The 2011 interview: Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda
Bob Zadek’s 2011 episode on Hollywood centered on Ben Shapiro, author of Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, who described telephoning people in Hollywood and interviewing roughly 75 to 100 of them, most of them major names, and releasing tapes of the conversations Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Shapiro described those he called smart enough to know what they were doing as having disdain for traditional American values and seeing their work as a way of giving back, and he cited the economics of the trade: writing a network television show paid $30,000 per episode at union scale, so a full season of comedy, 22 episodes, brought $660,000 before residuals and could easily total a million dollars for one season.
Shapiro illustrated the seepage of politics into writing with Good Will Hunting, which he described as an ode to Howard Zinn and centered on the theories of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; he said Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were nobodies before the film, and he asked whether they put that material in because they thought it commercial, answering no, while allowing that maybe they were propagandizing a little. He said people’s politics and their writing undergo a kind of natural osmosis.
Zadek offered the framing that creative people find great power in burying a message in palpable form, so that it tastes good even though it is medicine, and asked why creative and left-leaning seem a hyphenated phrase. Shapiro answered with rebellion against the status quo, citing Solzhenitsyn as a right-wing Russian artist and Arthur Miller as a left-wing American one, and with artists’ unfamiliarity with money. He also attacked the phrase “less fortunate,” saying it assumes no skill or effort goes into success, and argued that what distinguishes the United States is class mobility—smart people rising and stupid people falling regardless of where they are born. Bob Zadek recounted his own on-air mini-rant against the phrase, saying he attributed his own success not to fortune but to working hard for about 50 years. Shapiro said the people who are actually fortunate, looking at benefits in a vacuum, are those who get welfare benefits and special dispensations for college scholarships, as against those who pay higher tax rates.
Blacklisting and the politics of employment
In the same episode Shapiro said that if you are openly right-wing when you come to Hollywood, you will not work, and that on social issues specifically the dividing line at the time was gay marriage: having voted for Prop 8, which he described as upholding traditional marriage in California, meant being blacklisted. He said that on the war the permissible position depends on who holds power—pro-war allowed under Obama, not allowed under Bush—and that early-career Republicans are quashed, while major Republicans like Kelsey Grammer, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gary Sinise were not openly conservative when they started and came out only after about 20 years. Bob Zadek supplied the comparison to the Elia Kazan blacklisting and the communist witch hunt of the 1950s, and named David Mamet, of whom Shapiro said he thought coming out would probably have a negative impact on his career.
Shapiro told the story of Patricia Heaton: she first told him she had not been discriminated against, then called back two days later saying she had lost six specific jobs because of her political affiliation, then called again saying she did not want to be in the book at all for fear she would not be able to work—a case Shapiro used to argue that if it can happen to a top working actress it can happen to anybody. Shapiro also described his own experience: Leonard Goldberg, whom he identified as an independent and as producer of Blue Bloods and Charlie’s Angels, asked him to write a pilot based on his time at Harvard Law School; an agent later told him a producer had Googled him, found his political writings, and said he would never work with anybody of that political persuasion. Shapiro said he told the agent he would write under a pseudonym if it became a major issue, and that he knew working writers already doing so to hide donations to the Bush campaign.
Zadek asked whether a libertarian agnostic on social issues but a free-marketeer would meet the same resistance. Shapiro said it depends on how open the person is about the economic part of the platform—relatively liberal on social policy, people would be okay—but that a true Ayn Randian argument for cutting government, or a hawkish national-defense strain, would carry ramifications; the most controversial elements of the conservative agenda in Hollywood, he said, are the social ones.
Subsidy, regulation and the free-market claim
Zadek argued that Hollywood was not a free market. Shapiro agreed, saying the Democratic Party in particular has had a corrupt relationship with Hollywood in which Hollywood acts as the party’s PR firm and the party hands cash back, that the cable industry is extraordinarily regulated, and that local cable companies are forced to do certain things on behalf of local politicians to be accredited in those markets. He said that if the economy kept going down, government would try stimulus, that states already gave tax credits to attract businesses, and that it would not be long before subsidies went to studios too big to fail—just as subsidies were being discussed for newspapers.
Across episodes
Only the 2011 Hollywood episode treats the topic; a 2014 episode with North Korean defector Yeonmi Park mentions pirated DVDs, USB drives and Hollywood and Disney movies reaching North Korea and opening people’s eyes to the wider world, but the excerpts show no development of the Hollywood question between them Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not say when Primetime Propaganda was published, what became of the pilot Shapiro wrote for Leonard Goldberg, or what happened to any of the named figures afterward. The 2014 excerpt breaks off mid-conversation and identifies no further Hollywood material. No episodes in the excerpts offer a defense of the industry’s practices beyond what Shapiro and Zadek attribute to their subjects.