No One Can Blame TV for Big-Biz Mess

There’s no biz like big biz.

We know that from the conga line of CEOs and other key executives from giant companies suspected of hanky-panky in the wave of accounting scandals pounding Wall Street and costing investors their savings.

Confidence in capitalism’s top guns has sunk in recent months, along with the stock market. It’s now so low that President Bush, no foe of business, is motivated to censure them with an eye toward restoring confidence in the economy. And hundreds of corporations were ordered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to file sworn statements this week attesting to the accuracy of their recent financial reports.

Corruption reeking at the loftiest corporate levels? Possible criminal behavior by the rich and mighty?

A perfect greed-driven scenario for TV drama.

One that prime time has traditionally turned to for big ratings, from scheming J.R. Ewing in “Dallas”--who once engineered a foreign coup to regain his holdings--to “The Simpsons,” where Homer’s nefarious boss, Mr. Burns, operates a pollution-spewing nuclear power plant and other shady ventures that make him the most powerful man in Springfield.

It’s a widely evoked TV scenario, also, that used to be condemned regularly by conservatives who accused the medium of an anti-business bias (even though the television industry itself was big business).

These were voices of the right who believed that TV entertainment shilled for the left. The same voices that, in light of accounting debacles embroiling Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and others, are now silent on this topic, apparently in the belief that this is no time to champion corporations and attack TV for making big business a heavy.

Big business is doing that well enough on its own.

The silent ones include even ranting, red-in-the-face L. Brent Bozell. Yet it was only five years ago that left-bashing Bozell and his conservative watchdog, the Media Research Center of Alexandria, Va., were crowing about their 26-month study declaring broadcast TV’s prime time guilty of “cynicism toward business that it does not show toward any other” occupations.

What a difference a few years make, ironically, for most of what Bozell’s group derided would probably earn those networks plaudits today.

The 1997 study, for example, found that TV’s business characters committed more crimes, including murder, than those depicted in other occupations, and were more likely to cheat than contribute to society. Characters in big business, moreover, were portrayed by TV as more contemptible than those in small business.

These findings closely corroborated an earlier study by the Washington-based Media Institute that found that more than half of corporate chiefs on TV committed crimes ranging from fraud to murder.

Take away TV’s emphasis on murder, and what you have here pretty much echoes anti-business public opinion today--an unfair assessment of collective guilt that approaches the berating U.S. lawyers regularly get from Bush and other critics of the legal community.

The Media Research Center went on to urge that prime-time programmers consider “the possible effect this bias could have on society.” There’s been no evidence of this TV abuse shaping attitudes about business, however, or that the nation’s ill will toward corporate America predated today’s on-going Wall Street follies.

Why does TV so frequently cast big-business characters as vile scum? Don’t join Bozell in looking for sneaky ideologues hoping to fill brains with anti-capitalist propaganda. Although TV projects biases regularly, it’s largely the product of pragmatists not cabalists aligned to a specific political philosophy.

“Blacks, women, Italians, Hispanics, everyone writes letters complaining about how they are portrayed on television,” Barney Rosenzweig, executive producer of “Cagney & Lacey,” once told the New York Times. “That’s why I love businessmen--they don’t write me letters.”

Nor are many likely to start protesting now, given the dramatic loss of credibility by rich corporate moguls--including even Martha Stewart--accused of getting still richer at the expense of investors. In fact, all of this makes them even fatter targets in dramas that traditionally pluck ideas from headlines.

“No one argues that all businessmen are squeaky clean or necessarily better than the population [as] a whole,” Michael Fumento wrote in Investor’s Business Daily a decade ago. “But the crimes that businessmen sometimes do commit--embezzlement, income tax evasion, selling faulty goods, hiding bad effects of products, antitrust violations, insider trading--are rarely the ones they are depicted as committing.”

Expect that to change.

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Blah blah blah about business extends all across television these days, from the gasbaggery of pundits on talk and interview shows to the snickers aimed at this week’s economic forum called by Bush in Waco, Texas.

It was here, at the Baylor University law school, where TV cameras at one point captured the president apparently deep in thought, judiciously taking notes as someone else spoke, then tearing off a sheet of paper and taking more notes.

Oh, please. The business of presidents, and all politicians, has always included posing for self-serving photo ops.

This one reminded me of a day in 1980 when I was riding the press bus accompanying Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) as he campaigned in Illinois for the Democratic presidential nomination (which incumbent Jimmy Carter would win).

When Kennedy’s bus came to an unscheduled halt at a service station, he jumped off and, encircled by cameras, engaged an attendant in a dialogue beside a pump. Kennedy’s manner was grave, his face projecting concern.

What was that all about? I asked a Kennedy aide, and he replied: “The senator’s learning about the price of gas.” He didn’t already know? And he could learn only while basking in the sunlight of dutifully attentive media?

There’s also no biz like show biz.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com