A recent study accuses Dick Wolf and his various “Law & Order” shows of “manufacturing white criminals.”
Depictions of criminality and violence on “Law & Order,” the researchers say, are misleading and divisive. “Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York,” we are told, “and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites.”
Oh, bite me.
Don’t get me started on all the ways “Law & Order,” “Law and Order SVU” and TV procedurals in general commit routine demographic whoppers. All the police women are trim and gorgeous, for example, except for Mariska Hargitay, who is 62 and way past her pull-date. These shows, see, are make believe. They aren’t documentaries, and anyone who thinks they represent real life should be watching Nickelodeon.
If you believed television shows or streaming series were accurate, you would conclude that half the population is gay. You would also be convinced that all illegal immigrants wonderful people just trying to have a better life. Commercials tell us that about 60% of couples are mixed race. The procedurals also pretend that most computer and tech whizzes are female, black, or both. It’s nonsense, but why should anyone care? Yes, it’s indoctrination by trying to erase somewhat accurate stereotypes, but so what? That’s entertainment.
And we all know—why don’t the researchers?—that if L&O showed the disproportionately high rate of black on white crime consistent with the statistics, it would be boycotted and attacked as racist. At least pretending that almost all inner city crimes are committed by whites gets white actors hired while Hollywood is actively trying to DEI them onto the unemployment line.
Ethics Alarms 
Some would argue that White suspects would typically have more resources than suspects in general to actually duke it out in court.
That’s especially true for a typical Law & Order murder suspect- they’re usually smart and the murder is normally accompanied by a more complicated, interesting motive than theft/addiction.
I still watch the show out of habit, but it is now terrible.
We gave up on L & O: SVU years ago. Even my wife – an avid fan of the show for many years – finally got fed up with the obvious tilt of the episodes.
If you believed television shows or streaming series were accurate, you would conclude that half the population is gay. You would also be convinced that all illegal immigrants wonderful people just trying to have a better life. Commercials tell us that about 60% of couples are mixed race. The procedurals also pretend that most computer and tech whizzes are female, black, or both. Yes, it’s indoctrination by trying to erase somewhat accurate stereotypes, but so what? That’s entertainment.
Mejor dicho: social engineering.
It’s nonsense, but why should anyone care?
They very certainly should care. But it is really an issue of education: people really should receive education on “media manipulation” “social engineering” “media studies” and the functions of PR in our societies. Technically, there should be a critical attitude (not just the common attitude of social lemmings who have limited power to determine their “realities”).
However, and typically, critical media studies in the domain of Lefty-Progressives and Radicals, isn’t it? But here’s the thing: the Dissident Right has better critical ammunition and can make analyses that the Boomer Truth Regime (essentially Liberals in the original sense but beginning to smell like rotting salamanders) cannot make because their consciences are frozen 🥶 in conventions.
I will not however be dying my hair pink and blue.
Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities .. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
It’s nonsense, but why should anyone care? Yes, it’s indoctrination by trying to erase somewhat accurate stereotypes, but so what? That’s entertainment.
Why should anyone care? It’s annoying. Are black people driving around in Mercedes and living in great houses, or are they oppressed and in need of reparations? Pick one, liberal blob. You can’t have it both ways. And by the way, I’d say the entire Law and Order franchise is no longer entertainment. What’s a TV show when it’s unwatchable?
I considered moving to Maine several years ago. Then I watched a few episodes of Murder, She Wrote in syndication. Even small town Maine had a murder or two every week. And none of the ok kind either #mainesowhite. No way I would put my family at such risk!
Anyway, I have a conservative friend in advertising, and he just shrugs when we talk about demographics in commercials. That is not changing anytime soon.
When will it stop? There has to be a tipping point. Don’t advertisers care that black people aren’t buying all that stuff?
“Don’t advertisers care that black people aren’t buying all that stuff?”
Not their target audience, OB, which would be guilt suffocated white Lefties who need…nay require…a never-ending “Gosh I’m Nice/Look At Me/I’m Dialed In“ endorphin surge.
And corralling them is like shootin’ fish in a barrel!
PWS
Old Bill asks whether advertisers care. The answer is that yes, they care but the care relates to wider public perceptions. I think you are correct, PWS, that they do it for their core buyers so they feel good about themselves, as well as for those who could cause them trouble.
No advertiser wants a cancel campaign or to be too out of step. And advertising agencies are not going to go out on a limb with old fashioned casting.
We should care because it isn’t just one franchise. It is the accumulation of radical left massaging packaged as news or advertising or entertainment or education … and it is brain washing our youth, destroying our country.