MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Entertainment television has essentially been disregarded by academics interested in the impact of political agendas in mass media and on political belief systems (Mutz & Nir, 2010). In a time when many, if not most Americans can easily sidestep political discussion and self-select out of news altogether, it is vital that entertainment media be studied and explored. And academics who do research and write about entertainment television and politics have focused on programming that breaks new ground, such as genre-busting shows like House of Cards, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Homeland, and The West Wing. In this paper, through textual analysis, I examine a program that has been understudied but has large, politically significant audiences, the television police drama Blue Bloods. And while the show has been all but ignored by critics and academics, it has been covered extensively by the media, both negatively and positively. Blue Bloods has been called everything from “Fascist Cop-aganda” in the Daily Kos to “Ponderosa on the Hudson” in the National Review. Not only does Blue Blood’s overall popularity make it worth studying, but its particular popularity with older viewers, who are much more politically active, is also significant. In this textual analysis of 10 key episodes of the show, I address the following question: How are the moral values of the American family and the American criminal justice system presented within Blue Bloods? My findings show four themes that arose from the data: (1) a nostalgia and sentimentalism for ‘traditional family values’, (2) a one-sided respect for authority, (3) a blindness of privilege, and finally, (4) a dehumanization of ‘others’. Finally, I connect each of these themes with the moral foundations associated with conservative moral culture from moral foundations theory.