> I'm thinking of the countless shows which glorify violence, cheating, drug smuggling, and so forth. It's not clear that glorifying these things in the media leads to them being acted out in real life, but even if it doesn't: that still seems like a massive sense of cognitive dissonance, wherein the cultural products of a society are only tenuously related to its real-world values.
Remember the good ol' days?
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".