The AV Club asked its contributors and readers a question that’s worth asking yourself: What mass media and/or practitioners do you like despite your moral qualms?
Answers to “When entertainment trumps morality” boiled down to categories of:
- fare produced by actors, musicians, and athletes with questionable ethics.
- individual movies, shows, or songs with overtones of violence, racism, or misogyny.
This seems like an easy assignment for a media ethics class: Just make a list of those so-bad but so-good songs, movies, and people — and then defend yourself.
To make it more challenging, ask students to take a look at the reader comments below. In addition to their own lists (such as South Park, which no staffer mentioned ), readers offered a variety of ethical suggestions regarding what staffers (and fellow readers) wrote. Ask students to summarize the themes from the reader comments — and the levels of moral development in some of those readers.