American TV shifted from portraying torturers as villains to depicting heroes who torture

Evidence

In the history of U.S. television, the torturer had usually been the bad guy, not the good guy. Historically, torture was used as a technique by writers and producers to villainize a character; it was considered immoral and therefore a stock tool of the bad guys—who included the Russians during the Cold War, the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, and Latin American and Middle Eastern dictators in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 9/11, and especially through the character of Jack Bauer, the hero has become the torturer. Torture is now used for the greater good, as opposed to being used in the service of evil or power. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 299

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral panic framings and how media norms encode who counts as the enemy; also links to the ‘immodesty’ article’s theme of TV/visual culture shifting ethical norms.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the ‘torturing hero’ archetype in 24 normalized a definitional slippery slope from torture to ‘physical abuse’ that mapped onto real public policy debates.