When Richard Nixon, then Vice-President, appeared on the old Tonight Show with Jack Paar, everyone assumed that the spot was intended by Paar to let the public see what Tricky was like in a different setting than what they were used to seeing him in. Paar was an endearing and probing interviewer but always welcomed his guests with equal positive vibes: no one could tell what Jack’s politics were, and no one wanted to know.
For decades, we just assumed that TV entertainment wanted to make us laugh, cry, feel, be excited and happy, not to make us back the entertainers’ political agendas. That may have been naive, but the nation’s ethics and values were less divided then, and that was a good thing. Politically driven leftist playwrights like Arthur Miller would use their works to attack capitalism or Joe McCarthy, and Ed Sullivan might have a scene from “The Crucible” on his Sunday night variety show, but it was not so Ed could take sides in a political controversy.
Today, however, because the political right was lazy, inattentive, apathetic and foolish for so long, entertainment is critical to the Left’s efforts to re-make America. The “Law and Order” franchise has featured its cops treating “good illegal immigrants” as sympathetic martyrs who “just want a better life” for decades. All shows now promote DEI relentlessly: virtually every couple is interracial or some kind of LGBTQ coupling. Inspired by Comedy Central’s rise under John Stewart, every single late night comedy show after Craig Fergusen’s “Late Late Show” ended in 2014 shifted to open hostility to conservatives and Republicans. Colbert and Kimmel were the most aggressive, but as the conservative media watchdog “Newsbusters” has chronicled regularly, Democrats and anti-Trump critics in the news media have been featured and feted on these shows while conservatives have been shunned. NewsBusters’ analysis of five major late-night shows since September 2022 revealed a 97% liberal/Democratic guest rate, and that was just the inevitable result of a long trend. Google, which is an Axis ally, states, “Republicans often cite this data as evidence of systemic bias in late-night television.” Sound familiar? Those silly Republicans! Why would they complain about a 97% to 3% bias favoring the Left? After all, Democrats think this is, as Tony the Tiger would say, “G-R-R-R-REAT!”
The two most egregious examples of attempted election interference in 2024 prove my point. “Entertainment” late night show” “Saturday Night Live”, which barely mocked Barack Obama during his eight years dividing the nation and somehow couldn’t find comedy gold in President Joe Biden doing an extended “Being There” imitation for four years turned its last show before the 2024 election into an extended campaign ad for Kamala Harris. A weekend or two earlier, CBS’s “60 Minutes” set out to deceive its viewers, especially its independent viewers, by using deceptive editing to make Kamala appear to be less of a muddled, DEI-promoted empty suit than she is.
It’s true, cable shows and streaming services provide many alternate landing places for the public if it wants to reject indoctrination by the Left…in theory. In reality, the ideological Left rules those roosts too. Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney are completely woke-dominated.
And, of course, the Mad Left and Democrats love this, just as they love their domination of journalism and education at all levels. To the progressives’ credit, if conservatives had been anywhere near as alert and reactive as the Axis of Unethical Conduct is, we might never have reached the point where popular culture is an almost irresistible leftist propaganda bubble. The Trump Administration taking the minor step of repurposing the “Equal Time” rule to foil at least some of late night TV’s efforts to tilt public opinion isn’t going to have much impact, but if it’s toothless, why are Colbert, MSNOW, anti-Trump pundits and the Washington Post so upset about it?
They are terrified that the jig is up.
Good.
Ethics Alarms 
Late-night TV is just trying to appeal to its late-night liberal audience. Most conservatives aren’t watching TV after about 10 PM, because they need to get up in the morning and go to work, or (on Sundays) to church. No late-night comedian is worth losing sleep over, even if they’re making fun of people you don’t like. If the conservatives aren’t in bed during the late-night slot, it’s because they’re working the eves or night shifts, keeping the world running while the funny men are mocking them on TV.
Interesting theory: late night television is an echo chamber. Maybe the daytime “news” shows are as well. Morning Joe. Who watches that other than the true believers? Who’s going to have their mind changed listening to Joe or Mika? And likely same for Fox. Maybe it’s best to just ignore Colbert and Kimmel. They’re not drumming up any new votes for their side, just stroking their existing voters.
I wondered when the old, outdated rule argument would surface.
Consider this:
“The government shouldn’t be dictating the political content of late-night television — or of any other entertainment Americans choose to consume. But that’s exactly what the equal-time rule does. It is rooted in an entirely different technological landscape; in the early 20th century, scarce radio frequencies meant that the means of mass communication were limited. That’s why Congress saw fit to try to mandate that all candidates got a hearing.”
First of all, in its “explanation” of the equal time rule, the Post deliberately muddles the intent of Congress in passing it. Congress wisely (omg, did I actually write that??) thought that it would be in the public interest to prevent networks from supporting only one side of the public debate on the publicly-owned broadcast spectrum. That spectrum, last time I checked, is still publicly owned, CBS is still a lessee and the subject broadcast was supposed to air on broadcast television.
For a Leftist outlet like the Post, fairness is supposed to be perhaps the most cherished touchstone of any debate, yet because reminding it’s audience of the two fundamental motivations for the FCC rule — fairness and the public interest — would undermine its argument, the post just glosses over them altogether and argues by implication that freedom of entertainment choice is the most important thing.
Again, it is with sadness that I observe many people, perhaps even a majority, are so unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking that they will accept this editorial as holy writ. But make no mistake — this was a malicious, deliberately partisan and utterly facile argument, and the Post knows it. Verdict: Deliberately and intentionally unethical.
Thanks Glenn. Comment of the Day. I should have let you write the post.
Thanks, Jack. Appreciated, as always.
The same argument could be made that the government should not be enforcing these ancient monopoly rules. If all the pharmaceutical companies in the country merge, why should the government care? They can be more efficient by not duplicating research efforts and by efficiency of scale. These people who are upset that the benevolent pharmaceutical monopoly won’t provide affordable, effective cures, but instead are only marketing expensive treatments that require other drugs to treat the side effects are just whiners. So what if all the food is terrible and marketed by one large agri-monopoly. If you want something different, just try to start your own business without access to stores, transportation, fertilizer, boxes, packaging, packing plants, or anything else that are tied up with exclusive monopoly contracts. It is like the internet. If you don’t like the internet monopoly dictated by the government, just create your own internet to compete. Forget the fact that the internet was built with a lot of taxpayer dollars, eminent domain, and government easements. You do it by yourself. Now, the government will stop you with regulations and lawsuits. Why isn’t that fair? We need to make sure the elites of society make sure the commoners don’t get any crazy ideas from ‘those people’. If you don’t think so, you must be a member of the alt-right, or the extreme right, or be a Christian Nationalist, or whatever new ‘scary’ word the journalism community is going to invent and pretend is an accepted term for a objectively ‘bad’ group.