NBC: National Broadcasters Against Conservatives

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America.

For years, organizations like Code Pink, A.N.S.W.E.R., and MEChA have inflicted lunatic be-ins on a horrified public, the collective psychedelic derangement of which makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show look like A Room With a View. But then Freedom’s Watch arrived on the scene — let’s call them Code Red, White and Blue — and they came determined to honor our troops, damn the cost. In August of ’07, they first attempted to buy ad-time on major networks to run commercials supporting the war in Iraq. While Fox and CNN broadcast them without issue, NBC and its sister networks deemed them too controversial, which is liberal Pig Latin for too partisan, too outside the mainstream — in a word, too conservative. At the time, Freedom’s Watch president Bradley A. Blakeman wrote a polite letter to NBC, pointing out that the network has a long record of accepting ads from nakedly progressive groups without the slightest qualm.

(The Bob Hope display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.)

He might also have added, “That plaintive whining sound you hear is Bob Hope spinning in his grave.” As Hollywood’s most beloved wartime icon, the British-born comedian spent a half-century enriching NBC’s coffers while praising our military at every turn. His 1970 and ’71 Christmas Specials, filmed on the ground in Vietnam, still rank among the most-watched television shows of all-time. But save for an impressive schiltron of American flags displayed on holidays, Hope’s legacy long ago faded from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In the end, the network’s wingtipped, Armani-clad Brahmins never deigned to answer Blakeman’s letter, quietly consigning his request for ad-time to the good ol’ circular filing cabinet, one with a metaphorical temperature edging dangerously close to Ray Bradbury’s dystopian 451 degrees.

Then in December of ’07, Freedom’s Watch tried again with a pair of innocuous commercials that, to this viewer, soothed and fortified like exquisite mouthfuls of Mom’s home cooking. These new spots depicted people from all walks of life offering simple, heartfelt benedictions to our troops, and while their aura of optimism recalled Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” ads, the underlying message was, by any reasonable standard, universal. Judge for yourself:

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Astoundingly, these too were rejected by a sober-faced NBC. The problem this time? Including FW’s web address on the tail-end of each ad, an act which apparently violated the network’s Standards and Practices.

Standards and Practices…boy, that’s rich. In recent years, NBC’s practices have famously included living the high life at the expense of the companies they cover, as well as manufacturing stories on everything from anti-Muslim hate crimes to exploding cars. In the process, they’ve degenerated from a once-proud news bastion into the peacock battalion of America’s fifth column, force-feeding viewers doom-and-gloom propaganda slickly masqueraded as unbiased news. Running a sincere message of hope in a time of war would indeed appear to go against everything they stand for these days, although — who knows? — it might help them reverse their agonizing slide into their lowest news ratings in over twenty years.

Freedom’s Watch president Blakeman promptly fired off a new letter of protest, but few believed he’d have better luck than last time — that is, until storm clouds started to form on the public-relations horizon. Cruising the conservative blogosphere in the days following the rejection, I could sense astonishment quickly hardening into genuine outrage. In forum after forum, the network began getting an earful from Americans with friends and family in the armed services. Soon the cacophony had grown to the point where NBC announced that it was reversing course and amending its (allow me to gird myself to say the words with a straight face) Standards and Practices.

And so, just like that, Freedom’s Watch won. Not an election or a court case, but merely the simple right to buy, at great expense, the time with which to say “thank you” to our heroic fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends and spouses fighting and dying in faraway lands. This confrontation proved instructive. As Robert Avrech’s Memorial Day post here at Big Hollywood showed, conservatives often pine for the olden days when America was largely united on patriotic matters. It seems possible to at least partially resurrect that (semi-mythical) time, but only if we insist on more from our shared broadcast media than the desiccated “standards and practices” of a corrupt liberal thugocracy.

During that holiday season of 2007, the NBC show with the most cultural buzz was Heroes, a sleeper hit about ordinary people mysteriously imbued with comic-book superpowers. It’s nice to know that — courtesy of Freedom’s Watch — America’s real-life heroes were honored on NBC during that Christmas as well. Granted, we only got it in precious little windows of thirty seconds each, but it was a start on the long road toward cultural recovery and renewal.

Freedom’s Watch was a victim of the collapsing economy of 2008, and there will be no new Christmas commercials from them thanking our troops. But one imagines that in December of 2007, somewhere in the heavens, Bob Hope cracked a smile at all of the people who twisted NBC’s corporate arm and said, “Thanks for the Memory.”

Those conservatives pining for a bit of that ol’ time patriotism can buy Bob Hope: The Vietnam Years (1964-1972).