A Sign of How the Media Changed From the Feb 12, 1980 Tonight Show

Regular readers will know I'm not a Netflix person. I'm not a TV person in general. 

If the TV is on, which it usually isn't, it's more likely to be tuned to one of the plethora of rerun channels that populate the rabbit ear stations. One of those was showing the Tonight Show, not from tonight, from the night of Feb 12, 1980.

And there's Johnny... doing two unimaginable things.

1. Johnny Carson is reading from a compendium of the Islamic rulings of the Ayatollah Khomeini and mocking them.

2. The last night's guest is/was scheduled to be William F. Buckley.

Both things are unimaginable today.

No late night show host would dare mock Islamic law. And the odds of a conservative being invited to a late night show are somewhere between null and zero unless he's there to bash Trump.

Just a little sign of how things have changed since 1980. This isn't a change in our values or culture. It's purely a shift in the media.