Mass media transmit behavioral prescriptions rather than mirror real life

Evidence

The heroine of a light comedy is, to use George Legman’s term, ‘a bitch heroine.’ She behaves toward her father in an incredibly inhuman and cruel manner only slightly rationalized as ‘merry pranks’. But she is punished very slightly, if at all. True, in real life bad deeds are rarely punished at all, but this cannot be applied to television. Here, those who have developed the production code for the movies seem right: what matters in mass media is not what happens in real life, but rather the positive and negative ‘messages’, prescriptions, and taboos that the spectator absorbs by means of identification with the material he is looking at. The punishment given to the pretty heroine only nominally fulfils the conventional requirements of the conscience for a second. But the spectator is given to understand that the pretty heroine really gets away with everything just because she is pretty. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 240

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets out the core premise that drives the whole culture-industry reading: media function as a code of taboos, not as report on actuality.
• QUESTION: Adorno concedes production-code censorship as a shaping force here — worth testing how much of his reading survives the post-code, prestige-TV era.
• XREF: connects to: Media act as a genetic code mutating the real into the hyperreal. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 112; Objects and media messages interrogate consumers rather than being consumed — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 256; The internal psychological space has been fully penetrated by the media landscape — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 880 (+1 more)