I saw the MASH episode where they have a nork guerilla in the unit for treatment. Hawkeye and co. were all over Mako’s character for wanting to take her back for interrogation and possible execution. At the end, even when she admitted to trying to kill an American soldier in the hospital and how she despised and wanted to kill Hawk and co, they still got pissed at Mako’s char and had to be halted by his guards cocking their rifles.. I was amazed at how stupid they looked supporting this woman commie like that.
I saw a few other episodes that bad, or nearly so. It was a wildly popular show in its day, but it was pure propaganda. And still is. If you look at your channel guides, it’s being re-run on several networks on weekends and at night. But most of the shows are that way, in one format or another.
And of course the newscasts are equally vile in that regard.
That’s the kind of idiocy you really start encountering in the early-70s. The other day I was watching a similarly-vintage episode of “Cannon” (which is a series generally devoid of propagandizing, actually). The episode involved a scientist who steals a cannister of nerve-gas from his company, in protest of the Army’s purchasing of said product. To make a moral statement to the world, he places the cannister at a carousel in a carnival, set to be released and kill perhaps a thousand people.
The scientist is obviously presented as a bit unhinged, but also rather sympathetically. Even at the end, as he’s in custody, he’s treated more as an unfortunate guy who had a ‘breakdown,’ but meant well. Anyway, had this same story been told in a tv-show five or ten years earlier, the protagonists would have treated this character, who attempted a huge mass-murder of innocent carnival-patrons, with total disgust.