I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio and watch a lot of Old Time TV, so one thing that's interesting to me is the roles played on Dragnet by Stacy Harris and Anthony Eisley. On radio, Stacy Harris was stalwart FBI agent Jim Taylor on the program "This Is Your FBI"—brave, determined, incorruptible and fearless. On TV, Anthony Eisley was Tracy Steele, hero private detective on the show "Hawaiian Eye", yet on Dragnet they always played bad guys or, at the least, heels.
In this one, I think the only show on which both were featured, they were were more heel than bad guy—Eisley, as a smarmy pinko TV host and Harris a smarmy pinko college professor.
I remember seeing this episode when I was a kid and thinking it was funny then, and I still think it's funny. Biggest laugh, when Mondo Mabamba calls Joe Friday "Mr. Charlie". I wonder if this was real ghetto slang or if the writers made it up for the show. That line about the police being "Just like them Nazzies only you don't dress as sharp" has been in my personal joke insult arsenal for 40 years, especially since I have a lot of police in my family. I also loved the housewife who came up to the stand to say she supported the police and thought they were doing a great job. I liked her angry reaction when she was hooted down by the biased audience.
I agree with most viewers that in the 3rd season of this version of Dragnet there was a little too much of the Public Affairs stuff, but this was probably the most amusing of that type of program. Especially telling was the portrayal of a particularly odious type of white lefty who preens and postures and parades around with his concern about "blacks and Mexicans and minorities" as a way of claiming a higher moral character than the rest of his fellow whities. Call it an early version of the Ken Burns disease.