I've heard this theory. It's not really consistent with the fact that "24" was a torture-fest from the first season, aired before the enhanced interrogation stuff really got going. I was in college at the time, and we loved the show. You don't need much "purposeful desensitizing" to convince a bunch of 20-something guys it's okay to torture terrorists.
As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
I've assumed this theory prima facie for a while. Further examples are movies glorifying war (Homefront, Lone Survivor). As coldtea mentions, it could be considered a form of moving the Overton window.
As 'angibrowl points out, the movie trope of the good guy that isn't constrained by procedural rules is very old.[1] The 1980's action movie catalogue is full of it. Moving the Overton window doesn't even make sense in this context. Moving it from where? We're talking about a country full of people that vociferously supported bombing harmless Vietnamese villages off the map. Aside from maybe the folks who grew up in the 1990's, who weren't exposed to any real global conflict, I'd be surprised if the current generation wasn't the least receptive in American history to questionable methods of warfare.
[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."
Perhaps it's 'keeping the window propped up' (over to where it was moved long ago). The long history isn't exclusive to the idea that these shows and movies are a form of propaganda, or desensitization.
Moved when? Name one generation that you think was less accepting of questionable conduct in warfare.
The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.
The current trend traces at least as far back as DIRTY HARRY (1971). "Dirty Harry" was a common reference to extra-procedural cops for a couple decades.
