Is America now officially a Banana Republic where the president and those behind him control the media and the election outcomes too?

Several years ago, a trio of researchers working for the Inter-American Development Bank set out to help solve a sociological mystery. Brazil had, over the course of four decades, experienced one of the largest drops in average family size in the world, from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 children in 2000. What made the drop so curious is that, unlike the Draconian one-child policy in China, the Brazilian government had in place no policy to limit family size. (It was actually illegal at some point to advertise contraceptives in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.)

What could explain such a steep drop? The researchers zeroed in on one factor: television.

Television spread through Brazil in the mid-sixties. But it didn’t arrive everywhere at once in the sprawling country. Brazil’s main station, Globo, expanded slowly and unevenly. The researchers found that areas that gained access to Globo saw larger drops in fertility than those that didn’t (controlling, of course, for other factors that could affect fertility). It was not any kind of news or educational programming that caused this fertility drop but exposure to the massively popular soap operas, or novelas, that most Brazilians watch every night. The paper also found that areas with exposure to television were dramatically more likely to give their children names shared by novela characters.

Novelas almost always center around four or five families, each of which is usually small, so as to limit the number of characters the audience must track. Nearly three quarters of the main female characters of childbearing age in the prime-time novelas had no children, and a fifth had one child. Exposure to this glamorized and unusual (especially by Brazilian standards) family arrangement “led to significantly lower fertility”—an effect equal in impact to adding two years of schooling.

In a 2009 study, economists Robert Jensen and Emily Oster detected a similar pattern in India. A decade ago, cable television started to expand rapidly into the Indian countryside, where deeply patriarchal views had long prevailed. But not all villages got cable television at once, and its random spread created another natural experiment. This one yielded extraordinary results. Not only did women in villages with cable television begin bearing fewer children, as in Brazil, but they were also more able to leave their home without their husbands’ permission and more likely to disapprove of husbands abusing their wives, and the traditional preference for male children declined. The changes happened rapidly, and the magnitude was “quite large”—the gap in gender attitudes separating villages introduced to cable television from urban areas shrunk by between 45 and 70 percent.

Television, with its more progressive social model, had changed everything.

A 2011 paper found that when An Inconvenient Truth appeared in a town—here, again, an uneven pattern allowed for experimentation—purchases of carbon offsets rose by half. The effect disappeared over time, as you’d expect from a single film that wasn’t followed up.


Now how does this apply.

Wikidpedia houses info supporting the following.

- Al Jean of the Simpsons team admitted in an interview that; "We [the show] are of liberal bent.". In the DVD commentaries, creator Matt Groening and the majority of people who work on the show state several times that they are very liberal; There has been no debate the Simpsons expresses political agenda (1st most watched cartoon of all time). Also Futurama (the 4th most watched cartoon of all time) has never had debate over containing political agenda.

- In August 2006, Parker, Stone, and Sullivan headlined a conference in Amsterdam hosted by the libertarian monthly magazine Reason. During an on-stage interview with Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Jesse Walker, Stone and Parker reaffirmed their discomfort with labels while acknowledging that their political views could be described most accurately as libertarian and rejected the direction of the Republican Party that they described as "more government and more Jesus. There has also been southpark episodes showing parodies of the tea party. (South Park is the 2nd most watched cartoon of all time).

- Seth MacFarlane provides large donations to the Liberal party and actively admits firm support; there has been no debate Family Guy expresses political agenda (6th most watched cartoon of all time); and of course the Cleveland show and American dad (both newer shows)3.

No other cartoons in the top 10 of all time indicate any primary political swing, or do not include political themes. But for 4 of the top 6 shows to show heavy and unarguable liberal bias, that is concerning. The Simpsons arrived on TV’s in 1989…that’s how long this has had to result in a noticeable effect on the population.

Now from the following source;
http://nymag.com/news/feature...

A member of President Obama’s reelection team recently told New York’s John Heilemann that it plans on painting its opponent as a man out of time—Mitt Romney is “the fifties, he is retro, he is backward.”

The Screen Guide warned that Communists operate not through open advocacy but by slipping subtle messages into their scripts. “Their purpose,” the Screen Guide wrote of Communists, “is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting nonpolitical movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories.” Their primary method, according to the Screen Guide, was by portraying the rich in a negative light. It warned the studios not to permit negative portrayals of industrialists. “Don’t spit in your own face or, worse, pay miserable little rats to do it. You, as a motion-picture producer, are an industrialist.”

Other popular television shows that focus on pushing the ‘progressive’ view of the economy, family, immigrants, war and or other views aligned to a Liberal/Demo mindset.

- Modern Family
- Glee
- Girls
- Desperate Housewives
- Any number of 'popular' talk show hosts ie Oprah, Conan, Letterman etc...
- Pan Am (“Meanwhile, Maggie (Christina Ricci) struggles to balance her liberal politics with her feelings for a pro-war politician.”)
- Gossip Girl
- The Big Bang Theory
- Revenge
- New Girl
- The Office
- Seinfeld
- Will & Grace; When Joe Biden endorsed gay marriage in May, he cited Will & Grace as the single-most important driving force in transforming public opinion on the subject.
- Mad Men; An recent episode of Mad Men that included the odd throwaway line “Romney’s a clown,” putatively to describe George Romney, who was anything but.

The list could go on, but that is enough to draw some fairly stark conclusions unless a comparable list can be developed to show strong Republican alignment.

Joss Whedon admitted this spring that he had written a scene into The Avengers in which Captain America deplored the “loss of health care and welfare” in America, only to cut it in the editing room. Nicholas Meyer directed a 1983 anti–nuclear war television special, The Day After, and later confessed, “My private, grandiose notion was that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for reelection.”

René Balcer, the Law & Order producer, told one interviewer that he has laced his show with references to Bush-era abuses like the Patriot Act, but without naming Bush. “Our best shows,” he said, “make people question what’s going on.”

I’m not even going to make a start on more of the film industry as my point has been made.