TED KOPPEL TAKES ON THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW
IN CULTURE WARS, HISTORY, MEDIA BIAS
So there was Ted Koppel, innocently working out on a treadmill, when he came across an episode of the Andy Griffith Show. Later, he went online and discovered that the show was one of the most watched television programs of the 1960s.
Koppel had also heard a conservative complain about how “woke” the Washington, D.C. area has become and how much nicer it is to live in the south, where people are more friendly and neighborly. And he learned that Mayberry, North Carolina, the fictional setting of the Andy Griffith Show, is based on a real town, Mount Airy, North Carolina — or so the town says. Fans of the show still visit Mount Airy by the thousands every year.
Koppel therefore decided to go to Mount Airy. Once there — and perhaps before he even arrived — Koppel was (in the words of this gushing article in the Washington Post) “taken aback by the fierce nostalgia for a time and place that literally never existed — and how it connects to the misinformation that has infiltrated America’s politics.”
I don’t see how visiting a small town in 2021 could establish — literally or otherwise — that Andy Griffith’s Mayberry represents a slice of life that didn’t exist in 1960, when the show debuted. Koppel asserts:
People looking back at that program seem to confuse the program with what reality was like in those days, wishing that we could only restore some of the good feelings, some of the kindness, some of the decency. But what they’re really reflecting on is not what was going on in a particular North Carolina community. What they’re reflecting on is what was going on in the creative minds of a bunch of scriptwriters out in Hollywood.
How does Koppel know that Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, with its good feelings, kindness, and decency, didn’t reflect reality in small town southern America in 1960? Koppel lived in New York City after his family came to the U.S. from England in 1953. In the early 1960s, he was a student at Syracuse University and at Stanford. He then returned to New York City to work for the New York Times.
Koppel points out that “if you were Black in the ‘60s, things were not all that good” in southern towns. I hope this isn’t what one must settle for as an insight at age 82.
Everyone knows that Blacks were harshly discriminated against in the south in 1960. But the Andy Griffith Show wasn’t about Blacks. It didn’t purport to show how they were treated. So pointing to racial segregation in the south hardly demonstrates that the picture the program painted of how Whites in small southern towns treated each other is the figment of “creative minds of a bunch of Hollywood scriptwriters.”
Koppel also calls the show “an antidote to everything going on in the world at the time, which never showed up on the sunny series: Tens of thousands of American troops killed in Vietnam War. Race riots throughout the country. Assassinations.”
But the Andy Griffith show premiered in 1960. We had no large-scale involvement in Vietnam at that time, and there were no major race riots or assassinations. The tragic events Koppel describes came years later, reaching full force in 1968, the year the show went off the air.
Thus, the fact that these developments “never showed up” on the Andy Griffith show doesn’t constitute a meaningful departure from reality.
Finally, what about Koppel’s contention that “fierce nostalgia” for the America of Mayberry is connected to “the misinformation that has infiltrated America’s politics”? Koppel draws the connection from political views, mainly about the 2020 election, that he heard from tourists in Mount Airy with which he disagrees.
However, the fact that some devoted Andy Griffith fans hold views that Koppel deems misinformation doesn’t show a meaningful connection between the fandom and the views, which are also held by many young people who weren’t influenced at all by the show. Where I live, I heard four years of misinformation about Donald Trump, including claims that he took orders from Russia because he was repaying Putin for tilting the 2016 election in Trump’s favor and/or because Putin was blackmailing him.
If the people spouting this nonsense were big fans of “Seinfeld” — and some were — it wouldn’t, without more, show a meaningful connection between fondness for big city living or the type of humor delivered by that show and unhinged opinions about Trump.
But what is the “misinformation” Koppel is referring to? In what the Post calls a “defining scene” of his Mount Airy podcast, Koppel sounded out tourists on a trolley:
Koppel asks how many people there thought the 2020 presidential election was a fair one. Only two out of about a dozen people raise their hands.
“I think there was a lot of voter fraud,” one tourist says. “I think it’s more the mail-in ballots. You don’t know how much of those were duplicated, triplicated, the whole bit.”
Why does Koppel consider this misinformation? There’s no dispute that in the 2020 election some of the normal safeguards against fraud were waived in some jurisdictions. One can argue that this made the election inherently unfair.
One safeguard was waived through the widespread distribution of mail-in ballots. It’s not unreasonable to believe that voter fraud occurred as a result. The tourist is clearly correct in saying “you don’t know how much of [it]” occurred.
One person told Koppel that the events of January 6 were staged. That’s tin-foil hat stuff in my opinion, but it’s also just one person. As noted, I heard tin-foil hat stuff about Trump being an agent of Russia from more than one person in the D.C. area. A prominent congressional Democrat alleged this. What TV shows does Eric Swallwell like?
Politics aside, the underlying issue is whether the Andy Griffith Shows’ depiction of life for Whites in small town southern America in the early 1960s bears a solid relationship to reality. Koppel doesn’t think so. Thousands of Mount Airy tourists apparently disagree with him.
Many of these tourists probably lived in such towns and thus have a stronger basis for their conclusion than Koppel does. That doesn’t mean they are right. However, if the Post’s article is a reliable account, Koppel doesn’t come close to showing they are wrong.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/ted-koppel-takes-on-the-andy-griffith-show.php
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