CBS and ‘The Reagans’

The back-and-forth over CBS’s “The Reagans” drama has been fascinating to watch. Of course in the face of pressure driven by conservatives, CBS decided to move the controversial mini-series to Showtime.

CBS’s statement announcing this is bizarre,

CBS will not broadcast The Reagans on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

It’s amusing to see how a major media outlet, when faced when its own scandal, spins as poorly as any politician out there. The decision had nothing to do with the outcry over the film? That’s about as believable as a CBS story about destroying weapons bunkers in Iraq.

Although the mini-series features impressive production values and acting performances, and although the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script, we believe it does not present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience. Subsequent edits that we considered did not address those concerns.

As far as I can tell, CBS is simply flat-out lying about their sourcing claims. As Patty Davis, who in the past has had less than flattering things to say about her famous family, notes in Time magazine,

In the New York Times on October 21st, one of the writers admitted that the line about AIDS victims was completely fabricated. In that same article, Jim Rutenberg reported that the producers claimed no major event was depicted without two confirming sources.

In fact, Davis cites numerous errors related to their depiction of her life in the film (emphasis added),

Nor do I remember conducting an impromptu yoga class at my wedding reception. (I promise you, no one at my wedding was chanting Om or Shanti.)

. . .

Consider the scene in a girlsÂ’ boarding school I supposedly was attending when my father was elected governor of California (I was never at an all-girlsÂ’ boarding school.) They have a classmate saying to me, “HitlerÂ’s just been elected governor.” No one writes a line like that with any other agenda except to wound.

But nothing beats the third paragraph of the CBS explanation of the switch to Showtime for “The Reagans,”

A free broadcast network, available to all over the public airwaves, has different standards than media the public must pay to view. We do, however, recognize and respect the filmmakers’ right to have their voice heard and their film seen. As such, we have reached an agreement to license the exhibition rights for the film to Showtime, a subscriber-based, pay-cable network. We believe this is a solution that benefits everyone involved.

Ah, I get it now — it’s okay to make absurdly bogus biographical films of people provided you show them on a pay-cable channel. How about a new slogan: Showtime — for the times when integrity is a liability!

Source:

‘The Reagans,’ From One of Them. Patti Davis, Time, November 3, 2003.

Frank Sulloway’s Other Hypothesis

A lot of weblogs are talking lately about a study originating out of Berkeley whose results are summed up by this ridiculous quote,

Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form.

A lot of people have commented on the validity (or lack thereof) of the study and some of its obvious failings (Stalin, et al are also counted as conservatives), but no one to my knowledge has noted the connections between this study and the other nutty theory put forth by one of its co-authors, Frank Sulloway.

Pseudo-scientific theories about conservatism are nothing new for Sulloway who is a prominent advocate of the mother of all psycho-babble historical claims. In his book Born to Rebel, Sulloway argued that birth order is the single most important force in history.

I’m not making this up or even exaggerating Sulloway’s claims. As Scott Rosenberg summed up the book in a review for Salon.Com,

Sulloway declares that “the primary engine of historical change” is sibling conflict, rooted in a Darwinian struggle within the family based on birth order: “Compared with firstborns, laterborns are more likely to identify with the underdog and to challenge the established order. Because they identify with parents and authority, firstborns are more likely to defend the status quo. The effects of birth order transcend gender, social class, race, nationality, and — for the last five centuries — time.”

Sulloway goes so far as to argue that a historical event such as the French Revolution is best explained not by class or ideology or historical context, but rather by the number of first-borns vs. later-borns in the various groups that came to power during the French Revolution.

And, as with the “Stalin was a conservative” line, sometimes in Sulloway’s “data”, a first-born can be a later-born. Galileo, for example, was a first-born and under Sulloways’ theory should have been a conservative supporter of the dominant worldview. But because Galileo was nine years older than his next sibling, Sulloway insists that he was “functionally an only child.” Similarly, as Paul Elovitz notes, Sulloway is also forced to dismiss first-born innovators such as Einstein,

For example, such first born innovators of new theories as Newton, Lavoisier, Freud, and Einstein are dismissed by quickly noting that “the supporters of innovation are still predominantly laterborn.” Of course they are; most people are later born, especially prior to the current low birth rate in Western culture.

As the Skeptic’s Dictionary points out, Born to Rebel is little more than a book-length case of confirmation bias,

Many social scientists also are guilty of confirmation bias, especially those who seek to establish correlations between ambiguous variables, such as birth order and ‘radical ideas’, during arbitrarily defined historical periods. If you define the beginning and end points of data collection regarding the idea of evolution in the way Frank Sulloway did in Born to Rebel, you arrive at significant correlations between functional birth order and tendency to accept or reject the theory of evolution. However, if you start with Anaximander and stop with St. Augustine, you will get quite different results, since the idea was universally rejected during that period.

Maybe I Underestimated Jimmy Carter

This blogger suggests that maybe people like me have underestimated Jimmy Carter,

Actually, I don’t think President Carter and his administration get enough credit for their pivotal roles in ending the Cold War. After all, his four years in office ensured Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980.

Point taken.