The New Middle

Found this yesterday and I wish I had this graph when I was teaching media ethics - it nicely summarizes the giant right-ward shift of mass media in the decade after 9-11. These are the edges of what were acceptable ideas in the US media. This is a Gawker graph of the politics of show in 2008.





So the most Liberal show is General Electric's '30 Rock'. Here is a description

Overthinkingit wrote:
Let’s face it, Liz Lemon ain’t the likable, reasonable straight man, and she ain’t all that liberal, either.  Although she often claims solidarity with the workers, she rarely stays on their side.  She went to get a flu shot even when she said she would not do so until her crew got them, too.  The minute she got promoted, she screamed, “Suck it, monkeys!  I’m going corporate!” to her underlings.  She even admitted she would probably vote for John McCain but tell her friends she voted for Obama.


Even when Liz is talking about liberal politics, the show goes out of its way to mock her for doing so. 
Consider this classic scene:

LIZ: “Look at the educational system in this country. We spend all this money in Iraq but meanwhile our inner city graduation rates are lower than they are in the Sudan.”
PETE: “That doesn’t sound right.”
LIZ: “Maybe it was Sweden.  Maybe it was teen pregnancy.  I’ve gotta read more.”

Liz Lemon appears to be the liberal voice of reason but is neither liberal nor reasonable;  likewise, Jack Donaghy appears to be her evil conservative foil but is not.  Admittedly, in the first half of the first season, Jack Donaghy did play the role of the amoral, conservative corporate head that Liz needed to defeat in office combat.  The show, however, dropped that type of satire very early on.  While 30 Rock’s writers do make fun of Jack for his monomaniacal obsession with profits and prestige (as well as his unhealthy love of Ronald Reagan), I would argue that Jack, not Liz, has quickly become the show’s voice of reason and emotional center.  In fact, if we look at 30 Rock as a whole, the main storyline has been one about Liz Lemon becoming more like Jack Donaghy than the other way around.

https://www.overthinkingit.com/2009/11/16/tv-tina-fey-30-rock-liberal/

So '30 Rock' is about a ditzy liberal 'feminist' learning to love and emulate Gordon Geko. So 30 Rock is actually 50 Shades of Grey.

The "center" is Viacom's 'South Park' whose head writer, Trey Parker, openly states: "we really fucking hate liberals." His gold-hording partner, Matt Stone is just as explicit when he claims that he and Trey are  "more right-wing than most people in Hollywood"

On the far-right are FOX and HBO's Sopranos and 24, shows that openly advocate murder and torture as morally acceptable and glorify the criminal violence of the Mafia and CIA.



So here is the 2008 spectrum of Corporate Media without all the air-brushing and face-lifts >

The LEFT (aka Corporate Liberals)

The MIDDLE (aka Right-wing Jerkyboys)

This is the episode where South Park actually managed to violate the Geneva Convention(!) but using photos of POWs for entertainment. This culminated a decade long propaganda campaign by the show to demonize Iraq leading to the deaths of 100,000s of Iraqis.

The RIGHT (aka Straight-up Torturers and Murders

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After 2008, with the election of Obama, the Amnesia Button was pressed - but it is worth remember just how ugly, violent and stupid the US media became because this post-911 'new reality' has not gone away.