The most glaring example of that for me would be the 90s movie "PCU." It is an incredibly :LIB: piece of enlightened centrist propaganda, portraying black activism, feminism, veganism, even concern about endangered species as absurd and stupid, at least as bad as the cryptofascist white fratboys that are (of course) in league with the university's leader, who has two last names with a hyphen (the horror!) and had a whooping crane as a mascot (which is supposed to be a punchline as it wanders off and presumably dies off camera).
The chuds I knew back in the 90s loved it and there were moments that, if pressed, I would still grudgingly accept were cleverly written even if they are like peanuts sticking out of a steaming pile of ironically-:LIB: anti-:LIB: propaganda manure.
Lower key than that, the Indiana Jones movies are much harder to watch with all of the "all the girls in the professor's class want to bang him and also he is a lowkey child molester and it's just a quirky plot point."
I've talked about the Mass Effect series before and I'll bring it up again: being an extrajudicial special forces agent that acts above the law and working with (and effectively joining) a cryptofascist human supremacist organization ran by a rich techbro psychopath and it's all seen as sensible enough to have no opt-out, well, fuck that. "Humanity fuck yeah" stories are also tiresome to me.
Strong disagree from me, from the words of people I roomed with that credited South Park for their contemporary word views by direct reference.
I mean if you want to doubt that and say "material conditions only, down river only," I can't stop you, but when someone tells me, for example, "I didn't know what to think of (trans slur here) until I saw the Jenner episode" I believe them. It's hard to see what material conditions made that person decide to hate trans people, but when their entertainment makes trans people seem like vain and grotesque body horror monsters, denying that influence and saying "material conditions only" just seems dogmatic.
It's kind of hard to prove a negative, and saying that people's entertainment does absolutely nothing to influence their views sounds like an incredible stretch. Advertising works, so why wouldn't entertainment media messaging influence people to at least some extent?
Oh no I am not saying it doesn't affect people's views and influence people. What I am saying is that reactionary media doesn't create reactionaries ex nilio, like if you see transphobic garbage and go "lol yeah that's right" you were already in a place where you find it acceptable to doubt the value of people to begin with. It's also all statistical in nature like the material conditions determine the likelihood distribution of ideological outcomes for a given population.
It is also definitely a reciprocal relationship where being materially more prone to reactionary ideology makes those cultural products more effective, which in turn leads ideologically radicalized people to reinforce the material structure. I just think the process starts at the material.
Fair take.