Only 33% said the entertainment industry was having a positive effect. 51% said it was having a negative effect. What I don’t understand is why the entertainment industry didn’t blow the lid off the survey on the positive side. It’s entertainment. Doesn’t everyone want to be entertained? Since Pew only asked a single question, we can’t effectively drill into this result to learn any hard and fast truths. However, by examining other studies, there are some inferences we may be able to draw.

The entertainment industry was but one of thirteen institutions the Pew survey mentioned, so it seems reasonable to conclude that respondents were very well aware what they were being asked. The question was not, “what is your opinion about the quality of entertainment you see from Hollywood?” The question was about the industry’s influence on the trajectory of the country, in the gestalt. Apparently, just over half the respondents think that Hollywood is, simply put, a bad influence. If the comments left for Big Hollywood articles are of any indication, people don’t feel Hollywood represents their values, morals, ethics, political views, religious views, or much of anything else. People fail to identify with the characters they see on the screen. They don’t care for dramatic or comedic situations presented. They don’t agree with what Tom Hanks or James Cameron or Sean Penn or Roger Ebert have to say about a wide variety of topics.

Are these assertions valid? It’s impossible to say without a scientific survey. The anecdotal evidence, however, seems to suggest as much. A 2008 survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League found that 59% of Americans believe “that the people who run the TV networks and the major movie studios do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans.” Before anyone raises a claim of bias in the survey, it was conducted by Marttila Communications Group, run by John Marttila, a senior advisor to John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Let’s go one step further. The 1998 book Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures, is essentially an exhaustive scientific study of this issue. Among many conclusions, the authors found that, “Hollywood…ideology is generally left-leaning and highly critical of traditional features of modern society”.

The study’s blockbuster results, however, seem to support much of the reason for Big Hollywood’s very existence. Have a look at this:

“We tapped the movie elite’s views on trends in their own medium of expression…67% agreed that movies should promote social reform…81% disagreed that movies were too critical of traditional values…76% disagreed that there was too much sex in the movies—a statistic that shows just how differently this group views its art from the way in which the general public, which has consistently expressed concern over the issue, sees it”.

There’s more, and I quote at length here because it really explains the Pew results.

“Prindle and Endersby (1993)…indicate that Hollywood remains more liberal than the American public on a wide range of issues…raising taxes, less admiring of American business, more favorably inclined towards government regulation of business, and less suspicious of labor unions than is the public in general…the authors also argued that it was virtually impossible to measure traditionally conservative attitudes among the Hollywood elite, as they could find few, if any, representatives of such attitudes.”

Et tu, Nikki Finke?

Further, it stands to reason that, if 51% of people feel the entertainment industry is having a negative effect on the country, then we would expect them to avoid consumption of media content produced by Hollywood. Unquestionably, this would appear to be the case. Television viewership is sharply declining and box office admissions have been flat to down for the past several years. The MPAA reported that in 2009, 32% of Americans simply did not go to the movies, compared to 26% in 2006 and 24% in 2004. The trend suggests further support for the hypothesis that ideology is driving audiences away. Again, however, the data is not strictly scientific. After all, one might just as easily point to the rise of on-demand internet content as being the primary driver of this trend.

Nevertheless, while the reasons behind Pew’s results are unexplored, the anecdotal evidence seems to provide an explanation. Admittedly, my conclusions are not scientific and should not be relied upon as such. But as the saying goes, when you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras.

This leads us to an inevitable query: does Hollywood’s apparent left-leaning ideology impact revenues? I’ll examine that issue in my next article.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center has discovered that Democrats tend to be less happy than Republicans. That comes as no surprise to me. For the past eight years we have been listening to the whining about a stolen election, a war for oil, shredding the Constitution, Halliburton Halliburton Halliburton! You would think that now that they own both Houses of Congress and the White House, they should be happy. The economy is in the tank (as we told them would happen, if they ever got control of the government) but yet they still don’t seem to be happy.

The Tea Parties completely put them over the edge. Apparently we’re not allowed to have protest rallies and we’re not allowed to compare this President to a dictator from a previous era, as was their practice during the last administration. They call us mean and racist and use a sexual profanity too describe our movement. For some reason they seem even less happy, than they were when they were out of power.

Perhaps by forfeiting the last election, we have taken the purpose out of their lives.

It has been suggested there is far more unhappiness for the rich than there is for the poor; because if your life is imperfect (as it is for most of us) at least the poor can dream about how they might someday become rich. There is an eternal hope that money changes everything. Unfortunately for the rich, they already have the money, so there is nothing to hope for; and when hope is lost, so goes the spirit. Perhaps what we are seeing on the Left is that they have lost their hope. By voting for the Hope, they now have nothing to hope for. Meanwhile, nothing has Changed.

I might be rushing to conclusions though. Maybe being a Democrat doesn’t make it more difficult to be a happy person; rather, people are drawn to the Democrat Party because they are unhappy already. There is a certain kind of person in this world, a person who sees conspiracies everywhere. They see a conspiracy of Christians who want to bring back the Spanish Inquisition. They see a conspiracy of anti-intellectuals who want to ban science and burn books. They see a conspiracy of corporatists who want to reduce us to Eloi slaves, and march us into the kitchens when the Morlock dinner bell rings. These are the same people who think that the earth is being poisoned and toxins are everywhere.  In short, these are people with severe mental illness.

Where else are they going to go? The Republican plank of laissez-faire will not appeal to hypochondriacs and paranoids. These people need an outside force to coddle them and tell them everything is going to be all right. They want access to a doctor who is forced by the government to listen to them recite their ailments on a daily basis, completely free of charge. These functions used to be provided by churches and mental institutions; but the trend away from religion and the laws against involuntary institutionalization have allowed these patients to wander into the voting booths. They will be discontented with any government that does not promise to regulate every aspect of their lives, putting things into nice neat rows, and giving away everything for free.

In a way I think that people who run the Democrat Party intuitively know this. They know that if the people are kept miserable that they will overwhelmingly vote Democrat. I believe it’s why they really don’t care what damage their economic policies will have on us all. They don’t care if Cap and Trade will put the economy into a death spiral, or if their universal health care will start a declining life expectancy rate for the first time in American History. Because the more the misery, the better it is for them.

And for the truly miserable, the only balm is the knowledge that other people are just as miserable as you are. So what better way to find friends than to ensure there is an entire nation of miserables alongside you, living next door in the government provided housing, with equal access to a doctor, authorized to assist your suicide?

That’s what happens in other parts of the world. Most notably in the Social Paradises of Europe, places that consistently rank higher than us on the “Quality of Life” scale; those nations where the suicide rates are dramatically higher than here in the United States. I speculate it is because the ability to achieve is strictly limited over there. No matter how hard you work, you will still be living in the same neighborhood with the guy who spends his day sitting at home. What motivation is there too succeed when you will end up living in the same rabbit hutch next door to people who don’t even bother to get out of bed in the morning? Hope is the factor that inspires us to go on and by equalizing outcomes socialized Europeans have legislated hope out of existence.

It would be overwhelmingly depressing, if I didn’t believe that Americans will not stand for this. Democrats have confused a slim majority with a mandate and they are now over-reaching. I have hope, that the policies being pitched today will not survive beyond the 2010 election.

But enough nonsense, it’s getting late now … time to mow the lawn.