Sesame Street Has Liberal Bias, New Ben Shapiro Book, Primetime Propaganda, Asserts

Big Bird? More like big government. And don't even start trying to list all the hidden innuendo jam packed in Tickle Me Elmo.

And that's not Oscar the Grouch speaking; it's the very expert opinion of lawyer and author Ben Shapiro, whose new book "Primetime Propaganda," takes on what he alleges is Hollywood's liberal bias.

Shapiro, a syndicated columnist whose books include "Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future," asserts in his new tome that there is an inherent and very intentional effort by entertainment industry leaders to "shape America in their own leftist image," as he told the UK's Independent.

Chief amongst Shapiro's alleged liberal offenders is Sesame Street, the Jim Henson-created educational show carried on PBS, the public network with few conservative fans or defenders.

Citing interviews with one of the show's creators, early episodes of the show featuring hippies and racial reconciliation and, more recently, incidents such as 2009's "Pox News" controversy, Shapiro writes that "Sesame Street tried to tackle divorce, tackled 'peaceful conflict resolution' in the aftermath of 9/11 and had Neil Patrick Harris on the show playing the subtly-named 'fairy shoeperson.'"

<snip>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/sesame-street-has-liberal-bias_n_868887.html

urban setting, ethnic diversity, sharing cookies...

I figured he would have grown up and found something productive to do with his time after all these years.

Kindness, civility, tolerance, knowing how to count to ten... all things conservatives loathe.

For it to show "no bias" to Conservs, Several characters would have had to get thrown in jail, executed, or deported. Plus the Count would have foreclosed on Bert and Ernie, and they would have been beaten up by the Grouch for being "different".

It's called "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome."

...because it shows kids of all different ethnic backgrounds getting along, and promotes education. And don't even get them started on Bert and Ernie!

One would think a fact based reality would be better than a 'make it up as you go' kind, based on the talking point du jour, per the agenda.

they're teaching the kids real stuff, not that conservojunk that's being served up now a days.

Won't somebody think of the children?!?

conservatives would rather have a nation of feral children

:eyes: :crazy:

society the way Shapiro & Co./the Ayn Rand crowd want would be a hellhole

and that Pox News nontroversy reflected more on the howlers than the root message, why can't those conservatives take a joke, they always keep talking trash about gays, communist college professors, Muslims, envirowackos, feminazis, those despised others...they get what they ask for

if you're REALLY looking for primetime propaganda, the O'Reilly and Hannity TV shows? the Christian TV networks?

makes conservatives uncomfortable.

I wouldn't be the understanding, logical, empathy-loving human being I am today without the Cookie Monster or the Count.

O8)

definitely a liberal bias.

Shapiro and Cotton Mather. Two of a kind.

In regard to the Salem witch trials, however, it was Mather's interest in the craft and actions of Satan that won him an audience with the most powerful figures involved in the trial proceedings, several of the judges and the local ministers in Salem. Before the outbreak of accusations in Salem Village, Mather had already published his account, Remarkable Providences (1684), describing in detail he possession of the children of the Goodwin family of Boston. Mather actually took the eldest of the children, 13-year-old Martha, into his home to make a more intense study of the phenomenon. Later scholars have suggested that this book in fact outlined the symptoms of clinical hysteria. It was this same hysteria that provided the behavioral model for the circle of "afflicted" girls during the trials in Salem. Mather, however, used his experience with Goodwins to further his notion that New England was in fact a battleground with Satan. Similar themes appear in his sermons and in the Preface to one of his children's books, in which he warns young readers: "They which lie, must go to their father, the devil, into everlasting burning; they which never pray, God will pour out his wrath upon them; and when they bed and pray in hell fire, God will not forgive them, but there must lie forever. Are you willing to go to hell and burn with the devil and his angels?". Thus, the subject of eternal damnation weighed constantly upon Mather's mind, and it resonates in his own diary accounts. Scholars suggest that Mather's dramatic descriptions the devil's activity upon the young Goodwin children may have led to the first cry of witchcraft among the young girls in Salem Village.
. . . .
Accounts of eye-witnesses and historians paint a more contradictory portrait of Mather's hand in the trials. Mather is haunted in history by the account given in Robert Calef's book More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700) of his conduct at the hanging of former Salem minister George Burroughs. Calef reported that Burroughs recited a perfect rendition of the Lord's Prayer while on the gallows, something Mather himself thought impossible for anyone guilty of an alliance with the devil. The crowd was so moved that some wanted to prevent the execution. Mather, mounted on his horse, proclaimed that Burroughs was no ordained minister, and that the "Devil has often been transformed into an Angel of Light." With those words, under the tearful gaze of an ambivalent crowd the George Burroughs was hanged.

More at
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/salem/people/c_mather.html

kindness toward family, compassion toward strangers, and helping your community have been so thoroughly co-opted as "liberal" values.

The GOP only cares about fetuses. Once they are born, they become "Welfare cheats" and nothing more.

Dincha know?

Most of the rest was pretty expected - if a lunatic Republican is going to say reconciliation is a liberal plot, then we're happy to claim it, and watch him push his fellow right-wingers further off the map of acceptable behaviour.

But I was surprised at this in the Independent article:



I can't say I ever spotted that. It seemed very commercial to me - about what people would enjoy watching. Hell, I'd say it promoted 'family values' - I'd have said a lot of conservatives would have liked it for that.

Being educated is a well known liberal trait.

dropped on his head alot when he was small. Whadda maroon, in the words of Bugs Bunny.