Same old trope, blame the Hippies. What about how Paley canceled the Smothers Brothers and then brought them back?* But no, blame the hippies. The last 40 years have been about re-writing the 1960’s, undoing civil rights, abortion, voting rights, Vietnam, Kennedy (yeah, so what if he screwed anything with a vagina, wasn’t a saint, he’s still a damn sight better than what we have today), was it Huntley or Brinkley who was a pedophile? I get lost in those stories that are 1,000 times worse in today’s wild west, information free-for-all interboobs. You can’t blame the hippies for the way the world is today. It takes two to Tango.

*After Tom and Dick were canceled (at the behest of Nixon, who threatened to pull CBS license), Paley was sued, anonymously, along with a few others, for back money owed to the writers of the show, which included Steve Martin. CBS was owned by Westinghouse at the time, demanded to know who anonymous was (Tom had used Dick’s nickname in high school and had paid all his classmates $1000 to keep their mouths shut), because they had so much dirt on Paley that if they went to court, it would expose him and the Tiffany Network as frauds and hypocrites. When it came time for discovery, well, the writers got their back pay, with interest (plus no taxes) ad the Smothers Brothers came back for another two years.