Posted on 03/02/2003 7:16:25 AM PST by Pharmboy
LOS ANGELES -- SOME mention that Charles Lindbergh used to pal around with Hermann Göring in the 1930's. Everyone talks about Jane Fonda inspecting North Vietnamese gun placements in the 60's. And some ungenerous souls may want to trace the history of celebrity advocacy back as far as John Wilkes Booth.
Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford stumped for war bonds in 1918. Two years later, Al Jolson was campaigning for Warren G. Harding. Humphrey Bogart and four dozen other stars mounted a 1947 radiothon to oppose anti-Communist blacklisting. An all-star cast, including Groucho Marx and Bob Hope, led a get-out-the-vote telethon in 1956. Today, practically everyone in the Academy seems to be speaking out against war in Iraq.
"Ever since the whole notion of celebrity was invented, there were some people who took advantage of the pulpit that celebrity gave them to give us their opinion," said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "It's one of the advantages of celebrity."
But in an age of 500-channel satellite television and Web sites for every political peccadillo, the public is more able than ever to tune in the messages they want to hear and tune out the ones they don't.
A generation ago, with only three television networks, it made news when a celebrity took a controversial stand. Consider Jane Fonda's Vietnam foray, a move that deeply offended even those who opposed the war.
Today, there are three channels dedicated to 24-hour news, and hundreds of others providing a soapbox for every soap star — and the current din of celebrity voices can seem just as shrill. The question is, with so many celebrities spouting off, does anyone care anymore?
"There's plenty of time to have a long, drawn-out discussion about whether Sean Penn should have visited Baghdad or Janeane Garofalo should keep her mouth shut," Professor Thompson said. "The reason this gets talked about so much is that there are so many more places to talk about it."
To wit: as of Friday, the actor Mike Farrell, who portrayed Capt. B. J. Hunnicut on the television series "M*A*S*H," was scheduled to appear today on "Meet the Press" on NBC. Also on the schedule was Fred Thompson, a former Republican senator now portraying District Attorney Arthur Branch on "Law & Order."
No one seems to have done any empirical studies on whether attaching a celebrity to an idea makes that idea more attractive to people — certainly not in the way that putting an actress on a magazine cover has clearly been shown to boost newsstand sales, or that having the right celebrity pitchman (Michael Jordan) for the right product (basketball shoes) can mean more money in the bank. Nor is there any way to know whether celebrities hurt the causes they espouse if they come across as coddled, self-absorbed and uninformed.
But a Fox News poll of 900 registered voters last week offered some interesting data on the topic. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they would prefer that celebrities simply keep their political opinions to themselves, while over three-fourths said a celebrity's political opinion has no effect on which movies or television programs they watch or what products they buy.
Still, the notion that celebrity automatically generates influence persists. J. Fred MacDonald, a former professor of cultural history who began collecting tape of old radio and television programs and commercials for his research, found himself, as a consequence, in possession of a huge trove of material showing stars peddling causes. He traces celebrity advocacy to the war bond drives of World War I, and indeed most instances of it over the years have involved stars working on behalf of the government. His archives include dozens of instances of actors lending their celebrity to some cause or political issue, most often something benign, as when Frank Sinatra spoke out for Easter Seals in 1960.
That's not to say that even in the early part of the last century, celebrities didn't occasionally take unpopular stands. In the 1930's, for example, some Hollywood actors and screenwriters supported the United States Communist Party's presidential candidate in a series of newspapers ads.
"Hanoi Jane" heralded the modern era of celebrity advocacy, and the celebrity pulpit has rarely, if ever, been unoccupied since. But Professor Thompson and others are skeptical about whether today's celebrity advocates like Martin Sheen and Janeane Garofalo are able to shift political debates.
"People tend to have pretty deep beliefs about political things, and while there are some people still on the fence about this war, I think that most people already know how they feel about it," Mr. Thompson said. "Hearing a celebrity they respect talk about it might pull them over, but when you get down to it, what's being negotiated here is really just table scraps."
Leo Braudy, a cultural historian whose book "The Frenzy of Renown" studied the cult of celebrity, said that of greater importance is the way a famous star's political views might stiffen the spines of those who share that opinion.
"You need to feel that you are not alone in your position," Mr. Braudy said. "And one of the few common languages we have in this country is celebrity."
At the same time, audiences have become much more sophisticated about the media. "Back in the old days, I don't think people even realized that celebrities were being paid to be on commercials," Mr. Thompson said. "They thought, Oh, they smoke Philip Morris cigarettes just because they like them."
Now, not only are they aware, but sometimes they seem to be downright cynical. Both AOL and MTV have run Internet junk polls and chat boards in recent days asking visitors to weigh in on whether anyone cares what celebrities have to say about a potential war in Iraq.
"Boycott movie stars who are antiwar," was one of the more popular message threads on an AOL chat board last week.
At another site, a petition called Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits (ipetitions .com/campaigns/hollywoodceleb) takes a clear stance on that issue. "We the undersigned American Citizens stand against Wealthy Hollywood Celebrities abusing their status to speak for us," it says.
LORI BARDSLEY, the creator of the site, is a self-described "stay-at-home mom" from Summerfield, N.C., who once upon a time considered herself a liberal Democrat. She says the site has drawn thousands of signatures, landing her interviews on a half-dozen conservative talk shows. "I had had enough," she said.
Certainly the antiwar celebrities have proved a boon to the talk radio programs and cable news shows, some of them railing against "limousine liberals." Ms. Garofalo, for instance, was among the celebrity guests who were flambéed during a CNN special report last week called "Star Wars: What Does Hollywood Know About Politics?"
Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer and director who helped found Artists United to Win Without War, said that the celebrities in his group were prepared for this. "We knew there would be these attempts to marginalize and demonize and infantalize us," he said. "We even had a term for it. We call it the Three Ize."
Rob Long, a television producer and writer and the rare conservative in Hollywood, is one who is not offended.
"I come to this as someone who works in Hollywood and is in favor of the war," he said. "I'm a Republican. I voted for Bush. But this celebrity advocacy has never bothered me. I take it as a given that the Janeane Garofalos and Sean Penns of the world know that they live in a great country where they have the right to go on television and criticize the country. We conservatives certainly had a fine old time of it during the Clinton years."
"Of course," he added, "if they start being effective, I might change my answer."
Not even Hanoi Jane said she "hated America" and they rarely personally attacked the President. How many quotes have you heard from this crowd that says "Bush is an idiot" or "Bush is stupid".
The celebrities speaking out are in the pocket of the Demoncrats and are operatives of the party. They are already campaigning for the 2004 elections.
Worse that that, they may well become the mouthpieces to declare that President Bush is "unfit to lead" as some loonie lefties have floated the notion of mental illness. These celebrities are not just opinionating, they are on the verge of advocating overthrow of the government.
Can you imagine if conservative celebrities made those same accusations about democrap presidents?
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