Torture on TV

[tangaroa]

TV is promoting torture as an effective tool for the good guys -- at least on Fringe (which I haven't watched) and "everywhere in American entertainment now" (which I haven't watched). Via james_davis_nicoll.

I remember hearing rumours back when "24" was a new show that friends of Rush Limbaugh were intentionally writing torture into the scripts as a way of programming the audience to support the torture which the Bush administration had already approved, but was not yet widespread public knowledge. Then a few years later I tried to find whatever random blog post I had heard these rumours from and couldn't find anything.

I have seen a couple of shows of NCIS where the "good guys" willfully break the rules of evidence, such as conducting searches without a warrant. On Law and Order, at least there's an argument about it and the judge sometimes throws the evidence out. On NCIS, the attitude is "look how edgy our guy is!"