Serious Political Commentary for Serious Conservatives

Hollywood is Changing Our World
While Keeping Us Largely Entertained

-by Scott Rohter, January 2012

America’s fledgling broadcast industry began in the early part of the 20th century in New York City. Therefore, it is only logical to assume that from its earliest beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s, the business of broadcasting television would be primarily dominated and controlled by prominent New York liberals and other members of the east coast Establishment. This historical fact can be very easily verified.

The nascent broadcast industry, with its television network news divisions, was headquartered on the east coast in and around New York City, where most of the population of our country was centered. They were financed by big New York banks, and organized by wealthy New Yorkers, who were typically progressives.  In retrospect, there is nothing at all unusual or unexpected about the way that television began, and it explains very well why all of the major news networks are still very liberal today.

At roughly about the same time that the television industry was getting started on the east coast, another young industry was growing up on the west coast. It was born in the 1920s, and it had already been around for about ten years by the time that television came along.  It was centered outside of Los Angeles in a little known village called Hollywood. This became the entertainment and film industry that we know today. And Hollywood became the entertainment and film capital of the world. The principals behind the movie business were west coast liberals. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between east coast liberals and west coast liberals, except for the slightly different nature of their business interests.  For most of the 20th century there was a huge wall of separation between these two growing industries that disseminated information to the American public. This ‘Iron Curtain’ was mainly self-imposed, primarily by the more established Hollywood movie moguls, who were jealous of the up-start TV business, and would not share or release any of their content for broadcast on television.

Any maneuvering by one industry to gain control of the other would have almost certainly been opposed by the courts, and viewed as a form of monopoly. I can say this confidently, without any hesitation because those same courts issued various legal rulings in the 1940s and in the 1950s that prevented Hollywood Film Houses from owning or controlling the movie theaters that showed their films. Hollywood tried very hard to get a foothold in both the theater business and the budding broadcast industry, but they were not allowed to dominate or interfere in these two separate enterprises... And to paraphrase a famous television news anchorman of the day, “That’s just the way it was!”

The developing broadcast industry was as separate from the movie and entertainment business as the east is from the west, or at least as the east coast is from the west coast. They were as separate as fact is from fiction, or as truth is from lies. The television business on the east coast through their affiliated stations located across the country, broadcast mainly the news and information that the nation needed to know. The movie business located on the west coast specialized in pure entertainment, which was even then mostly fiction, and while they did produce some early documentaries notably to help with the war effort, they took no great pains to remain completely factual. Hollywood was mostly, and still is mostly about entertainment and propaganda.

There was obviously some overlap between the two growing industries.  Because there is a lot of programming time to fill in a day, television networks began to experiment with some early programs that were not really very newsworthy. They were primarily just entertainment in nature, like variety shows.  In that category there was The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Bob Hope Show. They tried their hand at comedy shows too, like Laurel and Hardy,  The Three Stooges, and just for the children, Bozo the Clown. They also produced some early sitcoms like The Life of Riley, I Love Lucy,  Leave It To Beaver and  The Jack Benny Show  One of the most popular sitcoms that I grew up with was called The Honeymooners, staring Jackie Gleason as Ralph Cramden in his role as a New York City bus driver.  All of these early sitcoms generally portrayed life in America the way that it was, and not the way that anyone partiacularly wanted it to be. Hollywood just focused on telling a story, and on entertaining people by making them laugh at certain caricatures of themselves.

In retrospect it was all very innocent and harmless in the beginning. There were NO hidden messages, NO political agenda, and NO social engineering built into the content of the early programs that were produced for television at the beginning. But I think World War II changed all that. Some people in the broadcast industry began to take notice of the power that television had over people, as it was then being misused by Nazi Germany to control an entire country. Of course the same thing can be done with radio, and the big screen as well, but radio has never been as powerful a means of subtly controling people as television is.

Gradually, some of the early television programming in America turned from purely news and documentaries, and other innocent forms of entertainment, to purely fictionalized storytelling with a hidden message.  From there, the programs morphed again into full-fledged social engineering projects, complete with their own political and social agenda!  Instead of just trying to sell the viewers something in the frequent commercial breaks between segments of the show, now the entire production was turned into a massive propaganda tool that was hammered home for sixty minutes every evening, usually five nights a week, for twenty-six weeks a year. Television is primarily interested in selling the viewer on some particular thought, idea, or behavior. Hollywood has never been very concerned about telling the truth.

In case you haven’t already noticed, you can detect an element of social engineering built into almost every television show you watch today, which is why I say that you aren’t really watching programs on television. You are being programmed by television! You are being conditioned to think and react in a certain way. Your acceptable responses to certain situations are actually being dictated to you by the powerful interests that control Hollywood and the media. That’s because somewhere along the way, during the last half of the 20th century, the wall of separation that once existed between Hollywood and New York, between movies and television, and between the film and entertainment industry on the one hand, and the television and news broadcasting business on the other hand, was torn down. Hollywood movie moguls wound up in control of the whole enchilada, including the major New York television networks and all of their corporate news divisions. Hollywood wound up in control of the whole ball of wax. I guess Hollywood's persistence finally paid off. What they couldn’t accomplish in the 1930s and 1940s, they somehow managed to pull off in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today Hollywood owns two of the three major television networks. Walt Disney owns ABC, and FOX (20th Century Fox) is joined at the hip to FOX News corp.  So not only is today’s contemporary storytelling on TV purely fictional, but it is also laced with both hidden and overt messaging, and directed towards advancing a specific social or political agenda. The lines between fact and fiction, and between news and entertainment have become so blurred that you can hardly recognize the difference anymore. Fact or fable, news or entertainment, reality or reality show.  It’s really very hard to tell the difference today. What did you think you would get if you put Hollywood movie executives in charge of broadcasting the evening news?  As I said before, Hollywood has never placed much importance on telling the truth. The only thing that matters to Hollywood movie executives is the sales receipts, or in this case the bottom line.

To see what has happened to the news, all you have to do is look at the way it is being presented on FOX News, the most popular news network in America. Just look at the presentation. There are so many unnecessary visual graphics, and mindless, irrelevant sound and noise distractions that have nothing at all to do with the news or the story being told.  But gee, it sure does look neat if you grew up with boom boxes in your bedroom.  They have all those stupid little blinking and flashing colored lights.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I actually prefer an old fashioned stereo receiver over those juvenile looking boom boxes with all of their little flashing lights.

Today, if you’re paying attention, you can detect the hardcore social engineering at work in almost every television program produced by the major television networks.  That’s why they are called programs.  Here is an example.  Even though gays and homosexuals represent only a very small segment of American society, the so-called gay lifestyle is featured on almost every TV sitcom, in an assault on our culture that is way out of proportion to their actual numbers.  And gays are usually portrayed in a very favorable light, as if it is somehow cool to be gay. The Hollywood portrayal of gays and lesbians just focuses on the nice personal side of the individual, and not on the downside of their self-indulgent and self-destructive behavior. Hollywood’s presentation of homosexuality doesn’t usually include any of the negative consequences of their deviant lifestyle, or its harmful effects upon society as a whole, unless it is to point out how mean and unfair the rest of society is for not accepting their perverted behavior.  You will almost never see the gay lifestyle portrayed on television or in the movies in a negative way, or as it really is: lonely, unfulfilling, and generally harmful to society. 

What are Hollywood and New York trying to accomplish with this kind of programming? Television has become an effective tool of social engineering. In the hands of skilled social engineers who are today's Hollywood movie producers and directors, television can be used to marginalize an inconvenient and politically incorrect social attitude, which can be every bit as stubborn as the Christian idea that marriage is between a man and a woman. This dearly held Christian belief is proving very difficult to eradicate from our society. In fact it takes a great deal of skill in the wrong hands to remove such an important Biblical injunction from our collective mindset. In the wrong hands television can destroy the fabric of an entire society, and they are very hard at work in Hollywood trying to do just that.

Television uses both explicit and subliminal messages which are woven right into the screenplay of programs to achieve its goals today. We know that Hollywood is seriously trying to change our society, while at the same time they are trying to keep us largely entertained and distracted.  Whether they are doing it with hidden messages or explicit messages when they are keeping millions of Americans comfortably distracted, they are still de-constructing our traditional Christian values based society none the less. They are trying to get millions of Americans to stop paying attention to the reality of what is going on all around them, and they are leading millions of Americans to opt out from politics, religion and morality. They are Changing Our World While Keeping Us Largely Entertained.

"A journalist has no better friend than the truth." - Scott Rohter
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