A single TV movie deployed several moral disengagement mechanisms at once.

Evidence

It was remarkable to see an entire movie exonerating televised violence inadvertently built on the mechanisms of moral disengagement. In the story line, a screenwriter’s TV movie is held responsible for triggering an imitative arson that killed a youngster. In justifying the reliance on violence, the broadcast industry was portrayed as fending off censorship that threatened to kill creativity. In a scene devoted to exoneration by advantageous comparison, the screenwriter confronts his married daughter, who allows her daughter to read the violence in “Little Red Riding Hood” but restricts what her daughter can watch on television. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 899

Categorization

• XREF: Shows moral disengagement layers compressing into one artifact — parallels how the chapter’s framework applies to media criticism as well as individual psychology.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on how commercial institutions unconsciously deploy moral disengagement in self-exoneration — using this real TV movie as a case study.