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.
The absurd plot is not mere speculation, however. The executive producer of the show, Warren Leight, confirmed that the episode is in production right now and set to air in October and that actress Cybill Shepard will portray the Deen character.
Readers will recall that celebrity chef Paula Deen became the focus of liberal outrage ostensibly for disclosing in a court case that she had used a racial slur 30 years ago. Around the same time, left-wing actor Alec Baldwin actually used an anti-gay slur against a British reporter on Twitter and it received one-fourth of the coverage. Probably the real reason that Deen, who is a Democrat, got flayed in the press was that she embarrassed First Lady Michelle Obama in 2012 by disclosing that she “probably ate more than any other guest I've ever had on the show.”
Writing show scripts based on current news stories has been something of a trademark for the shows but in reality, it is an extremely lazy writing device because it allows the show to avoid the laborious task of constructing believable characters. Even more lazy is that the show writers then re-imagine actual crimes in ways that almost invariably parrot tired left-wing shibboleths.
As a 2005 study by the MRC’s Business and Media Institute found, on the shows, businessmen were five times more likely to commit crimes than terrorists and four times more likely than gang members. Looking at “Law and Order,” “SVU,” and “Criminal Intent,” the study found that almost 50 percent of all crimes committed were committed by businessmen.
While there have been a few politically fair episodes over the years, portraying people unpopular with liberals as literal criminals has been standard fare for the “Law and Order” shows. A 2010 episode of “SVU” portrayed devout Christians as murderous sex addicts, a 2009 episode of the same series specifically went after talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly as “like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate.”
“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,” he wrote in a long-form essay decrying the politicization of the shows.
René Balcer, a long-time executive producer of the series has denied that the show has a political bias. In response to the post above which was prompted by a “Law and Order” episode condemning the Bush Administration’s approval of waterboarding for known Al Qaeda terrorists, Balcer claimed that his series was not partisan or ideologically unfair.
“What many of these critics fail to realize is that Law & Order has always been an equal-opportunity offender, and if a Democratic administration had implemented this despicable policy, our show would have taken them to task for it,” he told Harpers magazine.
It is too bad we can't get a judge to throw out that ridiculously false argument.
(Photos from the set shooting courtesy of Buzzfeed which first reported on the Paula Deen episode.)
