Exactly. If you see something being common on multiple shows with multiple or diverse demographics, it isn’t the opinion of the writers that causes it. Television does shape audience minds, but audience minds much more shape television.
I’ll give you a show that had family closeness, religious values, a positive view of hunting & guns, and an easy-going conservatism that took on the nonsense from the Left & the Right… King of the Hill.
That’s sort of a chicken-or-the-egg issue - is hunting depicted negatively because people aren’t hunting as much, or are people not hunting as much because it’s depicted negatively?
I almost mentioned KotH’s hunting episode in the OP as a counter-example. That show does represent a different perspective, a populist one, and rejects most of the tropes I mentioned in the OP.
Well, to answer your question, there is no doubt that fewer people hunt, but it’s still thriving in rural areas. But, as hypothesized in this thread, it’s clear that people with rural backgrounds are under-represented in the “creative community”.
I live in a rural area where a lot of people hunt (including myself) and most people have guns in their house. But I realize that’s not true everywhere, particularly in urban areas. And, yes, it’s obvious that most TV and movie writers (and actors, needless to say) have an urban, left-leaning background that is ignorant of hunting culture, at best, but more often blatantly antagonistic toward toward hunting.
I usually cringe when I see a “hunting” storyline in a TV show. The clothes are wrong, the verbiage is wrong, the tactics are wrong and the firearm handling is unsafe (and wrong). It’s obvious that the writers and actors have no idea about the subject.
On a related note, I also cringe every time I see a character (it happens with both “good guys” and “bad guys”) holding a striker-fired pistol like a Glock, point it at someone and then hear a “cocking” sound when they get “serious” about shooting someone. Arrggh! There is no hammer to pull back on a Glock! If you want that sound to be accurate, they need to be holding a revolver with a hammer that is cocked back. It happens on almost every show and drives me nuts.
In the case of hunting, I think more people are swayed by practical reasons than moral considerations. IMO, the decline of hunting has more to do with the ick factor (for lack of a better term) of shooting an animal and dealing with the blood and guts, rather than any moral stance portrayed on TV. It’s so much easier and cleaner to just go to the grocery store. For the same reason, a job at a slaughterhouse is never a priority for high school grads, not out of moral considerations but more because of the ick factor.
Does anyone remember the early 90s puppet sitcom Dinosaurs? It has got to be one of the most heavy-handed examples of “perspective”: every episode was a thinly veiled allegorical indictment of some stance on a social issue.