A lot can change in a year. And it seems like no year has brought as much cultural change to America’s TV landscape as the year since African American man George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. In that timeframe, America endured a summer of rioting, the acceleration of cancel culture and attempts to force critical race theory into every aspect of public and even private life.
Unwilling to leave bad enough alone, Hollywood joined in the hate; 127 TV episodes promoted the self-described Marxist Black Lives Matter movement, “Defund The Police” initiatives, and peddled the myth of America as a systemically racist country.
MRC Culture’s TV blog covered the entire year of Black Lives Matter narratives and propaganda forced into TV programming following Floyd’s death and found that there were 127 episodes promoting BLM talking points. Some of the worst moments included characters referring to police as “pigs,” lies that America has been the same racist place for the last “500 years,” and racist smears against white people, arguing that each should feel “personal shame” over the death of George Floyd.
These 127 BLM TV episodes featured propaganda-ridden storylines written to depict racist cops gunning down innocent black people, for example. NBC’s Chicago PD, CW’s Black Lightning and CBS’ FBI: Most Wanted smeared cops in this way. Black Lightning was so on the nose with depicting cops as careless, racist criminals, that one episode featured cops killing an innocent black woman in an unauthorized “no-knock” raid and then followed the scene up with depictions of BLM marches in her honor. Of course that was supposed to be a depiction of what the left says happened to real-life Breonna Taylor at the hands of police.
Other shows like CBS’s S.W.A.T. and ABC’s The Rookie advocated for “defunding the police.” A February 2021 episode of The Rookie featured a character arguing that “the criminal justice system is inherently biased, designed to punish poor people and people of color,” and that the only way to fix it would be to “defund the police.”
NCIS: Los Angeles and NBC’s Superstore attempted to gaslight their viewers that the BLM protests – of which 140 turned violent in real life – were “mostly peaceful protests” performed by good Samaritans just striving for justice for oppressed “black bodies.” NCIS, for example, depicted an exchange between two law enforcement agents in which one claimed that the idea that the protests were peaceful was “idealistic,” while the other rebuked him, saying the notion was “realistic,” and that the protests are “about equality and racial justice.”
Grey’s Anatomy and even CBS’s The Neighborhood also promoted the virulent propaganda that systemic racism characterizes American’s law enforcement and its other institutions. The latter featured an adult explaining to an impressionable child that “the police in this country have a history of treating us [white people] better than they treat Black people.”
And on an even more ridiculous note, a couple popular medical dramas including New Amsterdam and ABC’s The Good Doctor took aim at medical racism. You know, white doctors and their tremendous privilege. That’s not a joke. New Amsterdam took a dig at “old-timey doctors” for all being “white dudes” and The Good Doctor actually took aim at “racist doctors”
Again, it was no accident nor mere organic trend that TV exploded with this racist, anti-American propaganda in the last year. It had been done for an expressly political purpose. Kristen Marston, Culture and Entertainment Advocacy Director of the Pro-BLM civil rights non-profit, Color Of Change, stated in an interview with Hollywood Reporter, “What we see on TV, it impacts the way we vote, the way that we react to people and even the way that we either believe Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization or not.”
Take it from Marston. She was actually asked to advise ”over 100 TV shows” on how to help them move away from “unhelpful narratives” regarding police or Black Lives Matter. Her progressive non-profit also compiled a “damning 153-page report” on how entertainment TV depicts crime in such a way that “undermines racial equality,” called Normalizing Injustice.
It’s clear that this is all being done to change your perceptions about your country and its history. And it's all being broadcast into the safety of your suburban home. It’s way past time to just turn the television off.
