Hollywood’s Last Great Villain

It's the businessman. From today's Wall Street Journal:

Everybody knows that television plays a powerful role in shaping social attitudes. So it's no surprise when groups of people who sense that they are being harmfully stereotyped in the medium lodge complaints. The "Frito bandito" is long gone as a result, and a show like "Amos 'n' Andy" would be unthinkable now. Even religion can get some respect if the yelps of outrage are loud enough: NBC's "The Book of Daniel," about a drug-addicted Episcopal minister with a pipeline to a hipster Jesus, was quickly canceled this year after protests that it was offensive to people of faith.

But there's one group we never hear a peep from, even though its members may be the most routinely maligned of all. According to a study published last month by the Business & Media Institute, in the world of TV entertainment, "businessmen [are] a greater threat to society than terrorists, gangs or the mob."

The study, titled "Bad Company," looked at the top 12 TV dramas during May and November in 2005, ranging from crime shows like "CSI" to the goofy "Desperate Housewives." Out of 39 episodes that featured business-related plots, the study found, 77% advanced a negative view of the world of commerce and its practitioners.

Emily Chamlee-Wright and the late Don Lavoie covered similar ground in chapter five of their terrific book Culture and Enterprise.

On a related note, Deirdre McCloskey defended the virtues [pdf] of the bourgeois in a recent issue of Cato Policy Report.