I was around when television was released to the public in the late 1940s. There was no official release date, and people didn’t have to stand in line to get a TV set, but eventually, every home had one. I was five years old when I saw Hopalong Cassidy on a new TV set at a neighbor’s house in Chicago. We didn’t get our first family TV until 1950. It had a 12” round screen with black & white images, but it was our porthole in which to view the world.
The three network broadcasters provided entertainment for families to enjoy together, limited by the Federal Communications Commission standards of decency and equal time for political candidates or their policies. Decency standards required that network TV shows like I Love Lucy, had to use separate beds for married couples, and the spouses had to keep one foot on the floor. News broadcasts were a public service, and the reporter merely read the news of the day, with no editorial comments or weather events.
Today, there are no decency standards for TV programs on cable or Internet download and almost no limitations on broadcast networks. The entire entertainment industry including TV programming has a liberal bias and the tools to spread their agenda. Also, that industry argues that every other industry or corporation should be legally prevented from even buying time for an opposing political position. They’ve turned the network news programs into nothing more than cherry-picked stories of liberal influence or self-promotion for other programs or personalities of leftist passions.
News Now Includes Liberal Bias
The liberal bias often can be a bit subtle in so-called news programs, yet night after night, on all the major networks, we find that weather is the lead item ever since global warming became politicized. Special features like Made in America or Inspiring America, are vehicles to conclude each program with a liberal commentary that tugs on viewers heartstrings. The reports in the middle are hand-picked, edited, and misinterpreted to make conservative politicians look like evil predators.
The liberal bias runs amuck in so-called live comedy shows. They treated President Obama like a prophet and his initiatives and Executive Orders as sacred scripture, yet they act like President Trump is nothing more than a creepy clown. Reference to a person’s physical attributes is a self-imposed taboo for satire involving every other human except for President Trump. Of course, he has made it low hanging fruit for the leftists to pick off day after day.
During days of yore, half-hour situation comedy shows usually depicted a biological family with a father, mother, and some children. Grandparents were sometimes included to enhance the opportunity for age-related humor. Today, the only biological families are in the long-standing animated series on the FOX network, like The Simpsons, and they are yellow. All other sitcoms consist of contrived families of mixed race, same-sex, unknown origin, or in transition. All the situations which are enacted, convey a liberal perspective to achieve a happy conclusion unless there is a need to accentuate the conservative bad guys.
Gender Roles Re-Assigned
Up until last year, many hour-long dramas or detective shows consisted of a strong male investigator and a female cop enforcer. Examples are The Mentalist, Castle, and Person of Interest. They all transitioned into an empowered female lead with the male as a mere vulnerable sidekick. They were dropped, replaced by series with female lead characters who can outdrink, outfight, and out mate any male evildoer or his entire gang. Even programs based on comic book heroes have been taken over by females who are stronger than any evil force, with never so much as a split a seam in their black unitards. I’m not sure why that female empowerment doesn’t transition to college campuses where young women seem to be vulnerable to alcohol, insulting language, and aggressive environments.
Actors like Tom Selleck and Mark Harmon managed to hang on for one more season, but their roles have begun to look like the sidekick parts of other defunct series. Tom Selleck, as the Police Commissioner of New York City, now has to serve the whims of a female mayor, portrayed by the actress who once portrayed Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist. Mark Harmon’s lead character was held hostage in Paraguay over the summer break, and the youngest female trainee assumed his boss responsibilities. In almost all crime/detective programs, the big boss is a black female, and the evil organization that overarches multiple seasons is led by a white male. According to the liberal creed, there is little diversity amongst evildoers in TV crime shows.
The most annoying formula used by TV writers over the last few seasons is the soap opera cliffhanger nature of the plots. Most programs in past series used to be a complete story, sometimes with two or three complete subplots. Now, most series have a single overarching plot that carries through multiple seasons and one minor plot. As a crutch, writers often fill the time with tremendous gunfights where only cars or desks get hit by bullets. I can’t even count the number of gun battles I’ve seen in street scenes where background store windows remain intact or in office scenes where the outside windows don’t get hit. Cars and desks are shot to pieces. With that strong dependence on gun battles, it’s hard to believe those liberal screenwriters advocate gun control. Of course, they only advocate it for the legally owned and registered guns of law-abiding citizens, not the stolen guns of drug lords.
The Evolution of TV
The evolution of TV programming over the last 70 years leads me to believe that the end is near. It started with westerns (Wild Bill Hickok, Cisco Kid, Annie Oakley), then family shows (I Love Lucy, Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best), then doctor dramas (Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, Dr. Kildare). Then we went through the second generation of each of them (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Maverick, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Full House, Dr. Quin, ER, St. Elsewhere). All of them were entertaining with little or no political bias.
Today we have no westerns; family shows consist of biological misfits, and doctor shows target only female viewers (Grey’s Anatomy). Other drama/crime programming consists of empowered women treating males as sidekicks (at best), stooges, and weak evildoers (at worse) easily overpowered by a karate kick. One show recently portrayed a pregnant woman who was kidnapped and held hostage by three male brutes. She had the baby, broke loose from her ties, beat up the captors, and escaped with her baby. Now that’s a liberal fantasy!
This degeneration of TV programming is particularly dangerous because TV is not viewed as it was in the past, with everyone watching a show it the same time and discussing it within a family or around the office water cooler the next day. Today, the modern viewer downloads a full seasonal series, binge-watches it on a smartphone while on a treadmill and posts any opinion on a social network without a meaningful conversation. The programming bias goes straight to the individual’s brain with no opposing discussion or contradiction. The terms global warming, strength through diversity, gun show loophole, female empowerment, low self-esteem, abusive males, my body my choice, all become psychological mantras
It is this primed viewer who will vote in the next election. The death of TV may result in the death of our society unless some standards of decency or equal time requirements are imposed on the modern communications infrastructure of today. Thus, it seems, the modern porthole to the world will drown us if not closed in what has become a gale-force liberal storm.
