Who needs the Hollywood left?

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Media coverage of political activity by celebrities - Column

The hysteria over political correctness in university curricula seems, at last, to have run its loopy course. We rarely hear anymore that classes in cross-dressing are driving Shakespeare and Milton off required-reading lists, or that manhating feminists are taking over entire departments, leaving the terrorized males dazed and impotent. I guess Dinesh D'Souza and Camille Paglia ran out of horror stories - or big-bucks speaking gigs - at long last.

I confess I was a bit sorry to see headlines die; it was flattering, after all, to read and hear, day after day, about the enormous power and influence of leftists and feminists. But I needn't have worried. There is a new official enemy of the people, said by the mainstream media to be waging and winning the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of America: the "Hollywood Left."

It started with Dan Quayle's attack on the creators of Murphy Brown. Then there was last year's denunciation of the "new Hollywood McCarthyism" by Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. According to Stanley and her celebrity informants (who chose to remain anonymous because, it was implied, they feared for their careers), such "left-wing" "superstars" as Ron Silver, Rob Lowe, and Morgan Fairchild wield so much coercive power over Hollywood movies and movie stars these days that it is professionally risky to assert in public any right-of-center views. (That such actual superstars and power brokers as Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger do so regularly did not occur to any of Stanley's "sources.")

Not to be outdone in the realm of fear and loathing, Harpercollins added to the political paranoia with PBS movie critic Michael Medved's bestseller Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, a 383-page diatribe against Hollywood's "alienated ideological agenda." In Medved's view, it is the goal of the powers that be in Hollywood to drive traditional values - family, patriotism, and religion - from the silver screen, to the dismay of the much-cited "middle-American majority," who crave such wholesome fare.

Where the hype about academic revolutionaries was hard to support - since few people, even those with children in college, ever saw any evidence of the revolutionary goings-on said to be rampant in college classrooms - the Hollywood situation is different. Everyone who watched the Academy Awards last April, for example, did indeed see several major stars - Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, and Richard Gere, for example - making impassioned political pleas. And everyone who watches any televised art or entertainment awards show or reads any of the popular celebrity/entertainment magazines, for that matter, has witnessed public "political activity" on the part of celebrities.

Given all this attention, it's no wonder people believe the right-wing propaganda about Hollywood being in the thrall of radical activists: It can certainly look as if movie stars spend all their time saving forests...