I’m a fan of Chris Wallace and Fox News Sunday, but there’s no doubt he’s been having a tough time lately. Yesterday’s interview with Michele Bachmann was a case in point, but as it’s been covered plenty here at the Corner, I refer now to his interview with Jon Stewart of a week ago.
Stewart ate his lunch. If Wallace got in a single good punch, I must have missed it. If you just look at the body language during the interview, you can see who’s winning: Stewart is coiled and glancing gimlet-eyed at the host, while Wallace flinches back, awaiting the next blow. By the end of the interview, I half-expected to see Brit Hume or Roger Ailes throw in the towel and stop the fight.
I was scoring at home and thought Stewart landed at least three body blows to win on a TKO:
No. 1: The media’s bias is not necessarily toward liberalism per se, but “sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.” It’s true that the MSM skews heavily left, but speaking as someone who spent 25 years working in it, including 16 years at Time Magazine, the default inclination toward groupthink should not be discounted, especially when the chorus is lead by the New York Times, from which most other news organization still take their cues about what is important. If you want to break the liberal bias of the media, the way to do it is to break the Times’s news-judgment dominance.
Is the Times liberal? You bet it is.
No. 2: Similarly, Hollywood also skews left, but its primary bias is toward the product, not the ideology. ”I’m a comedian first,” said Stewart. “My comedy is informed by an ideological background — there’s no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand . . . is that Hollywood, yeah, they’re liberal, but that’s not their primary motivating force.”
I realize this is hard for many on the right to accept, but again I speak from personal experience: In no script or pitch meeting that I’ve ever attended has the topic been politics, much less on the set itself. It’s been story — how best and most effectively to dramatize the narrative. Are there jobs I’m not getting, meetings I’m not invited to, because everyone knows, or can easily find out, that I’m a conservative? Possibly. Probably.
On the other hand, there are jobs I did get precisely because of my military brat background or knowledge of music. Hey, it’s a tough racket, with a million writers chasing maybe 40 major motion pictures a year — when you see the lucky screenwriter up there on stage on Oscar night and he says it took ten years or more to get his movie made, he’s not kidding.
Yes, many movies are bad, but nobody sets out to make a bad movie or a movie badly; and, as Sam Goldwyn said, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Hollywood is, first and foremost, a relationship business. Producers have writers they like to work with, agents whose judgment they respect, directors they’ve partnered with in the past. Show business tends to run in families: If you want to change Hollywood, start sending your kids there. There may be a job in the WME or ICM mailroom.
No. 3: Stewart to Wallace: “Being a comedian is much harder than what you do.” As someone whose name is lost in the mists of history and legend (it might have been Edmund Gwenn) famously said: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”