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The closest thing TV has to an advocacy producer is Linda Bloodworth- Thomason , creator of three current network shows: Designing Women, Evening Shade and the upcoming Hearts Afire. She and her husband Harry Thomason are Clinton friends and supporters (and part-time residents of Little Rock) who produced the biographical film that introduced the candidate at the Democratic Convention. "So-called serious newspeople miss the powerful potential of the entertainment forum as a means of influencing people's lives in a positive way," she says. "I have my own column on TV, and I take it as seriously as does Mike Royko or David Broder." Yet Bloodworth-Thomason denies that the TV community is a liberal monolith. "Entertainment corporations are owned by old, white, conservative, rich men," she says. "The artists they employ are more liberal. The slant of what the artists are allowed to put out will be determined by the profit factor. The bottom line is money."
Indeed, the structure of network television serves to keep entertainment from wandering too far from the safe political center. Advertisers, for example, shy away from any program that takes a controversial political stand or gets too explicit about sensitive subjects like homosexuality. No leading character in a prime-time TV series since Maude has had an abortion, mainly because of advertiser skittishness. "There's no issue today more contentious," says Joel Segal, executive vice president at McCann-Erickson/ New York. "Nobody is interested in alienating large blocs of viewers."
^ Network executives, not surprisingly, have the same concerns. Censors monitor shows closely for any material that might be objectionable to a large (or at least vocal) segment of the audience. "It's the responsibility of good television to be topical, but it should not espouse any political candidacy," says CBS Entertainment president Jeff Sagansky. Still, success in the ratings (Murphy Brown commands the highest ad rates of any series on TV) can go a long way toward calming network nerves. "The viewers vote for Murphy Brown every week," says Sagansky, "and only vote for Dan Quayle every four years."
So does network TV reflect a liberal sensibility? Yes, a certain political correctness does prevail around the dial. The concerns of feminists, environmental activists and oppressed minorities are given sympathetic treatment; big corporations are usually portrayed as villains; government bureaucrats are typically inept or uncaring. But this is probably due less to political calculation than to dramatic necessity. Artists tend to gravitate toward humanistic concerns rather than institutional ones; pitting an underdog against the system always makes for a better story. This is not necessarily proof of liberal bias any more than the proliferation of TV shoot-'em-ups means that Hollywood producers support the N.R.A.