Hollywood Bias and the Reagan Mini-Series

I think Timothy Noah misses the point of the flap over the Regan miniseries. If the movie was indeed an attempt to present a historically balanced view of the Reagans, there would have been protestations by those who would want the warts ignored, but it certainly wouldn't have been pulled. Rather, from what I have read, heard and seen, this miniseries is a study in all of the cliches about Reagan from a liberal point of view. The soundbites that I have heard are laughable and the script excerpts have been insane (like Reagan pondering that he might be the anti-christ, I mean, please).

We will remember that the original, and very critical, piece on this movie came from the NYT and Chris Matthews, hardly a Reagan-worshipping conservative, has been highly (indeed, remarkably) critical of this project.

I will allow that there is a reverance of Reagan by many, many American conservatives that transcends the empirical, and that is part of what has driven this critique. However, any fair-minded person of any ideological perspective would have to admit that having Streisand's husand in the lead role, where she was on the set constantly, raises a red flag. As I said when this first came up, it would be like Charlton Heston playing Clinton. Surely if we found out that there was going to be Clinton biopic coming out where Heston played Clinton, and Ken Starr was acting as an informal consultant, most liberals would be outraged?

Personally, I haven't gotten overly exercised over the whole thing. I am not an advocate of boycotts, and I simply wouldn't have watched the thing had it aired on CBS. For one thing, I tend not to like fictionalized biographies. I will say that this production doesn't help the argument that Hollywood isn't inherently biased.

As I asked several months ago: can anyone name a movie or tv show where the conservatives are painted as the good guys (let alone the liberals as the bad guys)? Rather, as I noted in that earlier post, it is pretty easy to find a plethora of shows and movies where the right is bad and the left is good. I can add one to the list: NBC's new (and now cancelled) show The Lyon's Den was shaping up as the good, liberal crusader versus the evil, money-grubbing, in-bed-with-greedy-corporate-type conservatives in the politicized setting of Washington, D.C. Now, it looked like an interesting show, but the political bias was clear.

Posted by Steven Taylor at November 6, 2024 10:27 AM | TrackBack