Culture war? The right is not even in the game!

Harry Stein writes at City Journal about how all the targets of the entertainment industry's humor are always on the right.

It’s hardly happenstance that in a country evenly split between left and right, in entertainment programming the left/liberal worldview today reigns virtually unchallenged. As Andrew Klavan observes, it is now “almost an unwritten law of Hollywood that any glancing reference to real-life politics in a film or television show must be slanted left.” Just as viewers can safely assume that the straightlaced businessman on contemporary crime shows will turn out to be a bad guy, it’s an excellent bet that, far from knowing best, today’s sitcom dad will be a hapless lunkhead, while his fictional kids will be gung-ho environmentalists. If Ned Flanders of The Simpsons stands as TV’s idea of a do-gooding religious traditionalist, no one is fairer game on award-winning shows like 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation than real-life conservative pols, with Sarah Palin an especially attractive piñata. (Of course, President Obama is off-limits.)

For some of us on the right, this is a profound source of frustration, a key reason that we are not only losing the culture war but not even in the game. The problem is not so much a lack of comic targets on the left—why not a sitcom set on one of today’s insanely politically correct campuses or in a lapdog mainstream newsroom? Why no gags at the expense of a Joe Biden or Harry Reid?—as it is a shortage of network executives and creative types to make it happen.

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