What is the deal with lying liberal media these days, those bad old legacy networks like CBS and NBC, filling the air with their bullshit lies? Deceit is the deal, and the Weekly Standard’s Gregg Easterbrook is on the case. Unfortunately, Gregg, in his role of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” tends to hide his epistemological light under a bushel basket full of bad boy blather regarding what’s up, and who’s down, in the NFL. Fortunately, I read Gregg so you don’t have to, and this last Tuesday ole Gregg went on a tear, tearing both CBS and NBC a new one, from which I will quote at length.
First up was the CBS shoot ‘em up Hawaii Five-O,1 which Gregg mercilessly indicts for its cartoonish carnage:
Five-0, a ratings hit, just reached its ninth season. In each season, individual episodes have shown more murders than occur in the actual state in a year. [35 in 2016, Gregg tells us] Five-0 has depicted machine-gun slaughters of surfer dudes and bikini babes on Waikiki beach; gigantic blasts leveling whole buildings in downtown Honolulu; bioengineered diseases causing evacuation of Hawaiian cities; death drones killing hikers and joggers on scenic Hawaiian hills; Honolulu bank robberies involving a dozen hoodlums firing military weapons; wildfires smothering Oahu; exploding tractor-trailer trucks in tourist areas; attacks by helicopter commandos on Hawaiian prisons; murders of the governor and other top public officials; and at least 100 police officers gunned down, significantly more than the total number of law enforcement officers who have died by gunfire in the entire history of the state.
But wait, Gregg’s just getting warmed up. He saves his real fire for Chicago P.D. I’ll quote from what he has to say at even greater length, since he touches on so many things that bother me about virtually all cop shows for the last 30 years—that, thanks to dramatic license/“magic”, we in the audience always know that the “perp” is not only “guilty” but guilty of the most “heinous” crimes, and not only guilty of the most heinous crimes, but a smug, arrogant smart ass as well, and thus all too deserving of getting his ass kicked sans any of this due process shit. What these shows are really about is revenge—we want to see awful people do awful things, and then have awful things done to them in return. Worst of all, as Gregg points out, on Chicago P.D. (which I’ve never seen) the awful people are black and their hapless victims are white.
Primetime American television, which is heavy on crime procedurals, is trebly wrong in its core depictions. First, violent crime is shown as out of control, when actually it is in a generation-long trend of decline. Second, affluent whites are depicted as primary targets of violent crime, when low-income minority group members are far more likely, as a population share, to be harmed. Third, law enforcement agencies are depicted as super-efficient avengers who always get their man, though, as the Washington Post reports, in the past decade, police in the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in about 50 percent of homicides.
Chicago P.D. takes these structural faults of primetime police procedurals and multiples them, pretending to be realism while relentlessly distorting practically everything about the city’s law enforcement.
,,,
Further troubling about Chicago P.D. is that the show lauds torture of suspects. Brutalized suspects always turn out to be guilty as sin, and the beatings always cause them to reveal information that saves an innocent life. Whether torture could be acceptable if law enforcement knew for sure an innocent life would be saved is a complex moral issue. In real-world policing, detectives rarely know if they have the right guy, while torture is, itself, a crime. Chicago P.D. manipulates audiences into rooting for torture, suggesting cops have godlike powers of knowledge and would never harm a suspect except if given no choice to protect the innocent.
Constitutional protections are laughed at on Chicago P.D. In this season’s premiere, the protagonist busts into the apartment of a dope dealer, threatens his girlfriend, and starts burning the dealer’s $100 bills to get the dealer to admit where the stash house is. The detective has probable cause, so why couldn’t the entry to the dealer’s apartment have been done legally? Because real heroes don’t waste time filling out forms for some namby-pamby warrant!
Chicago P.D. suggests to the NBC primetime audience that crime could end tomorrow if bleeding-heart politicians didn’t tie the hands of heroic cops who inexplicably know exactly where every offender is at every moment and never, ever mistreat the innocent. I wonder if Dick Wolf would want to live in a neighborhood where cops are free to smash down his door and rough him up because only a wimp would go to a judge for a search warrant.
Most disturbing is that Chicago PD depicts police officers as the real victims of urban dysfunction.
In one episode, a foot patrolman chases a murder suspect while loudly yelling “Stop! Police!” After the suspect raises a gun and the patrolman shoots him, the officer is immediately fired, then prosecuted. In another episode, a policewoman observes a murder and shoots the killer while trying to apprehend him; she is fired immediately, without any investigation or union rights. In both episodes, mobs of angry African Americans form outside the precinct house—causing the viewer to perceive police officers as the ones in danger, and blacks as the real threat.
At the end of last season, a decorated detective—shown to viewers as dedicated to protecting the innocent—is sent to prison on a trumped-up charge in order to appease the media and a sinister African-American higher-up. Though the detective’s record is clean, the judge denies bail. As soon as the noble officer is behind bars, he’s stabbed to death by the drug gang that runs the jail.
Why would a judge deny bail to an officer with no prior conviction? “I got a call from the mayor,” the judge explains to the show’s hero. The media and the minority group mobs, it is implied, like to hear that white Chicago cops are being killed.
Maybe there are cities in which mayors telephone judges with instructions, though this is really not how the criminal justice system is supposed to function. But that’s how the criminal justice system is presented to NBC’s primetime audience, in a show that bills itself as the hidden truth about Chicago law.
Yes, we are living in Trump’s America. NBC tells us so.
Afterwords
Yes, I am quoting an awful lot of Gregg’s piece, but I don’t see why readers have to wade through 50 column inches of “funny” jokes about wide receivers to find this excellent journalism.
The one thing I would add to this piece, which Gregg actually touches on in his discussion of Hawaii Five-O, is the grotesque overemphasis on terrorism as a threat on these shows. Since 9/11, all of the major terrorist events in the U.S. have been the result of a few individuals, either citizens or long-time residents, acting without assistance from international terrorist groups. We have had no incidents involving “weapons of mass destrution” of any kind, and, as I’ve said before, those weapons, while terrifying, are not, in fact, “weapons of mass destrution”, being no more (and no less) effective than old-fashioned explosives and considerably less reliable.
- Typographical trivia, anyone? “Hawaii Five-O” supposedly means “Hawaii 50”, since Hawaii is the fiftieth state. But (I guess) “Hawaii Five Oh” is easier to say than “Hawaii 50”. ↩︎
