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Where Have All the Smart Media Moguls Gone?
In the old days, movie moguls and newspaper barons lived for the bottom line. But if the profit motive still drives their industries, you'd never know it.
For several years, I have marveled at the arrogance that Hollywood has displayed towards its customers. Or, perhaps I should say potential customers or even ex-customers. Why, I’ve been asking myself, have they insisted on churning out one movie after another about lowlife drug addicts? The only druggie movie I can think of that made money was “The Man With the Golden Arm,” back in 1955, and that was based on a best-selling novel and starred Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak.
Lately, they’ve added a second genre that has proven equally unprofitable. I refer to war movies that present the American military in a bad light. No sooner, it seems, does “In the Valley of Elah” bomb at the box office than Hollywood rolls out “Redacted.” Even the titles they stick on these turkeys seem to have no other purpose than to keep audiences as far away as possible.
Unless these movies are simply some accountant’s madcap idea of a tax shelter, I can not imagine why they keep producing them. Perhaps red ink has become Tinsel Town’s version of the red badge of courage.
In the old days, Hollywood was run by a bunch of tough cookies who kept one eye on the starlets and one eye on the bottom line. These days, it appears as if the movies are in the hands of bozos who think there’s something tacky about making movies that actually turn a profit.
Still, there’s another group that makes these guys look like hard-headed businessmen. I refer to those people who own newspapers. The way they carry on, you’d think their names were Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Gummo.
Thanks to all the many incarnations of Hecht and MacArthur’s “Front Page,” we’ve always known that reporters were fast-talking, hard-drinking, irresponsible double-dealers who’d run over their own grannies to get a scoop. But their bosses, the lords of the fourth estate, appeared to be a collection of sober-sided capitalists who could read a profit-and-loss statement even if they were sitting in a cave during a solar eclipse.
That, however, is no longer the case. And while I have heard various theories as to why people are canceling their subscriptions, the main one being the Internet, I think there is yet another reason; namely, liberal bias.
People on the left, even those who believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, deny that liberal bias even exists. That’s because they believe everything they read in the New York Times and the Washington Post, everything they see on CNN and WSNBC, and every word uttered by Chris Matthews and Bill Maher. Once you accept that those institutions and individuals are dispensing objective truth, it stands to reason that only those at the opposite end of the political spectrum could possibly be slanting the news.
However, if you are a conservative and every time you pick up your daily newspaper, you find that everything you believe, not to mention all the things you hold dear, are being ridiculed not only on the editorial page, but throughout the entire paper, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the day finally dawns when a lot of them are going to say, “Why am I paying for this bilge?”
The question that comes to mind is why a business – any business – would go out of its way to antagonize, depending on the city, between, say, 40 and 60% of its market. Is it possible that while my back was turned, the DNC bought up every paper in the country except for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times?
Living in Los Angeles, as I have for the past 60-odd years, I’ve seen the L.A. Times bury one competitor after another. But ever since 2000, the paper has been slowly bleeding to death. In a desperate attempt to keep breathing, the paper has fired scores of employees and amputated entire sections. They’ve done virtually everything except try to put out a newspaper that doesn’t resemble one of James Carville’s wet dreams.
While I have no doubt that many of the 300,000 former subscribers simply decided there were cheaper, more convenient, ways to get the news, I happen to personally know that a good many left because of the paper’s relentless bashing of conservatives.
Even the letters to the editor are slanted. Rarely will they run a letter that disagrees with their editorial position. In fact, if you’re dying to see your name in the paper, all you have to do is attack George Bush or the war in Iraq. The Times will celebrate a blue moon or hell’s freezing over by publishing an op-ed piece by a conservative, but they absolutely draw the line at publishing a letter in praise of it. In fact, one could easily get the idea that Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg serve the same role as those poor saps at the amusement park who stick their heads through a hole in the wall so that the paying customers can bonk them in the noggin with baseballs.
I wouldn’t want to give you the idea that my hometown newspaper is entirely heartless when it comes to right-wingers. In fact, just recently, I had occasion to write the following letter to the editor: “First it was William F. Buckley who got a terrific, extremely respectful, front page sendoff. Today, it was Charlton Heston’s turn. Clearly, all a conservative has to do in order to get his just deserts from the L.A. Times is to die on a slow news day.”
Television writer Burt Prelutsky is the author of Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco (101 Reasons Why I’m Happy I Left the Left).
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12 Comments
1. Snooper:Smart Media Moguls? Aren’t they extinct?
Apr 27, 2008 - 3:46 am 2. Paul S.:I, too, am convinced that extreme liberal bias accounts in part for declining circulation. I wish I could say It’s the principal reason, but I have yet to see any hard data that would support such a conclusion. (In fact, the almost vertical drop in classified advertising alone is a pretty significant factor.) I’d like to know how the circulations of papers like the WSJ, the New York Sun, the New York Post and the Washington Times have fared in contrast to The New York Times, et al. I’d also like to know how Time and Newsweek have performed relative to the liberal dailies. Altogether, it would make for an interesting study.
Apr 27, 2008 - 4:36 am 3. Increase Mather:Please let us know if they printed your letter…though I think I know the answer.
I gave up on the NY Times about seven years ago…also, the NYReview of Books, The Atlantic, and Harpers. Got sick of their conservative bashing…
Now that we have choices in reportage we don’t need the Left anymore.
Apr 27, 2008 - 7:58 am 4. Burt Prelutsky:Dear Increase Mather: There was no blue moon and Hell did not freeze over and, so, the L.A. Times did not print my letter.
Regards, Burt Prelutsky
Apr 27, 2008 - 10:20 am 5. Concerned Citizen:Today’s media moguls don’t actually own their companies, because they inherited it or are working for someone else as a “hired hand”. They get paid a big, fat salary even if they lose money, so why not make media they and their friends like instead of media a paying audience will like?
Apr 27, 2008 - 10:31 am 6. Mike Kelley:I think Concerned Citizen has a good point. Company managers today are paid so lavishly they don’t need to care about the companies they run. When a CEO signs his first contract, he is then financially set for life. CEO pay that used to be 30 times average worker salary is now something like 400-plus that number. High pay that is given to “align his interests with that of the company” actually makes him too rich to care about the little things, like profitability.
Apr 27, 2008 - 1:02 pm 7. Tom W.:It’s just peer pressure. The moguls are terrified of going to cocktail-cocaine parties and having their peers start chanting, “Youuuuuuuuu like Dick Chaaaaaayneeee. Youuuuuuuuu like Dick Chaaaaaayneeee.”
“Nah-ah! I do not! Stop saying that!”
The same goes for actors and journalists.
Sean and Georgie sitting in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love, then comes marriage
Then comes Sean with a baby carriage.
So Sean covers his ears, screams, and runs off to Tehran to hug mullahs. Or he writes a screenplay about some poor black soldier tricked into going to war for oil.
The denizens of Hollywood and the mainstream media are only thirteen years old.
Apr 27, 2008 - 4:23 pm 8. Pat:I think the movie business figures whatever it loses in the US it makes up overseas in “America-hating” countries…but those are disappearing, too.
Apr 27, 2008 - 5:31 pm 9. cfbleachers:Burt, if one was an arrogant prig…masquerading as an historian…one could ask “What’s the Matter with Manhattan?” or “What’s the Matter With Berkeley?”
Deadwood media are acting in manner inconsistent with their own economic health and welfare, in order to sustain a worldview.
The fact that the worldview they choose to espouse is arrogant, narrow-minded, hypocritical, antagonistic, puerile, elitist, anti-military, anti-American, anti-Israel, poorly researched, poorly edited, oftentimes forged, plagiarized or fauxtography-filled….is of little moment to them. It’s intent is and has been to indoctrinate opinions, not stimulate debate.
It’s intent is and has been to brainwash, not mind expand. It’s intent is and has been to grind out dissent, not advance discussion on topics of the day.
It’s intent is and has been to paint corporate America in a bad light, to denigrate the military, to denounce certain faiths, to peer pressure the easily swayed. It has become the Cultism of Communication. Hollywood is an arm, deadwood media is an arm, academia is an arm, the alphabet newsrooms are an arm. They have stifled, strangled, snuffed out not just dissent…but ANY voice expressing a different opinion within their confines.
Like a steam pressure valve…those points of view responded to the strangulation…by popping up in vents elsewhere. The blogosphere, talk radio, Fox News.
The leftists cling to their elitism and antagonist-theism because “belonging” to the peer pressure accepted group is more important than their own welfare. Certainly more important than the free expression of ideas and absolutely more important than the welfare of the country to which they belong in name only….not in heart or soul. These are people who are no longer proud to be Americans, they wish to be One World Socialists. They have a residence here, but are Timeshare Americans.
“What’s Wrong with Press Row?” They sold out and bought into Timeshare America.
Apr 28, 2008 - 2:13 am 10. Bugs:Regarding movies, am I correct in believing that actors and directors have a lot more power than they used to in the “movie mogul” days? Perhaps it’s just easier for these individuals to broadcast their beliefs and prejudices via their chosen medium. Being auteurs, they don’t necessarily care about the bottom line – they just want to get their message out, to make “important” films, to be lauded by their peers at the Academy Awards, to take home the Palme d’Or. Whether the general public enjoys what they produce – a minor consideration. What studio head today can tell Robert Redford not to make a movie he really believes in because the public will hate it?
Apr 28, 2008 - 9:40 am 11. Larry Rasczak:cfbleachers is right “Deadwood media are acting in manner inconsistent with their own economic health and welfare, in order to sustain a worldview.”
However, I don’t think it is an institutional world view, but a PERSONAL one.
Two factors are at work here. One is the “birds of a feather…” idea. George Will once quoted a New Yorker who said, with all honesty, “I don’t know how McGovern could have lost, everyone I know voted for him.” In a “hard” science or engineering one will hire and associate with people less on a matter of social compatibility than on basis of ability…(”He may be a little wierd, but he knows more about Laminar flow than anyone else in the country.”). Without objectively verifiable results, getting work in the arts or humanities becomes more a matter of who you know than what you know.
Secondly, the process of becoming a Leftist is a lot like the process of becoming dammed. It happens a little at a time but it is very difficult to go back.
Think a moment like a babyboomer. Lets say that in 1969 you were afraid of being drafted, so you began to loathe the military. You burned your draft card, yelled “Hell No We Won’t Go!” and did other various and sundry things. Even though it is almost 40 years later, and even though you have seen Saigon fall, Pol Pot’s killing fields, the “yellow rain” on the Meo, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9-11; to turn around now and embrace the military means that what you, personally, did in the 60’s was wrong.. If you are someone who spent years being openly and aggressively “anti-military”; if you suddenly admit that the kids who went to “Nam were doing the honorable, brave, patriotic, and even (dare we say it) heroic thing…what does that make you?
That is a pretty emotionally uncomfortable place to go for a lot of people. It means admitting to yourself that your Dad was probably right when he said you were “…nothing but a lazy, pot smoking, cowardly little draft dodger…”. Nobody wants to do that. So, no matter how much objective intellectual evidence you see, you won’t…do that…to much emotional pain attached to it. In fact psychologically you can’t, see the military as a group of heros; and your art will naturally enough reflect that.
Abortion is a similar tale. If you have had, or pushed a partner (or employee) to have an abortion, the guilt and pain that would follow from admitting to yourself that you had participated in the murder of an innocent child is going to be difficult to bear. You would have to see yourself as (literally) a “baby killer”. A few people are honest and strong enough to do this… many aren’t.
The list goes on and on. If you have had several affairs, and are on your third trophy wife, the conventional Christian teachings on divorce and adultery will not be something you are comfortable hearing. People who bought or sold drugs will, (at least not until they complete rehab) be comfortable admitting the pain they caused others by so doing.
On a personal, and even a professional level it is psychologically easier to make a money losing movie that you and your friends like, rather than one that makes money but that people find upsetting and that offends their political positions, because for many of the children of the 60s the political IS the personal. If you attack a Conservative’s views you attack his views, but if you attack a Liberal’s views, you (often as not) attack his conscience. This provokes a much nastier and much more personal reaction. Everyone agrees that John Milius is a brilliant film-make, but his resume has an almost three year long gap in it after he made RED DAWN.
Apr 28, 2008 - 11:15 am 12. Bugs:On the other hand, at least movie3 people have a relatively harmless outlet for their leftist impulses. Nobody really expects them to tell the truth and they can’t force us to act in ways contrary to our own beliefs and interests. The same cannot be said of leftist news reporters or leftist politicians.
Apr 30, 2008 - 7:44 am