Harmful actors deflect blame by comparing their acts to worse ones

Evidence

In The Storyteller, a television movie directed by Robert Markowitz that was designed to vindicate televised violence, a father reminds his married daughter, who is concerned about televised fare, that classic children’s stories are of violence: “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel” are much worse (Levinson & Link, 1977). Other media personnel point to the knights of yore in the tales of King Arthur as a mighty violent lot. The violence on television is said to pale in comparison to that in comic books. Why pick on television, the scapegoat disclaimer goes, when the government is wreaking havoc through societal violence? “To examine violence where the end result is a dead body on television glosses over the point. This evades the culpability of a whole society which permits wars… . Television and motion pictures are fall guys for a sick society” (Baldwin & Lewis, 1972). Even the death toll caused by the tobacco industry is recruited in the service of comparative exoneration: “Exploring the effects of violence on my program is a sliver as compared with manifestations of violence in the total society. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 837

Categorization

• XREF: Comparative exoneration as blame deflection connects to the vault’s moral-disengagement and scapegoating mechanisms.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 837