So, the cat’s out of the bag: “Primetime Propaganda” has hit the market, accompanied by exclusive tape of Hollywood insiders admitting to anti-conservative bias in the industry, openly talking about using their shows to propagandize for political purposes, and bashing right-leaning Americans.
The media has jumped all over the story. Or rather, they’ve jumped all over the wrong story. When in doubt, attack the messenger.
Rather than focusing on the tape we started to release yesterday through Big Hollywood, Townhall, HotAir, and other websites, the left has focused almost exclusively on a one-and-a-half page section of “Primetime Propaganda”: the Sesame Street section. They’re claiming that I call Big Bird a pinko (nope), that I say that Sesame Street is a socialist haven (wrong) and that I am deeply upset by Sesame Street’s use of liberal pop culture icons like Katy Perry and Neil Patrick Harris (not so much).
They should probably just read the book. In the book, I do detail Sesame Street’s historic liberal tilt – the former VP of Children’s Television Workshop, Mike Dann, told me that the show was “underwritten and created primarily for black children, Spanish-speaking children. It was not made for the sophisticated or the middle class … there’s no written material in a black household. But there is television.” This sounds like typical soft bigotry of low expectations material.
In the 1980s, Sesame Street staffers talked about using the show to preach to kids about divorce; after September 11, the show creators decided to tackle peaceful conflict resolution (an odd topic, implying as it does either that we should peacefully resolve our problems with those who want to fly planes into buildings, or that our children need training in not beating up those of different cultures).
Sesame Street’s liberalism is soft and overarching, not intrusive and annoying. The Sesame Street website lectures Americans about their deep, dark cultural biases ordering parents to examine “your own cultural assumptions and biases” as a “good place to begin your anti-bias work.” The website also tells parents to “try to use gender-neutral language … [use] words such as firefighter, flight attendant, garbage collector, and humankind to replace the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun or ending.” The goal, of course, is to parrot the feminist line about language’s inherent sexism. The website also encourages parents to find toys and books with characters “that break stereotypes about men and women, for example, dolls for boys and building toys and puzzles for girls.” Larry Summers has amply debunked such nonsense – it’s leftist utopian thinking at its finest, fostered with your tax dollars.
Nobody in the media has bothered to examine the actual evidence with regard to Sesame Street. But that’s no surprise – they’d rather shoot the messenger than listen to the tape.
Sadly for them, this is only the beginning. We’ll see how long they can ignore the real story.
