My child wanted to watch an animated green lantern series recently so we checked it out. Of course the main character who is the human green lantern is a fighter pilot who does a bunch of sweet fighter pilot flight maneuvers in the opening sequence. I told my child that shows like this often show the military being cool and doing cool stuff, but that in real life what fighter pilots actually do is drop bombs on children. I’m only human, I also enjoy (some) military action movies, but I know it’s cotton candy brain poison too.
I hate how many children’s shows have pro military pro cop propaganda. How do others talk to their kids about it to inoculate them against brainworms? I usually describe the military and the cops as being like a gang of bullies - they do things to make themselves look cool but really they just exist to hurt people and take their shit.
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Even Bluey has an episode where the moral is, “If you have symptoms of ADHD, consider joining the army.”
My kid’s still too young to talk in much depth, but my intention is to curate as much copaganda as I can out of their media diet while still fulfilling most of their media requests, and to treat “the cop talk” the same way I intend to treat sexuality: answer questions frankly and concisely when they come up. They’ll ask for more details if they’re wondering, and the rest probably won’t be relevant to them yet.
I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid, but that didn’t survive me seeing how the military swindles soldiers, much less learning about the Korean War etc.
I’m trying to think of kids shows that don’t have either the token friendly cop or cop episodes where cops talk about how great they are and I’m drawing a blank. At least for mainstream American kids shows.
This probably only works for little kids (under age 8-9 or so) and if you live in the US, but I limit TV pretty much to just PBS Kids. Virtually no copaganda, definitely no military worship, and there’s enough variety that there’s always some shows my kids are excited to watch so it’s not like I’m forcing them to eat their veggies or anything .
I always watched PBS as a kid. Even though I was raised in a very religious community, stuff like Little Bear and Arthur were pretty good.
Though I do still think most of those had at some point a “good cop” character
Yeah I was gonna see even Bluey has a bootlicking episode.
I would talk about it outside of when they are enjoying it, if that makes sense?
Could frame it about how “sometimes it can be hard to tell fact from fiction when it involves a subject we don’t know anything about, I just want you to be informed, it is alright to enjoy things but we have to be vigilant when it comes to media portraying things we don’t know stuff about”
And maybe also share some times you believed things that weren’t true because of media/fiction. Modeling growth is important.
Reagan abolishing the Fairness Doctrine, even as flawed and questionably motivated as it was, paved the way for some very serious and long-lasting propaganda victories for chuds for decades afterward.
While not the most direct recipient of the abolishment, childrens’ entertainment nonetheless became increasingly driven by an unprecedented desire to sell toys based off of what was on the screen, often with crude propaganda built right in.
The most glaring example of that was the 1980s GI Joe cartoon with the tattered vestiges of the old broadcast norms delivered by way of those memeable PSAs after each show.
I really enjoyed that cartoon as a kid and it took decades to look back and realize what I had internalized and accepted in the propaganda in an unexamined way regarding the US military, its purpose, and its goals across the planet.
At least we got parodies like this from people that realized what was shoveled into their brains when they were kids.
