By Mark Finkelstein | June 16, 2015 | 8:51 PM EDT

How can Judd Apatow, once ranked the smartest guy in Hollywood be so . . . ? On today's With All Due Respect, big comedy macher [credits include Lena Dunham's GirlsApatow said it was "ridiculous that anyone thinks that rich people care about other people.  When the Koch brothers give a billion dollars, it is not out of a great concern for the masses."

To his credit, Mark Halperin twice pressed Apatow as to whether his notion that the rich don't care about others also applies to rich Hollywood liberals.  Apatow eventually asserted that there's a difference: "Hollywood liberals would be willing to change the entire system if all would get the money out of it, and I don't think conservatives would do it."  Hmm.  Who was the guy who, realizing he could get untold millions from Hollywood among other places, broke his pledge to limit himself to public financing?  That would be Barack Obama.  

By Tom Blumer | June 15, 2015 | 4:08 PM EDT

Marlow Stern at the Daily Beast, who reviewed Jurassic World on June 10, must be absolutely furious.

The Steven Spielberg-produced movie just had "the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time." Not bad for a film Stern panned as "A Big, Dumb, Sexist Mess." — with heavy emphasis on the "sexist" part.

By Clay Waters | June 15, 2015 | 9:25 AM EDT

Patrick Healy penned a theatrical tribute to hard-left Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders thatappeared in the New York Times Sunday Review: "Can America Back an Underdog? Broadway Did." Healy, a former political reporter, eagerly sold socialist Sanders as a scrappy underdog, just like the musical Fun Home. Healy even contradicted his own previous Obama reporting to make his odd comparison work, while celebrating both Obama and Sanders as purveyors of "authenticity" seen by voters as "the real deal."

By Tom Johnson | May 18, 2015 | 6:07 PM EDT

Over the past decade or so, David Letterman has become outspokenly liberal, but according to cultural critic Scott Timberg, the seemingly apolitical comedy that Dave did in the 1980s actually hurt the left. Specifically, it served as a sort of opiate which left his audience disinclined to push back against Reaganism.

“For those on the progressive or liberal side of the aisle,” wrote Timberg last Tuesday in Salon, “the irreverent irony ‘Late Night’ brought to the table probably helped neuter the American left…The helpless bemusement behind it certainly became -- for anyone aiming at social or political or economic change -- a dead end.” In Timberg’s telling, laughter, rather than activism, became the “default response” to “the stupid stuff thrown to us by cheap consumerism and the Reagan-Thatcher takeover.”

By Julia A. Seymour | May 14, 2015 | 11:55 AM EDT

When it comes to Hollywood, Proverbs got it right: there is nothing new under the sun.

Trailers for ABC’s fall TV lineup are being released and the new show OIL appears to be more of same anti-gas and oil propaganda television networks and movie producers have been dredging up for years.

By Kyle Drennen | May 1, 2015 | 4:30 PM EDT

Apparently voters can expect to see Rick Harrison of History Channel's Pawn Stars hitting the campaign trail for Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio.

By Tom Blumer | April 21, 2015 | 11:52 AM EDT

Readers who have seen my previous posts on actress Gwyneth Paltrow's recent "failed" attempt to complete the deceptively designed "Food Stamp Challenge" know far more than people who rely on Eonline.com ever will.

Although it's far from encouraging when contemplating our nation's future, what we have here is an object lesson in how the entertainment press airbrushes the truth to polish the image of a celebrity who is either breathtakingly ignorant or in on the scam.

By Tom Johnson | April 19, 2015 | 12:12 PM EDT

According to Jon Stewart, cable news is so awful that Daily Show staffers who keep tabs on it are essentially “turd miners.” That said, Stewart believes that the most foul-smelling poop comes from Fox News.

In a Saturday profile in the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, Stewart told writer Hadley Freeman that MSNBC is preferable to Fox “because [MSNBC isn’t] steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”

By Brent Bozell | and By Tim Graham | April 11, 2015 | 8:09 AM EDT

Conservatives know what to expect when the networks create shows about lawyers. From L.A. Law to Ally McBeal, we’ve observed countless crusading liberal protagonists confront and defeat conniving corporate executives and other corrupt establishment villains.

This seemed to describe The Good Wife on CBS over the last five years. But something interesting has happened over the last few weeks. Producers have introduced a wealthy conservative character named Reese Dipple, who engages seasoned liberal lawyer Diane Lockhart on the hot-button social issues of the day.

By Tim Graham | April 8, 2015 | 11:54 AM EDT

Last October, we relayed that the NBCUniversal-owned Syfy cable network made a development deal with leftist actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for a corporate-dystopia series called “Incorporated.” Now The Hollywood Reporter is offering an update: Syfy has greenlighted the making of a pilot episode.

Corporate leftists demonstrate a surprising capacity for hypocrisy. The Syfy press release – coming out of Comcast, a large entertainment conglomerate with one of the largest lobbying staffs in the nation’s capital – comically imagines today’s trend in Obama-era government is a “dismantling of the public sector."

By Tom Johnson | April 2, 2015 | 2:08 PM EDT

Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah are first-rate comedians, but beyond that, argues Klein, Comedy Central’s choice of two black hosts to succeed Stephen Colbert and (eventually) Jon Stewart was an extremely smart business move.

Noah and Wilmore have a “particular skill for limning America's complicated, and often infuriating, racial politics,” writes Klein, “and their takeover is a recognition of one of the lessons of Obama's presidency: American politics isn't moving past race. It's moving into it. And so, too, is the news business…[I]n the Obama years, attitudes toward politics have begun driving attitudes toward race. The result is that racial controversies are a bigger part of American politics right now than they were before Obama's election.”

By Tom Johnson | March 30, 2015 | 9:18 PM EDT

It’s fair to say most conservatives aren’t big fans of Jon Stewart, but according to TV critic Sonia Saraiya, Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show, is in for an even nastier response from the right, much of it having to do with his skin color.

Apropos of Comedy Central’s Monday announcement that Noah, a biracial South African comedian, will take over for Stewart sometime this year, Saraiya remarked that “this country spent years embroiled in a debate over whether an American citizen who became the president was ‘really’ American; what are we going to do to Trevor Noah? Conservative critics have a practiced, doublespeaking method of piling on the heat on figures who stand out because of their race or gender or sexuality, while protesting that they are doing no such thing.”