The "24" Effect

Award-winning and critically acclaimed TV show "24" has had quite an impact upon our society. The extent of 24's influence goes beyond the tendency of actors to convey badassedness by whispering every single one of their lines. According to Brigadier General and Dean of West Point Patrick Finnegan, 24 has "had an adverse effect on the training of actual American soldiers by advocating unethical and illegal behavior." (quote from the Wikipedia site). Just about every week, or every hour in the time-scale of 24, Jack Bauer saves the day by torturing a terrorist who gives up the location of, usually quite literally, a ticking time bomb. According to one of the creators of 24, the "'ticking time bomb' situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely." Despite this we have President Bush's advisers saying that the crushing of the testicles of a terrorist's child would be a legally permissible way of obtaining information in ticking bomb situation. In the fallout from Abu Ghraib and US detention centers around the world, this debate about torture in ticking time bomb situations was extended to Congress and the wider press. When the Dean of West Point is citing 24's influence on his students, surely the show must have had an influence on the wider American public's perception of torture?

Fortunately, I don't have to answer that question today. Instead, I'm going to conclusively prove that the rising level of badness of Chinese characters in 24 correlates with an increase of negative views of China in US media. As everyone knows, correlation is the best way to find evidence for tenuous conclusions that the Man doesn't want you to know about. They usually try to totally bring down this sort of stellar research by referring to it as "coincidence." Well, let me ask you: is it coincidence that 24 runs on Fox?

To begin, let's look at the increasingly nefarious portrayal of Chinese people in the Days of 24 beginning with Day 3.

Day 3
There's no Chinese involvement in this season.

Day 4
A Chinese national is complicit in the bad stuff and Jack infiltrates the embassy. Jack commits pseudocide to prevent the US government from selling him out to the Chinese.

Day 5
Jack totally faked out the PRC! But, when terror strikes LA again, Jack must emerge from hiding and whoop up on some terrorists. This makes his presence known to the Chinese and they totally jack Jack at the end of the season and send him packing to China.

Day 6
The Chinese release Jack. But bad Chinese guys play the biggest role of their careers in this most recent Day of 24. They never tell us what happened to Jack during his 20 months in China, but it must have been bad because the weird burns on his hands totally get our mind spinning with the possibilities. Plus, the Chinese faked Audrey's death and tortured her, too! Some bad Chinese dude is in cahoots with Jack's dad and brother, but maybe just his dad because his brother's sort of a tool. They're scoring a card for the Chinese that will give them all they need to know about Russia's defense systems so the Chinese can get a first strike going against the Russian's who became increasingly belligerent on the show (and in real life, but investigating Russian's mirroring their behavior in 24 is the domain of another blog). Chinese agents drive helicopters and Hummvee's around LA's outskirts blowing stuff with machine guns in order to catch Jack who is messing with them because he always has a plan. His plan works! There's even a Chinese submarine that was chilling of the coast of LA waiting to pick up his dad to start a new life in China because China's going to be better than the US in a decade!? [See end of post for better discussion of this from somebody else]

The Study
For the study I did some LexisNexis searches in the New York Times for different search terms that are related to China for 24 Days 3-6. I searched for "china & bad," and "china & danger!" for the full course of each Day, and I searched for "china," "china & bad," and "china & danger!" for the month following the end of Day. I then recorded the number articles that included each of these terms and recorded the results in the chart below:

Full Course of Each Day

	china & bad	china & danger!
Day 3	128	88
Day 4	140	108
Day 5	134	119
Day 6	183	131

Month Following Conclusion of Each Day

	china	china & bad	china & danger!
Day 3	274	22	26
Day 4	354	38	24
Day 5	340	30	37
Day 6	417	40	35

The proof is irrefutably in the pudding. Over the course of these four Days of 24 China is more on the media's mind, and the media views China as both more bad and more related to words that begin with danger. This correlates exactly with an increase in the badness of Chinese characters in 24. 24, and by extension Fox, must be manipulating our minds about the perceived danger posed by China. There cannot be any other rational conclusion.

Those who are unable to understand the intricacy of this study, or those unwilling to grasp the results are going to say something like: "24 doesn't have anything to do with negative media portrayals of China. It has more do with China's explosive growth, rising challenges to US hegemony, perceptions of unfair trade and monetary practices, and poisonous toys." My response: show me some proof. You'll probably give some boring qualitative diatribe on why. Well guess what? I've got numbers. Numbers don't lie. Numbers let us tell interesting stories.

Conclusion
To summarize, 24 has taught us more than torturing and killing terrorists (suspected and otherwise) can solve all of your problems. The show has taught us more than talking in a whisper is really dang cool. The show has taught us more than it only takes a shower, a shave, and a new set of clothes to fully recover from 20 months of continuous torture. And despite the media's apparent misunderstanding, the show has taught us more than the Chinese are bad people who want to destroy us by providing funding to terrorists. The show has taught us that a shadowy cabal of scotch drinking, blue-tooth earpiece wearing businessmen, who are led by either your father or brother are actually almost certainly the mastermind's behind terrorism in the US because they were acting in patriotic or monetary interest.

For a take on the same issue that wasn't posted on any April 1st, check out TIME: China Blog, '24' has China on the Brain!

[Please, note the date of the post]