From movies to product labels, much of what we view was made in an attempt to produce an acute emotional hunger. Which, like real hunger, makes it more difficult to think logically and more likely that you'll act to satisfy your hunger. This is usually accomplished by spending, and thereby buying, something. Logic is often the media's enemy because it is the consumer's friend. As for truth, it's at best an incoherent side note. Simply by default, continuously streaming unbiased truth is forbidden because lies, exaggerations, and biased perspectives are what have the most potential and incentive to generate profit and power. Truth is only the friend of actual gods, not our media gods who depend on public ignorance to thrive.
Around election days, regularly employing cynically deceptive commercials and community outreach (P.R.) campaigns, which seamlessly streamline into the public narrative,the CCPOA and similar groups have been able to flourish*. Fear and apathy of the masses towards the private slave warehousing done in the name of stripping us of as much wealth as possible, until death do us part, are what ensure its continuation. The capitalist (money making) expertise honed by professionals and used by the CCPOA has allowed it to become the most powerful union, in the most populous state, in the most powerful country in the world. It is influential.
Factor all of the above in with that outrageous asshole in your younger years you still haven't forgave, (and whom you hope right now is in Buhba’s cell) , along with some random second-hand horror story you have heard and sprinkle on top the network news and some (bigger, brighter, better, Law-and-Order-copied) cop dramas, and we have a creation little short of a revolution can stop from ever increasing its relative money and power by marketing fear and promoting ignorance.
Television is not reality and yet it actually influences our perception of reality. And this has many powerful implications. One of which is our conceptualization of the common criminal vs. victim dichotomy. Though not as morally bankrupt as the firsthand cop-sponsored fear commercials, studies show that the most popular cop-dramas produce a startling inaccurate and distorted characterization of the people they pretend to portray. In these, the accused are presented as full of excessive greed or some sort of psychological pathology. Something that will make us feel like they were destined criminals who need to be in prison. Often contrasted with the bright futured or upstanding random citizen victim on the good guy team. As for the criminals themselves, they were never victims, especially of horrible circumstantial misfortunes. Never fearful, never unlucky. No, especially not illiterate, never influenced by an abused childhood, never a foster kid, with dead or missing parents. Never, or near so, any of those things that humanize someone.
On the other side police, prosecutors, and prison guards are often portrayed as sinless forces of good. Both textbooks and television have acted as instructional programs that bolster the perception of government officials while impugning the character of the accused and imprisoned.
Very rarely is a story that is a little more gray, more complex, presented. Rarely are we presented with a story involving something both more complicated and subtle as someone who was led to believe they had a (possibly racial) incurable learning impairment; led to believe any attempt to succeed on their own would lead to failure. Failure in front of everyone. Everyone then realizing they'd tried and still couldn't do it. So as a fearful unaccomplished kid they actually got in the habit of trying to fail, thereby succeeding in something without risking their fragile ego. In fact succeeding in the only thing they suspected they could. Giving these still less innocent examples though takes away from the tragic randomness of life itself in which, as Aristotle wrote, “it is probably that many things should happen contrary to probability." Prison systems have been holding truly wonderful and improbable prisoners since Jesus’ time.
This dynamic of the seemingly improbable being probable is no more poorly expressed than in cop dramas new brethren of prison dramas, and also their so-called television documentaries, missing are the anti-climatic, various groups of average individuals, some of those being innocent. While others having been hopeless, homeless, or jobless, or even having come to terms with growing up role model-less, now realizing those decisions made - based on the information they were most familiar with - were below them and mistakes. The truth being California’s prisons are filled with all too regular people responding to extraordinarily bad events, and not so much that Aryan brother on television.
*http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/biggest-obstacle-prison-reform-labor-unions
