Crooks, Conmen and Clowns

The low rating of American businessmen on television

Television may do for businessmen what a Borgia banquet did for casual dining. From Dallas' oily antihero J.R. Ewing on down, most businessmen on television are depicted as crooks, amoral wheeler-dealers, criminals with Mafia connections, cheats, employers of professional arsonists and, worse still, jerks, clowns and buffoons. With the exception of Margaret Pynchon, the gracious owner of the Los Angeles Tribune on Lou Grant, nowhere on prime time is there anyone remotely resembling such constructive businessmen as Joseph C. Wilson of Xerox, Edwin Land of Polaroid, Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors or Thomas Watson of IBM. Is art reflecting life? Or is art looking for handy villains to make stories move between commercials?

The Media Institute, a conservative Washington watchdog of the press and television, believes that the portrayal of corporate leaders on the tube shows television's antibusiness bias. The group, which studied 200 prime-time episodes on all three major networks, this week publishes its findings in a report titled Crooks, Conmen and Clowns. It reveals that two of three businessmen are shown as foolish, greedy or criminal, and that almost half of all work activities performed by businessmen involve illegal acts. For example, in Barnaby Jones, a coffee importer helps a violent revolutionary group. In Vega$, a wealthy hotel owner who owes $50 million plans and oversees several murders. Owners or managers of big businesses are almost always filthy rich, with gigantic houses, servants and limousines. There is some honor among small businessmen, but most come off as H.L. Mencken characterized farmers and politicians: candidates for society's dung heap. Concludes the study: "If American business has redeeming social values, they are not visible on prime-time television."

Jonathan Hart, a very distant echo of Nick Charles in The Thin Man, is described as a "self-made millionaire"whose "hobby is murder" on Hart to Hart. But his business connections are tenuous, and how he made all those millions is never clear. Mrs. Oleson, who with her husband runs the general store in Little House on the Prairie, reneges on an agreement to buy honey from children. In the series Alice, the son of the program's star urges her to work somewhere else because of the low wages paid by Mel, owner of the diner where she works as a waitress. Shirley, a black former cab driver who was the wise and friendly heroine of One in a Million, inherited a conglomerate, but she was counterpointed against another executive who was pompous, stiff and stupid.

The study cites scores of such examples. Even when the tube's businessmen do good, it is, in 94% of the cases, on a purely personal level, like helping a troubled employee. Rarely does it involve socially or economically productive behavior. Activities of businessmen who are central characters in shows are frequently negative, mostly clownish. Archie Bunker, who now owns a bar in Archie Bunker's Place, philosophizes that the best way to cut the crime rate in half is for every person to shoot one criminal; Dry Cleaning Mini-Tycoon George Jefferson of The Jeffersons emerges as an intellectual cipher, trapped in matriarchy. Even when businessmen are written into a plot on a one-shot basis, they are, in most cases, up to no good; only 6%--three of 49--were presented in a favorable light.

Why is television so hard on businessmen? The institute's president, Leonard J. Theberge, suggests that writers of shows seem to have a congenital antipathy toward the business values of certitude, lurching optimism, organization, authority and profit. The writers also do not take into account that business pays their salaries and makes U.S. television possible in the first place.

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