You may soon be turning the tube on to your favorite police
program. But what is billed as "just entertainment" is selling
political ideology, that:
- authority is always right
- law and order is good
- protecting the status quo is necessary and
- the myth of "justice" in the "criminal justice" system.
Television does not make children violent. Television
violence makes children passive. Television is programmed to
teach children to look to government authorities to keep law and
order in their city or nation.
A good example of these anti-people politics is the
violation of people's rights by television police. In any random
week a viewer will find many clear "rights" violations --
brutalizing people, performing illegal searches and seizures of
property, and imprisoning people, without due process. And often
that's just from the daily "news" broadcasts!
When a crime is under investigation scores of uninvolved
citizens are roughed up, shaken down, and harassed -- by police.
Homes, offices and cars are routine broken into -- by police or
other government officials in the course of investigating. With
a sixth sense that only scriptwriters can generate, every such
invasion of personal privacy turns up the real, and usually
demented, criminal or a person that is made to look like he is
guilty of some "crime" on TV. And, somehow honest, law-abiding
citizens are miraculously never hurt by these methods.
The message we are getting is that government authority is
never wrong. The desired image is of a paternalistic great
society in which all law enforcement people are properly
motivated and their opponents are always drug dealers, crazies,
or un-American weirdos. They work overtime to make you think it
is criminal to criticize the institutions of government.
This violence by authorities, such as the violence of
individual cops, or teachers, is accepted by children as the
solution to social problems. Television gives us no examples of
how to solve problems by trusting and learning from other people
and getting together to change things.
We don't think that television has the power to determine
how we think or act. But its message is not in our interests --
to make things better. Instead, its message is to keep things
the way they are or allow even worse. The next time you tune in
to your favorite police show, check it out to see whose interests
are really being served.
Copyright © 1988 by
Adam Starchild
The Libertarian Library has reprinted this article with the permission of the author.
