Name: See Dick and Jane... Lie, Cheat and Steal: Teaching Morality to Kids
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1989-04-22
Duration: 48 min
Cast: Sylvia Peters, Tom Selleck

Wrongheaded documentary presenting opinions as facts

I was forced to watch this propaganda piece several times in middle school. It's essentially right-wing drivel that the media teaches kids to do bad things and championing the 1950s as the American Utopia. For example, they list the top en problems in schools in the 1980s based on teacher surveys and compare that to what they allege is a survey of teachers about student misbehavior where the biggest problems were littering and cutting class, a top ten list that was eventually proved to be a hoax that was based on one man's opinion and not derived from a survey at all.

Another scene shows an episode of _He-Man and the Masters of the Universe_ over which Tom Selleck notes that the series tells viewers that violence is the best solution to problems. This is indisputably propaganda, as the scene shown depicts no violence whatsoever, but is, rather, a dialogue scene between He-Man and Gleegle from the episode "Quest for He-Man." It seems like all the adults I knew took this seriously at the time it came out, victims of the magic bullet theory. I never knew why they didn't understand why showing a clip of dialogue between two friendly characters to "prove" that the show teaches violence, especially when there was no audio has no validity. I suspect it was akin to the letter-writing campaign of people telling the network to take off _The A-Team_ on the grounds that it was "too violent," when probably 95% of the complainers had never watched the show and were going based on what friends heard from friends.

Teabaggers would love this nonsense, but fortunately, it has become difficult to see.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

See Dick and Jane... Lie, Cheat and Steal: Teaching Morality to Kids

A documentary on raising children with moral values in today's society.

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See Dick and Jane... Lie, Cheat and Steal: Teaching Morality to Kids

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