Twilight Zone Creator Rod Serling on the Most Dangerous Kind of Censorship
"We practice it all the time. We just do not write those themes, which we know are going to get into trouble.”
When New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss resigned following “the Maoist Struggle” that led to the ouster of head opinion writer James Bennett, she wrote gave this (mock) advice to young writers and editors:
Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
It’s easy to forget how crazy the country felt in the summer of 2020. As Brad Polumbo pointed out at FEE, a mob-like madness had taken hold across the country. Consider just a handful of episodes:
A museum curator in San Francisco resigned after facing a mob and petition for his removal simply because he stated that his museum would still collect art from white men.
A Palestinian immigrant and business owner had his lease canceled and restaurant boycotted after activists dug up his daughter’s old offensive social media posts from when she was a teenager.
A Hispanic construction worker was fired for making a supposedly “white supremacist” hand signal that for most people has always just meant “okay.”
A soccer player was pushed off the Los Angeles Galaxy roster because his wife posted something racist on Instagram.
The head opinion editor of the New York Times was fired and his colleague was demoted after they published an op-ed by a US senator arguing a widely held position and liberal colleagues claimed the words “put black lives in danger.’
A random Boeing executive was recently mobbed and fired because he wrote an article 30 years ago arguing against having women serve in combat roles in the military.
A data analyst tweeted out the findings of a research paper (by a black scholar) about the ineffectiveness of protests and was fired after colleagues claimed their safety was threatened.
Led by progressives as prominent as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a woke mob tried to get a Chicago economist fired from his editorship of an economics journal for tweeting that embracing “Defund the Police” undercuts the Black Lives Matter movement’s chances of achieving real reform.
Twenty-first century Americans tend to think of ourselves as an open and tolerant people, but the reality is we’re actually quite dogmatic. It’s not just that certain rules must be followed; it’s that certain ideas and values must not be even be questioned.
Has it always been this way? Perhaps, though in a different manner.
Benjamin Carlson recently shared on Twitter a clip of Rod Serling, in which the famed Twilight Zone creator talked about writing a show for the United States Steel Hour—”Noon on Doomsday”—that was sanitized for viewers by producers. Racial themes were removed and the location was moved to England instead of the South.
Serling: “It became a lukewarm, vitiated, emasculated kind of show.”
Wallace: “You went along with it, though.”
Serling: “All the way.”
Notice that Serling didn’t hesitate in his response. He admitted he went along with the new direction, though he adds that he protested and “went down fighting, as most television writers do.”
Serling said there was plenty of blame to go around for this sanitation of ideas—including sponsors, the network, the FCC and even viewers themselves—but he hinted that there was a bigger, periphery problem with this heavy-handed method: pre-censorship.
“Pre-censorship is a practice I think of most television writers, I can’t speak for all of them. This is the prior knowledge of the writer of those areas which are difficult to get through. So a writer will shy away from writing those things which he knows he’s he’s going to have trouble with on a sponsorial or agency level. We practice it all the time. We just do not write those themes, which we know are going to get into trouble.”
As Larry Reed recently pointed out, we all practice self-censorship to some degree. But he joined others—including George Orwell —who point out that this softer version of censorship undermines the discovery of truth just as much as government censorship.
One can only wonder what Rod Serling would think about today’s climate. Anyone who watches television or movies can see this kind of pre-censorship is rampant. Scripts are often cookie-cutter and predictable. In some cases, it’s ruined beloved franchises (R.I.P. Star Wars).
Self-censorship/pre-censorship is not confined to script writing, of course. We all saw during the pandemic how government and Big Tech colluded to silence inconvenient facts, theories and opinions about the origins of Covid, vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and scores of other topics. People watched untold numbers of influencers—many of whom used social media for their livelihood—get censored, suspended, “fact-checked,” and outright banned for sharing information that is today is accepted as factual.
For every person actually banned or suspended, a hundred thousand probably made a decision—consciously or subconsciously—that Serling would recognize: “do not [tweet] those themes, which we know are going to get into trouble.”
Navigating all of this is no easy task in this day and age. (I say this from experience, as a person who is paid to write about ideas and publish them.) But I think the best thing we as individuals can do is support a culture that allows for the free exchange of ideas (even ones we find harmful).
We should also remember that the government does not have a monopoly on the truth. In fact, history suggests it has an outright aversion to the truth.