Politics? It’s everywhere

WHEN Sherri Shepherd and her cohorts on ABC’s “The View” start screaming at one another about the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical-left group that bombed the Pentagon, it appears as if something strange has leaked into the American water supply.

Once upon a time, except for the occasional drive-by comment during acceptance speeches at the Emmys or the odd plug for a pet cause, TV entertainers would seldom be heard voicing explicit political opinion over the airwaves. Now, you can’t get on-air talent to button up about the overheated presidential race.

Robert Schmuhl, a Notre Dame professor who’s written widely on politics and the media, points out that in the past, politicians would use entertainment shows more or less as a photo op -- for example, Bill Clinton trying to connect with young voters by playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show in 1992.

“This year, it is much more pronounced,” Schmuhl said. “The interest in the campaign is probably the driving force behind it. The contrasts are so sharp, the characters are so vivid, that all of this lends itself to appearing on entertainment as well as public affairs programming.”

Another driving force, of course, is the bottom line. Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” have proved there’s gold in political lampoons. Producers of “The View” made a conscious and widely reported decision to go political this season, and since then, ratings have gone up. In a divided America, partisanship has become another spectator sport.

Yet as hard as it may be to believe, this kind of civic opinion-mongering was not tolerated on entertainment programs until fairly recently. The Fairness Doctrine mandated by the Federal Communications Commission required broadcasters to offer equitable and balanced viewpoints on controversial issues. The policy may have sounded reasonable in the abstract, but in practice, it proved an enormous pain in the rear end. As a result, most programming executives took the path of least resistance and made sure political discussion stayed strictly inside the bounds of news and public-affairs programs. Getting political was by no means illegal, but it was frowned upon.

Recall that Tommy Smothers -- who picked up a special award at last month’s Emmy telecast -- and his brother Dick famously got their popular variety program axed by CBS in 1969 after battling the censors over tart sketches on the Vietnam War and other political topics.

The pendulum swung the other way when the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which paved the way for talk radio, an explosion of cable-news shows such as Bill O’Reilly’s and now the creeping politicization of typically apolitical shows, such as “The View” and “Late Show With David Letterman.” Liberals have been so aggrieved by talk radio that some Democrats have advocated reinstating the doctrine, although so far to little avail. Democrats would do well to remember that outside of talk radio, many of the opinions expressed on broadcast outlets are favorable to liberal causes and politicians, as evidenced by comments made this season by Oprah Winfrey and Letterman.

THE HOT TOPICS round-table segment on “The View” -- a show usually devoted to such burning issues as which B-list celeb got voted off “Dancing With the Stars” -- has lately resembled the vortex of a road-rage incident. Shepherd got into a screaming match earlier this month with cohost Elisabeth Hasselbeck -- the show’s token pro-John McCain foil -- over Barack Obama’s ties to former Weatherman Bill Ayers and McCain’s divorce from his first wife.

“Saturday Night Live” has seized the spotlight with Tina Fey’s goofs on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, so much so that Palin may reportedly make a campaign stop on NBC’s sketch show later this month. And of course, Winfrey, our age’s most powerful broadcasting personality, has been a virtual endorsement machine for Obama.

And yet for all this, entertainment programs still seem guided by irrational double standards when it comes to direct political expression. (As for sublimated political expression, sometimes it glides by with relatively little scrutiny, such as on Fox’s terrorism thriller “24,” while other times it explodes into controversy, as on the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11”).

Letterman, whose politics used to be mostly inscrutable, spent half a recent show trashing McCain for skipping a scheduled interview. (On Sunday, CBS announced that McCain will appear on the show Thursday.) A subsequent Letterman program featured an unusually direct attack on the White House: a lengthy montage of clips from President Bush’s speeches, with a loud buzzer at the end of every statement the program deemed wrong or deceptive.

BUT EARLIER this month, when the Los Angeles rock band No Age arrived to tape a performance on CBS’ “Late Late Show,” one of the members was told he couldn’t wear his Obama T-shirt during the performance. CBS explained in a statement that the T-shirt could have been construed as an on-air endorsement and thus might trigger the equal-time rule. That provision is designed to prevent broadcasters from favoring one candidate over others (news programs are exempt). That meant that every presidential candidate, even ones representing fringe parties, could have bombarded CBS stations requesting time after the Obama T-shirt appeared.

Given that Letterman had just gone medieval on McCain, CBS was left offering viewers a mixed message: It’s OK for a late-night host to chew out a major presidential candidate over the public airwaves, but guests had better leave those T-shirts and campaign buttons at home. No matter how the network might try to explain it, that position doesn’t make much sense.

This is not necessarily the broadcasters’ fault. Network television, because it’s still considered to be broadcast over public airwaves, remains a semi-regulated industry, subject to a blizzard of confusing and sometimes self-contradictory federal rules.

Network executives point out, for example, that the FCC has considered one part of a program to be subject to the equal-time provision, while another segment of the same program is not. Meanwhile, TV competes against other media, such as print and online, whose content the government assiduously refrains from regulating.

So it’s not necessarily surprising that networks often struggle to find a middle ground when it comes to political expression. What’s noteworthy this season is how intense that expression has become, and how entertainers are starting to frame political issues in ways that mainstream journalistic organizations are sometimes no longer willing or able to do.

After McCain went on “The View” last month and got drubbed by the hosts for questionable accuracy in some of his campaign ads, a friend of mine posted a Facebook update that expressed a widely heard sentiment, thanking “the ladies of ‘The View’ for doing the job the mainstream press ought to be doing.”

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The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com