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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Steve Burton must have flamed out in a lot of cocktail parties after trying his "Two Words: Omar Little" line.

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(@Tushar:

You're correct to say that the Republican governor hadn't cut funding in Season 3, but the reason the schools were in the hole is because their funding had been cut for so long by that governor: it only came to a head for Carcetti because he inherited the problem that Royce had been ignoring for so long, letting it get worse and worse. Since Carcetti made promises to the teachers in his campaign, he had to find a way to deal with the budget crisis.)

I think the overall message of the show is more that In general, corruption is apolitical, and the real villain. The Republicans in the show are mostly names and legacies that the Democrats decry the evils of, but corruption comes from the Democrats AND the Republicans. It's that simple. The real evil in the show time after time is not Republicans, or Democrats, or even "Government," but rather corruption in everything from juking stats for promotions, to bending rules for Pulitzers.

Additionally, it depicts a system broken in part because people never fix the problems around them because they refuse to admit to uncomfortable truths, which is also apolitical, but is usually a Liberal claim in everything from the environment to affirmative action to educational reform. Take the depiction of standardized testing in public schools: ineffective, counter productive, biased. This is a Liberal argument; I can't remember the last time I saw a Republican talking about the school systems other than to say that "Intelligent Design" should be taught in them too.

Let's go through the list of assertions from each season after the first:-Unions are corrupt: Conservative, but the sympathy is clearly with them anyway because they need to be corrupt to survive.-Politics are corrupt: Apolitical.-Public schools and police departments need more funding; Liberal. Conservatives are just as likely to cut funding to police departments as they are to public schools, under the umbrella of "less government spending."-Media is insincere; Apolitical.

The overall message of the show though?-The Drug War is a failure; Liberal/Libertarian. Not all Democrats would say this, but many have gone on record as for the decriminalization of drugs, and the only Republicans that dare espouse this view on national television are the ones that are more Libertarian than Conservative.

In answer to the question of what another season might be to show the Liberal views of the creators more clearly, it seems pretty straightforward to me: the privatization of prisons and by extension the corruption of the justice system. It's hard to make a series that's focusing on a single city really encompass the "conservative evils" of big businesses using their monetary clout to influence laws and deregulate health and safety measures, but they could do something with that on a smaller scale in terms of pollution and monopolizing.

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