Our Degenerating Media

In the early decades of Hollywood, when corporate greed thrived in its classic form, the studios’ main concern was to please their biggest market - honest, upright, hard-working, family-loving, patriotic Americans. That sort of “profiteering” by the movie (and later television) studios resulted in a profusion of brilliant classic movies, family shows, comedies, and dramas that explored and elevated human spirit. The customers, otherwise known as the American people, demanded shows and movies they could identify with - and “corporate greed” responded by giving the world a magnificent gallery of original and unforgettable characters who, just like their intended audiences, were honest, upright, hard-working, family-loving, and patriotic.
[...]
My, how things have changed. Based on the current Hollywood productions it’s easy to assume that today’s Americans are the most crooked, violent, dissolute, foul-mouthed, sex-crazed, drug-addicted degenerates on the planet. And many people in far-away lands do assume that, having few sources of information about this country other than Hollywood. This assumption would be true, of course, if the same forces of supply and demand were at play in Hollywood as they had been during the Golden Age. But they’re not. The product of Hollywood is no longer the projection of the American psyche.

The changes began around 1960s with a “paradigm shift” towards a “progressive” mentality among the elites who saw America as some sort of Jurassic Park in need of modernization. A significant part of the supposedly greedy Big Media was on the frontlines, selflessly fighting the campaign to swipe traditional American values into the dustbin of history - while gradually losing touch with the majority of Americans who selfishly refused to treat their traditional values as garbage. Having to choose between the consumers and the ideology, the media elites chose the ideology, denying Americans a voice in their programming. Thus the Big Media broke the first rule of capitalism. It breached its contract with the consumer. The customer became always wrong.