As conservatives we have long known that the entertainment media complex was overwhelmingly liberal. But liberals themselves have long denied it, at least until now. In this lengthy essay, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait not only admits the liberal bias of The Elite Media Monoculture, but also shows how its propaganda molds political and cultural opinion and does so beneath the radar. By introducing leftism without naming it, and damning freedom and capitalism with implication and innuendo, it seeks to bypass the rational and intellectual requirements of free and open debate. For real debate to exist, the ideas of both sides must be out in the open and discussed consciously.
But the liberal entertainment complex does no such thing. Instead it works to undermine American ideas and traditions without the general public being overtly aware of the process. It seeks to inculcate an emotional response to key words, ideas and concepts without the need of actually discussing or evaluating them in any way. It seeks to create memes that are accepted without question and never examined rationally. For if people were to think about those ideas, they might come to the wrong conclusions. And we can’t have that now, can we?
When Joe Biden endorsed gay marriage in May, he cited Will & Grace as the single-most important driving force in transforming public opinion on the subject. In so doing he actually confirmed the long-standing fear of conservatives—that a coterie of Hollywood elites had undertaken an invidious and utterly successfully propaganda campaign, and had transmuted the cultural majority into a minority. Set aside the substance of the matter and consider the process of it—that is, think of it from the conservative point of view, if you don’t happen to be one. Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion.
You’d probably be angry, too.
The need to appeal to the widest possible audience generally drives film and television to avoid displays of overt partisanship, while still smuggling in a message. Joss Whedon admitted this spring that he had written a scene into The Avengers in which Captain America deplored the “loss of health care and welfare” in America, only to cut it in the editing room. Nicholas Meyer directed a 1983 anti–nuclear war television special, The Day After, and later confessed, “My private, grandiose notion was that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for reelection.” René Balcer, the Law & Order producer, told one interviewer that he has laced his show with references to Bush-era abuses like the Patriot Act, but without naming Bush. “Our best shows,” he said, “make people question what’s going on.”
This capacity to mold the moral premises of large segments of the public, and especially the youngest and most impressionable elements, may or may not be unfair. What it is undoubtedly is a source of cultural (and hence political) power. Liberals like to believe that our strength derives solely from the natural concordance of the people, that we represent what most Americans believe, or would believe if not for the distorting rightward pull of Fox News and the Koch brothers and the rest. Conservatives surely do benefit from these outposts of power, and most would rather indulge their own populist fantasies than admit it. But they do have a point about one thing: We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.
