americans watch hours of Hollywood produced entertainment, mostly unaware of the outright political agenda of people making it. Shapiro's new book successfully charges Hollywood as a Democratic machine designed to impose liberal beliefs on its audience while completely dismissing any conservative viewpoints contrary to its agenda.
