Media openly exonerated elite rule-breaking in the millennial era

Evidence

Gossip Girl’s politics, wrote Slate’s Willa Paskin, were “borderline aristocratic.” Lana Cooper in PopMatters observed that the show transformed its “Poor Little Rich Kids” into sympathetic figures, “regardless of how many rules they break.” In fact, critic David Klion wrote, “Everyone on Gossip Girl remains filthy rich and free to do whatever they want. They’re all morally exonerated for their most reprehensible actions.” Even this, however, felt in keeping with millennial candor. Gossip Girl’s tagline—“You know you love me”—was, as Paskin put it, “a neat summation of the series’s feelings about the preposterously wealthy.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 353

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for the counter-case: the frankly unapologetic wealth worship of Gossip Girl-era media is itself a distinctive era signature, even if Marx calls the period blank — it signals aestheticized amorality rather than class identification.