While HBO’s “Newsroom” is surely today’s leading liberal fantasy news show, it is following in a format pioneered by the overwrought crime drama series “Law and Order” and its various clone shows.
The producers of “Law and Order: SVU” reminded everyone of that recently by actually writing and filming an episode in which a character based on Paula Deen kills a Trayvon Martin character.
"Law & Order," the popular courtroom drama that concluded its 20th and final season May 24, is a primetime TV legend. But the show that boasted its stories were "ripped from the headlines" often provided its viewers a distorted reality in which businesspeople were mostly portrayed as villains.
The Business & Media Institute examined "Law & Order," along with other television dramas' treatment of businessmen in 2005. BMI found that you were 21 times more likely to be kidnapped or killed by a businessman that a mobster.
Since 1990, the cop/attorney drama created by liberal Dick Wolf has covered a host of "bad" businesses from the company secretly testing roach poison on children and the greedy pharmaceutical execs selling a bad vaccine to the military to allegedly dirty defense contractors, landlords and medical device manufacturers.
In two out of three of its final episodes, the original "Law & Order" continued to demonize businessmen. One of those anti-business episodes villainized a bio-research firm, HemaLabs, for "stealing" DNA and blood samples from a family to create cancer treatment drugs. The company never compensated the impoverished family.
Perhaps there is something obstructing the view overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, where MSNBC broadcasts "Countdown" nightly because the show's host, Keith Olbermann fails to see the existence of a news media with a liberal bias.
On MSNBC's Dec. 14 broadcast of "Countdown," Olbermann came to the defense of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" executive producer and noted left-winger Dick Wolf. The Dec. 9 episode of Wolf's program featured a killer who targeted the children of illegal immigrants and in that episode, one of the characters, played by John Larroquette, blamed conservatives "like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck" for inciting violence against immigrants. That prompted O'Reilly on Dec. 10, the next broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," to fire back at Wolf.
And that led Olbermann to respond to O'Reilly, five days later, which deteriorated into Olbermann making the seemingly laughable assertion there is no such thing as the liberal media. Olbermann began his tirade by attacking Andrew Breitbart, who is launching a Web site called "Big Journalism," which will take on "the Democratic-media complex."
<p><i><b>Managing Editor's Note</b>: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's <a href="http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmoriarty/2009/12/14/the-increasingly-... target="_blank">original December 14 post to Big Hollywood</a>. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama "Law and Order."</i></p><p>Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098844/" bluelink="yes">"Law and Order"</a> for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one. Out of sight, out of mind. "Law and Order" has, for years, been just a press of the remote away from non-existence.</p> <p>However, recent events have "Law and Order" just begging for my reassessment. I hardly expected my old television series to be the clown act that leads the American viewing audience into an increasingly predictable pile of hard left propaganda.</p> <p>Why?</p>
On Thursday’s The O’Reilly Factor, FNC host Bill O’Reilly slammed Dick Wolf, the left-wing executive producer of NBC's Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, because Wednesday's episode – featuring a killer who targeted the children of illegal immigrants – contained dialogue of a character blaming conservatives like O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck for inciting violence against immigrants.
O’Reilly showed a clip of dialogue from the show in which left-wing lawyer Randall Carver -- played by John Larroquette -- made a comparison between a racist conservative talk show host character -- named Gordon Garrison -- and real-life conservative talk show hosts. Larroquette: "Garrison, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them, they are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate. I mean, they’ve convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that fail to pay a living wage or a broken health care system."
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Thursday, December 10, The O'Reilly Factor on FNC: