Hate your boss?
You’re not alone. TV also hates your boss.
The Free Market Project of the Media Research Center recently analyzed 17 weeks of prime-time fare during a 26-month period. That comes to a numbing total of 863 sitcoms, dramas and made-for-TV movies on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.
The results of the study are surprising.
Of the 514 “criminals” on TV during the study period, 150 (29.2 percent) were “business owners” or “executives.” Only 50 (9.8 percent) were “career criminals.”
And these “crimes” didn’t involve merely the familiar white-collar hanky-panky.
Business characters also kill: Of the 214 “murderers” in the study, 65 (30.4 percent) were “businessmen.”
It’s little wonder that the title of this study is “Businessmen Behaving Badly,” and little wonder that it has people outraged.
“Prime-time TV is creating a preposterous and fictitious portrait of businessmen as evil, and spoon-feeding it to mass audiences every night of the week,” says the study’s author, Tim Lamer, who also edits the Free Market Project’s monthly newsletter called MediaNomics (whatever that means). “Hollywood is not mirroring society as it has always claimed, it is attacking society.”
