Presentism fallacy
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Original Question
I notice that this fallacy doesn't seem to be on this site. It means judging things that happened in the past by present day moral standards, which in many cases isn't really fair. For instance, people often complain about things in old films or TV shows being racist or sexist or otherwise discriminatory, but they don't seem prepared to bear in mind that the films were made at a time when that sort of thing was considered funny.
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Answers
3Presentism is only really fallacious when it interferes with your ability to describe history; it doesn't really apply if one strictly admits that they are giving their opinion.
Here's an example of this going wrong:
Simon: Slavery has always been a disgusting practice. The way the slave workers were treated was inhumane. All societies that practiced it should have known better.
This is more like the historian’s fallacy where Simon tries to argue that slave societies 'should have known better', when their practice of slavery was based on norms and beliefs that we now know to be false.
Here, criticising slavery is fine - it was an abhorrent practice - but one has to bear in mind that people in the past did not see things that way, because they did not have the moral standards and information that we have. Thus, while one can disapprove of the slave-owning nature of many ancient societies, it is good to remember that this is simply how things were back in the day.
A lot of people criticise things from the past in order to prescribe future action (which is fine, and not a fallacy).
Here's an example of doing this right:
Louise: We now know that slavery is wrong. Southern Power is a film that glorifies slavery. Thus, it should be banned.
I would disagree with Louise, but this is a fair argument with a moral judgement. Rather than reading present morals into the past, she is projecting them into the future.
I think the fallacy you're referring to is what C.S.Lewis called chronological snobbery, Which is the idea that the present is inherently better than the past. Like in your example, people will often say old TV and films are more racist than new films--the implication being that new films are better/less racist because they are contemporary (contemporary is assumed to = progress).
But many would argue that (1) racism is still alive and well dispite progress we've made over the decades; and (2) contemporary film and TV still portrays racism at times. For example, the TV show Kims Convenience (2011-2021) has been criticized for portraying Koreans in a bigoted manner.
On this website, the fallacy is described as appeal to novelty
On this site, the primary name is historian’s fallacy .
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The logical flaw here is that your argument implies that "changes in social culture and attitudes" either occur separately or indifferently from the "emergence of new information", when in fact it can be easily shown that the two are necessarily coeval.
I think this may qualify as an ambiguity fallacy as it is a phrase and not based upon a single misinterpreted word. (Equivocation Fallacy )
Changes in social culture and attitudes occur with the introduction of new ideas and information.
Therefore, any society or culture that is immune to new ideas or new information will find social change to be extremely difficult.
For instance, The Constitution originally defined African Americans as only 3/5 of a person. Obviously, with the introduction of new information (over some four hundred years), we realize this to be a preposterous claim.
The other flaw I see in the OP is that it assumes that just because some people found a morally repugnant and obsolete idea to be funny it somehow excuses it from being racist or discriminatory. (It's possible to be both). Don Rickles could be both hysterically funny and shockingly racist at times, but with new information and changes in attitude, his comedy act drew more and more criticism and eventually grew out of favor. Minstrel singers were once considered to be a high note of musical and cultural entertainment, but as new information and ideas poured in we realized that it was at the expense of reducing, stereotyping, and dehumanizing whole groups of ethnic people.