Moral disengagement mechanisms structure industry self-defense narratives

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. In a tranquil scene in which the screenwriter builds sand castles on the beach with his granddaughter, he tells a metaphoric story about protection against an attack in which seagulls bring grains of sand to protect the sand castle from the tidal onslaught. He asks his granddaughter whether she is ever scared by what she sees on television. Voicing the industry’s erroneous claim that children are not frightened by menacing scenes, she replies, “No, it’s only make-believe.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 899

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the SAME rhetorical playbook (advantageous comparison, denial of harm, victim-blaming, displacement of responsibility) that vault claims document in Islamophobia and authoritarian support — industry public-relations as microcosm of Bandura’s whole mechanism set.
• SEED: An angle comparing how discredited industries (broadcast violence, tobacco, lead paint) rehearse identical exoneration scripts — a taxonomy of self-absolution rhetoric.
• CANDY: A TV movie defending television violence used Little Red Riding Hood as the ‘advantageous comparison’ — violence in fairy tales is fine but on-screen mayhem needs censorship defense.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 899