essay about television violence

Television Violence and its Impact on Society essay

Many people believe that television violence has a negative effect on society because it promotes violence. Do you agree or disagree?

Today, the impact of television on the audience is still significant that raises the public concerns about the possible negative impact of television violence on society (Machlis & Forney, 2010). On the other hand, some people argue that the negative impact of television on society is insignificant because people are rational and can distinguish the real world from the imaginary one. However, the television violence does have the negative impact on society because people see violence on the regular basis. As a result, they grow accustomed to violence and take it for granted. If they see violence on television over and over again they start believing that violence is a norm and comprises an integral part of their life.

In fact, people become vulnerable to the impact of television because, if they see violence, for instance, they may grow disturbed about cases of violence occurring in society. Steadily people may grow anxious about their own safety and start expecting violent and aggressive behavior from the part of their social environment. Eventually, they may slip to the aggressive and violent behavior as the means of self-defense and, more important, they steadily learn that the aggressive and violent behavior is a norm since they watch violence on television day after day and there is no effective counteraction to the violence in society.

On the other hand, it is possible to argue that people should be reasonable and rational in the perception of the information which they receive from mass media, including television. Therefore, they should not necessarily behave in the violent way as they watch other people behave on television.

In fact, people live in society and they respect existing social norms and standards (Moy, et al., 1999). Therefore, if violence is anti-social, then they will never behave in a violent or aggressive way, unless they are inclined to the anti-social behavior because of some reasons (Machlis & Forney, 2010). Instead, they behave in the rational way and respect social norms, while the violence on television cannot change the existing social norms and values. People are just living according to rules and legal norms that are acceptable within their community.

However, arguments of opponents of the belief that television violence cannot have a negative impact on society are inconsistent because they apparently underestimate the depth of the impact of television on the audience (Lawson & Stowell, 2009). If people are always exposed to the violence on television, they stop perceiving it as something abnormal. In fact, the normal psychological reaction of the average viewer on violence is repulsion. However, if that viewer watch the violence on television over and over again, it becomes less shocking, until the moment, when the viewer perceives the violence as a norm. As the attitude of the viewer on the violence on television evolves, so does change the viewer’s attitude to violence in the real world (Lawson & Stowell, 2009). The viewer just starts believing that violence is not abnormal but a routine part of social life. Therefore, the viewer starts believing that violence is a plausible means of resolution of any problems fast.

In addition, viewers are vulnerable to the impact of violence from the early childhood. As a result, children are also vulnerable to the impact of violence on television (Moy, et al., 1999). At this point, it is worth mentioning the fact that children perceive television in a different way compared to adults. They cannot always distinguish the real world and fiction on television. They cannot clearly say what is good and what is right because their personality and values are just forming. As a result, the exposure of children to violence leads to the development of negative behavioral patterns, such as violence and aggression that influence their social relations and may cause deviant behavior.

Thus, the violence on television is dangerous because it has a negative impact on society. Arguments of those, who believe that violence on television does not have negative impact on society, are inconsistent because people cannot always think rationally and perceive the information they receive from television critically. Moreover, they learn negative behavioral patterns and become violent and aggressive under the impact of the violence on television. In such a way, the violence on television does have a negative impact on people, their behavior and social relations.

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Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior Essay

It is said that television and media brought about new problems that are evident in the modern day and age. Mostly, these influences are harmful in relation to violence and people’s general behavior, which is characterized as careless, destructive and unpredictable.

In reality, there is a great difference and separation between the violence that is seen on TV and that in real life, as people will not become aggressive if their character is not based on aggression.

For a long time, there has been a debate that violence in the media causes more aggressive behavior in the person. There have been numerous studies, but the evidence is somewhat controversial. The majority of people believe that the causation of violent behavior by media is exaggerated. The social theorists suppose that people learn by modeling and imitating behavior.

There have been experiments where such imitation would be tested with children as participants. It has yielded imprecise results (Wells, 1997). Further studies and experimentation have not established any particular correlation because of the control variables being too fluid.

An important concept in movies and media is that they constantly remind the viewer that it is only the authorized people, like police officers and other authorities, are allowed to use violence as a last resource. In many instances, there is added humor, even though it does not diminish the violent and dangerous nature of the situation where a person is killed or their life is threatened.

In general, it is possible to assume that a person might get desensitized towards violence, blood, aggression and criminal behavior. It has been proven that the more a person is confronted with a certain stimuli, the more they will get used to it. This can be seen in many examples from real life (Casey, 2008).

Today, there are movies that show very gruesome and graphic scenes, and it is a fact that many people watch movies like “Saw” and it might make them more used to horror and blood. But people realize that it is a movie and a false, staged situation. A real life occurrence would be very different.

For example, if a movie does not have graphic images or scenes, it might create an idea of violence where people are controlled against their will or held hostage. From one perspective, it is said that the person will learn to like the violence and use it in real life. But a person’s character or individuality cannot learn to like a particular stimulus. If a person does not like to smoke, they will not get used to it by constantly smoking.

Or if someone likes a certain color or smell, a person cannot be made to like or unlike something. In the end, it is possible to see that there must be a link between violence and an already existing personal predisposition to it. The only people who will get affected by graphic violent media are those who require ideas in how to manifest own violent behavior.

From this perspective, it would be better if violence was excluded from media and movies. It can be left simple, as if when a person gets shot or hit, there are no close-ups to show the wound or any blood. It would be useful to promote that the only moral of the movies in relation to violence is that it is unlawful and unwanted by anyone. Most evidence supports the fact that there must be a predisposition towards violence.

It very much depends on an individual. A person who is kind and moral will not resolve to violence because it will conflict with their core moral beliefs, and no matter how often they see violence on the news or in movies, each time they will feel appalled and will not simulate such behavior (Freedman, 2002).

It is clear that a person, who resolved to violence, either grew up in aggressive circumstances where they thought that it was allowed or possible or they have some genetic malfunction. Majority of people are taught that violence is wrong and will not be tolerated by the law and society.

Modern civilized countries take every effort to make this as clear as possible and everyone, even the criminals, know that taking someone’s life or being aggressive towards someone is the highest crime and will be punished. Unfortunately, the evolving technology is becoming a greater part of human life. The 3D or hologram affects, not to mention virtual reality, can stimulate senses in ways that were not possible before.

There is very little evidence as to how the body and genetic information reacts and what it stores. There is a slight chance that a person who watches violence all their life and becomes desensitized to human pain and suffering, will record that information in genes and pass it on to the next generation (Holtzman, 2000).

In any case, there is always a limit as to violence on TV and its nature. The modern society wants to see more blood, which is evident from many movies, and the types of people that watch those movies are of specific character. But the general public seems unharmed by media, as it is too character specific.

Works Cited

Casey, Bernadette. Television studies: the key concepts . New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Freedman, Jonathan. Media violence and its effect on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Print.

Holtzman, Linda. Media messages . Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Print.

Wells, Alan. Mass media & society . London, England: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. Print.

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The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research

L. rowell huesmann.

The University of Michigan

Since the early 1960s research evidence has been accumulating that suggests that exposure to violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones, and on the internet increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of them behaving violently. In the current review this research evidence is critically assessed, and the psychological theory that explains why exposure to violence has detrimental effects for both the short run and long run is elaborated. Finally, the size of the “media violence effect” is compared with some other well known threats to society to estimate how important a threat it should be considered.

One of the notable changes in our social environment in the 20 th and 21st centuries has been the saturation of our culture and daily lives by the mass media. In this new environment radio, television, movies, videos, video games, cell phones, and computer networks have assumed central roles in our children’s daily lives. For better or worse the mass media are having an enormous impact on our children’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. Unfortunately, the consequences of one particular common element of the electronic mass media has a particularly detrimental effect on children’s well being. Research evidence has accumulated over the past half-century that exposure to violence on television, movies, and most recently in video games increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of violent behavior. Correspondingly, the recent increase in the use of mobile phones, text messaging, e-mail, and chat rooms by our youth have opened new venues for social interaction in which aggression can occur and youth can be victimized – new venues that break the old boundaries of family, neighborhood, and community that might have protected our youth to some extent in the past. These globe spanning electronic communication media have not really introduced new psychological threats to our children, but they have made it much harder to protect youth from the threats and have exposed many more of them to threats that only a few might have experienced before. It is now not just kids in bad neighborhoods or with bad friends who are likely to be exposed to bad things when they go out on the street. A ‘virtual’ bad street is easily available to most youth now. However, our response should not be to panic and keep our children “indoors” because the “streets” out there are dangerous. The streets also provide wonderful experiences and help youth become the kinds of adults we desire. Rather our response should be to understand the dangers on the streets, to help our children understand and avoid the dangers, to avoid exaggerating the dangers which will destroy our credibility, and also to try to control exposure to the extent we can.

Background for the Review

Different people may have quite different things in mind when they think of media violence. Similarly, among the public there may be little consensus on what constitutes aggressive and violent behavior . Most researchers, however, have clear conceptions of what they mean by media violence and aggressive behavior.

Most researchers define media violence as visual portrayals of acts of physical aggression by one human or human-like character against another. This definition has evolved as theories about the effects of media violence have evolved and represents an attempt to describe the kind of violent media presentation that is most likely to teach the viewer to be more violent. Movies depicting violence of this type were frequent 75 years ago and are even more frequent today, e.g., M, The Maltese Falcon, Shane, Dirty Harry, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Kill Bill . Violent TV programs became common shortly after TV became common in American homes about 55 years ago and are common today, e.g., Gunsmoke, Miami Vice, CSI, and 24. More recently, video games, internet displays, and cell phone displays have become part of most children’s growing-up, and violent displays have become common on them, e.g., Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, Warrior .

To most researchers, aggressive behavior refers to an act that is intended to injure or irritate another person. Laymen may call assertive salesmen “aggressive,” but researchers do not because there is no intent to harm. Aggression can be physical or non-physical. It includes many kinds of behavior that do not seem to fit the commonly understood meaning of “violence.” Insults and spreading harmful rumors fit the definition. Of course, the aggressive behaviors of greatest concern clearly involve physical aggression ranging in severity from pushing or shoving, to fighting, to serious assaults and homicide. In this review he term violent behavior is used to describe these more serious forms of physical aggression that have a significant risk of seriously injuring the victim.

Violent or aggressive actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence and aggression. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. Furthermore, a developmental perspective is essential for an adequate understanding of how media violence affects youthful conduct and in order to formulate a coherent response to this problem. Most youth who are aggressive and engage in some forms of antisocial behavior do not go on to become violent teens and adults [ 1 ]. Still, research has shown that a significant proportion of aggressive children are likely to grow up to be aggressive adults, and that seriously violent adolescents and adults often were highly aggressive and even violent as children [ 2 ]. The best single predictor of violent behavior in older adolescents, young adults, and even middle aged adults is aggressive behavior when they were younger. Thus, anything that promotes aggressive behavior in young children statistically is a risk factor for violent behavior in adults as well.

Theoretical Explanations for Media Violence Effects

In order to understand the empirical research implicating violence in electronic media as a threat to society, an understanding of why and how violent media cause aggression is vital. In fact, psychological theories that explain why media violence is such a threat are now well established. Furthermore, these theories also explain why the observation of violence in the real world – among the family, among peers, and within the community – also stimulates aggressive behavior in the observer.

Somewhat different processes seem to cause short term effects of violent content and long term effects of violent content, and that both of these processes are distinct from the time displacement effects that engagement in media may have on children. Time displacement effects refer to the role of the mass media (including video games) in displacing other activities in which the child might engage which might change the risk for certain kinds of behavior, e.g. replacing reading, athletics, etc. This essay is focusing on the effects of violent media content, and displacement effects will not be reviewed though they may well have important consequences.

Short-term Effects

Most theorists would now agree that the short term effects of exposure to media violence are mostly due to 1) priming processes, 2) arousal processes, and 3) the immediate mimicking of specific behaviors [ 3 , 4 ].

Priming is the process through which spreading activation in the brain’s neural network from the locus representing an external observed stimulus excites another brain node representing a cognition, emotion, or behavior. The external stimulus can be inherently linked to a cognition, e.g., the sight of a gun is inherently linked to the concept of aggression [ 5 ], or the external stimulus can be something inherently neutral like a particular ethnic group (e.g., African-American) that has become linked in the past to certain beliefs or behaviors (e.g., welfare). The primed concepts make behaviors linked to them more likely. When media violence primes aggressive concepts, aggression is more likely.

To the extent that mass media presentations arouse the observer, aggressive behavior may also become more likely in the short run for two possible reasons -- excitation transfer [ 6 ] and general arousal [ 7 ]. First, a subsequent stimulus that arouses an emotion (e.g. a provocation arousing anger) may be perceived as more severe than it is because some of the emotional response stimulated by the media presentation is miss-attributed as due to the provocation transfer. For example, immediately following an exciting media presentation, such excitation transfer could cause more aggressive responses to provocation. Alternatively, the increased general arousal stimulated by the media presentation may simply reach such a peak that inhibition of inappropriate responses is diminished, and dominant learned responses are displayed in social problem solving, e.g. direct instrumental aggression.

The third short term process, imitation of specific behaviors, can be viewed as a special case of the more general long-term process of observational learning [ 8 ]. In recent years evidence has accumulated that human and primate young have an innate tendency to mimic whomever they observe [ 9 ]. Observation of specific social behaviors around them increases the likelihood of children behaving exactly that way. Specifically, as children observe violent behavior, they are prone to mimic it. The neurological process through which this happens is not completely understood, but it seems likely that “mirror neurons,” which fire when either a behavior is observed or when the same behavior is acted out, play an important role [ 10 , 4 ].

Long-term Effects

Long term content effects, on the other hand, seem to be due to 1) more lasting observational learning of cognitions and behaviors (i.e., imitation of behaviors), and 2) activation and desensitization of emotional processes.

Observational learning

According to widely accepted social cognitive models, a person’s social behavior is controlled to a great extent by the interplay of the current situation with the person’s emotional state, their schemas about the world, their normative beliefs about what is appropriate, and the scripts for social behavior that they have learned [ 11 ]. During early, middle, and late childhood children encode in memory social scripts to guide behavior though observation of family, peers, community, and mass media. Consequently observed behaviors are imitated long after they are observed [ 10 ]. During this period, children’s social cognitive schemas about the world around them also are elaborated. For example, extensive observation of violence has been shown to bias children’s world schemas toward attributing hostility to others’ actions. Such attributions in turn increase the likelihood of children behaving aggressively [ 12 ]. As children mature further, normative beliefs about what social behaviors are appropriate become crystallized and begin to act as filters to limit inappropriate social behaviors [ 13 ]. These normative beliefs are influenced in part by children’s observation of the behaviors of those around them including those observed in the mass media.

Desensitization

Long-term socialization effects of the mass media are also quite likely increased by the way the mass media and video games affect emotions. Repeated exposures to emotionally activating media or video games can lead to habituation of certain natural emotional reactions. This process is called “desensitization.” Negative emotions experienced automatically by viewers in response to a particular violent or gory scene decline in intensity after many exposures [ 4 ]. For example, increased heart rates, perspiration, and self-reports of discomfort often accompany exposure to blood and gore. However, with repeated exposures, this negative emotional response habituates, and the child becomes “desensitized.” The child can then think about and plan proactive aggressive acts without experiencing negative affect [ 4 ].

Enactive learning

One more theoretical point is important. Observational learning and desensitization do not occur independently of other learning processes. Children are constantly being conditioned and reinforced to behave in certain ways, and this learning may occur during media interactions. For example, because players of violent video games are not just observers but also “active” participants in violent actions, and are generally reinforced for using violence to gain desired goals, the effects on stimulating long-term increases in violent behavior should be even greater for video games than for TV, movies, or internet displays of violence. At the same time, because some video games are played together by social groups (e.g., multi-person games) and because individual games may often be played together by peers, more complex social conditioning processes may be involved that have not yet been empirically examined. These effects, including effects of selection and involvement, need to be explored.

The Key Empirical Studies

Given this theoretical back ground, let us now examine the empirical research that indicates that childhood exposure to media violence has both short term and long term effects in stimulating aggression and violence in the viewer. Most of this research is on TV, movies, and video games, but from the theory above one can see that the same effects should occur for violence portrayed on various internet sites (e.g., multi-person game sites, video posting sites, chat rooms) and on handheld cell phones or computers.

Violence in Television, Films, and Video Games

The fact that most research on the impact of media violence on aggressive behavior has focused on violence in fictional television and film and video games is not surprising given the prominence of violent content in these media and the prominence of these media in children’s lives.

Children in the United States spend an average of between three and four hours per day viewing television [ 14 ], and the best studies have shown that over 60% of programs contain some violence, and about 40% of those contain heavy violence [ 15 ]. Children are also spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83% of homes with children [ 16 ]. In 2004, children spent 49 minutes per day playing video, and on any given day, 52% of children ages 8–18 years play a video game games [ 16 ]. Video game use peaks during middle childhood with an average of 65 minutes per day for 8–10 year-olds, and declines to 33 minutes per day for 15–18 year-olds [ 16 ]. And most of these games are violent; 94% of games rated (by the video game industry) as appropriate for teens are described as containing violence, and ratings by independent researchers suggest that the real percentage may be even higher [ 17 ]. No published study has quantified the violence in games rated ‘M’ for mature—presumably, these are even more likely to be violent.

Meta-analyses that average the effects observed in many studies provide the best overall estimates of the effects of media violence. Two particularly notable meta-analyses are those of Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] and Anderson and Bushman [ 19 ]. The Paik and Comstock meta-analysis focused on violent TV and films while the Anderson and Bushman meta-analysis focused on violent video games.

Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] examined effect sizes from 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990. For the randomized experiments they reviewed, Paik and Comstock found an average effect size ( r =.38, N=432 independent tests of hypotheses) which is moderate to large compared to other public health effects. When the analysis was limited to experiments on physical violence against a person, the average r was still .32 (N=71 independent tests). This meta-analysis also examined cross-sectional and longitudinal field surveys published between 1957 and 1990. For these studies the authors found an average r of .19 (N=410 independent tests). When only studies were used for which the dependent measure was actual physical aggression against another person (N=200), the effect size remained unchanged. Finally, the average correlation of media violence exposure with engaging in criminal violence was .13.

Anderson and Bushman [ 19 ] conducted the key meta-analyses on the effects of violent video games. Their meta-analyses revealed effect sizes for violent video games ranging from .15 to .30. Specifically, playing violent video games was related to increases in aggressive behavior ( r = .27), aggressive affect ( r =.19), aggressive cognitions (i.e., aggressive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes), ( r =.27), and physiological arousal ( r = .22) and was related to decreases in prosocial (helping) behavior ( r = −.27). Furthermore, when studies were coded for the quality of their methodology, the best studies yielded larger effect sizes than the “not-best” studies.

One criticism sometimes leveled at meta-analyses is based on the “file drawer effect.” This refers to the fact that studies with “non-significant” results are less likely to be published and to appear in meta-analyses. However, one can correct for this problem by estimating how many “null-effect” studies it would take to change the results of the meta-analysis. This has been done with the above meta-analyses, and the numbers are very large. For example, Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] show that over 500,000 cases of null effects would have to exist in file drawers to change their overall conclusion of a significant positive relation between exposure to media violence and aggression.

While meta-analyses are good of obtaining a summary view of what the research shows, a better understanding of the research can be obtained by examining a few key specific studies in more detail.

Experiments

Generally, experiments have demonstrated that exposing people, especially children and youth, to violent behavior on film and TV increases the likelihood that they will behave aggressively immediately afterwards. In the typical paradigm, randomly selected individuals are shown either a violent or non-violent short film or TV program or play a violent or non-violent video game and are then observed as they have the opportunity to aggress. For children, this generally means playing with other children in situations that might stimulate conflict; for adults, it generally means participating in a competitive activity in which winning seems to involve inflicting pain on another person.

Children in such experiments who see the violent film clip or play the violent game typically behave more aggressively immediately afterwards than those viewing or playing nonviolence (20, 21, 22). For example, Josephson (22) randomly assigned 396 seven- to nine-year-old boys to watch either a violent or a nonviolent film before they played a game of floor hockey in school. Observers who did not know what movie any boy had seen recorded the number of times each boy physically attacked another boy during the game. Physical attack was defined to include hitting, elbowing, or shoving another player to the floor, as well as tripping, kneeing, and other assaultive behaviors that would be penalized in hockey. For some children, the referees carried a walkie-talkie, a specific cue that had appeared in the violent film that was expected to remind the boys of the movie they had seen earlier. For boys rated by their teacher as frequently aggressive, the combination of seeing a violent film and seeing the movie-associated cue stimulated significantly more assaultive behavior than any other combination of film and cue. Parallel results have been found in randomized experiments for preschoolers who physically attack each other more often after watching violent videos [ 21 ] and for older delinquent adolescents who get into more fights on days they see more violent films [ 23 ].

In a randomized experiment with violent video games, Irwin & Gross [ 24 ] assessed physical aggression (e.g., hitting, shoving, pinching, kicking) between boys who had just played either a violent or a nonviolent video game. Those who had played the violent video game were more physically aggressive toward peers. Other randomized experiments have measured college students’ propensity to be physically aggressive after they had played (or not played) a violent video game. For example, Bartholow &Anderson [ 25 ] found that male and female college students who had played a violent game subsequently delivered more than two and a half times as many high-intensity punishments to a peer as those who played a nonviolent video game. Other experiments have shown that it is the violence in video games, not the excitement that playing them provokes, that produces the increase in aggression [ 26 ].

In summary, experiments unambiguously show that viewing violent videos, films, cartoons, or TV dramas or playing violent video games “cause” the risk to go up that the observing child will behave seriously aggressively toward others immediately afterwards. This is true of preschoolers, elementary school children, high school children, college students, and adults. Those who watch the violent clips tend to behave more aggressively than those who view non-violent clips, and they adopt beliefs that are more “accepting” of violence [ 27 ].

One more quasi-experiment frequently cited by game manufacturers should be mentioned here. Williams and Skoric [ 28 ] have published the results of a dissertation study of cooperative online game playing by adults in which they report no significant long-term effects of playing a violent game on the adult’s behavior. However, the low statistical power of the study, the numerous methodological flaws (self-selection of a biased sample, lack of an adequate control group, the lack of adequate behavioral measures) make the validity of the study highly questionable. Furthermore, the participants were adults for whom there would be little theoretical reason to expect long-term effects.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Empirical cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of youth behaving and watching or playing violent media in their natural environments do not test causation as well as experiments do, but they provide strong evidence that the causal processes demonstrated in experiments generalize to violence observed in the real world and have significant effects on real world violent behavior. As reported in the discussion of meta-analyses above, the great majority of competently done one-shot survey studies have shown that children who watch more media violence day in and day out behave more aggressively day in and day out [ 18 ]. The relationship is less strong than that observed in laboratory experiments, but it is nonetheless large enough to be socially significant; the correlations obtained are usually are between .15 and .30. Moreover, the relation is highly replicable even across researchers who disagree about the reasons for the relationship [e.g., 29 ] and across countries [ 30 , 31 ].

Complementing these one-time survey studies are the longitudinal real-world studies that have shown correlations over time from childhood viewing of media violence to later adolescent and adult aggressive behavior [ 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]; for reviews see [ 4 , 27 , 33 ]. This studies have shown that early habitual exposure to media violence in middle-childhood predicts increased aggressiveness 1 year, 3 years, 10 years, 15 years, and 22 years later in adulthood, even controlling for early aggressiveness. On the other hand, behaving aggressively in childhood is a much weaker predictor of higher subsequent viewing of violence when initial violence viewing is controlled, making it implausible that the correlation between aggression and violent media use was primarily due to aggressive children turning to watching more violence [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. As discussed below the pattern of results suggests that the strongest contribution to the correlation is the stimulation of aggression from exposure to media violence but that those behaving aggressively may also have a tendency to turn to watching more violence, leading to a downward spiral effect [ 13 ].

An example is illustrative. In a study of children interviewed each year for three years as they moved through middle childhood, Huesmann et al. [ 31 ] found increasing rates of aggression for both boys and girls who watched more television violence even with controls for initial aggressiveness and many other background factors. Children who identified with the portrayed aggressor and those who perceived the violence as realistic were especially likely to show these observational learning effects. A 15-year follow-up of these children [ 33 ] demonstrated that those who habitually watched more TV violence in their middle-childhood years grew up to be more aggressive young adults. For example, among children who were in the upper quartile on violence viewing in middle childhood, 11% of the males had been convicted of a crime (compared with 3% for other males), 42% had “pushed, grabbed, or shoved their spouse” in the past year (compared with 22% of other males), and 69% had “shoved a person” when made angry in the past year (compared with 50% of other males). For females, 39% of the high-violence-viewers had “thrown something at their spouse” in the past year (compared with 17% of the other females), and 17% had “punched, beaten, or choked” another adult when angry in the past year (compared with 4% of the other females). These effects were not attributable to any of a large set of child and parent characteristics including demographic factors, intelligence, parenting practices. Overall, for both males and females the effect of middle-childhood violence viewing on young adult aggression was significant even when controlling for their initial aggression. In contrast, the effect of middle-childhood aggression on adult violence viewing when controlling for initial violence viewing was not-significant, though it was positive.

Moderators of Media Violence Effects

Obviously, not all observers of violence are affected equally by what they observe at all times. Research has shown that the effects of media violence on children are moderated by situational characteristics of the presentation including how well it attracts and sustains attention, personal characteristics of the viewer including their aggressive predispositions, and characteristics of the physical and human context in which the children are exposed to violence.

In terms of plot characteristics, portraying violence as justified and showing rewards (or at least not showing punishments) for violence increase the effects that media violence has in stimulating aggression, particularly in the long run [ 27 , 36 , 37 ]. As for viewer characteristics that depend on perceptions of the plot, those viewers who perceive the violence as telling about life more like it really is and who identify more with the perpetrator of the violence are also stimulated more toward violent behavior in the long run [ 27 , 30 , 33 , 38 ]. Taken together these facts mean that violent acts by charismatic heroes, that appear justified and are rewarded, are the violent acts most likely to increase viewer’s aggression.

A number of researchers have suggested that, independently of the plot, viewers or game players who are already aggressive should be the only one’s affected. This is certainly not true. While the already aggressive child who watches or plays a lot of violent media may become the most aggressive young adult, the research shows that even initially unaggressive children are made more aggressive by viewing media violence [ 27 , 32 , 33 ]. Long term effects due appear to be stronger for younger children [ 3 , 14 ], but short term affects appear, if anything, stronger for older children [ 3 ] perhaps because one needs to have already learned aggressive scripts to have them primed by violent displays. While the effects appeared weaker for female 40 years ago [ 32 ], they appear equally strong today [ 33 ]. Finally, having a high IQ does not seem to protect a child against being influenced [ 27 ].

Mediators of Media Violence Effects

Most researchers believe that the long term effects of media violence depend on social cognitions that control social behavior being changed for the long run. More research needs to completed to identify all the mediators, but it seems clear that they include normative beliefs about what kinds of social behaviors are OK [ 4 , 13 , 27 ], world schemas that lead to hostile or non-hostile attributions about others intentions [ 4 , 12 , 27 ], and social scripts that automatically control social behavior once they are well learned [ 4 , 11 , 27 ].

This review marshals evidence that compelling points to the conclusion that media violence increases the risk significantly that a viewer or game player will behave more violently in the short run and in the long run. Randomized experiments demonstrate conclusively that exposure to media violence immediately increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior for children and adults in the short run. The most important underlying process for this effect is probably priming though mimicry and increased arousal also play important roles. The evidence from longitudinal field studies is also compelling that children’s exposure to violent electronic media including violent games leads to long-term increases in their risk for behaving aggressively and violently. These long-term effects are a consequence of the powerful observational learning and desensitization processes that neuroscientists and psychologists now understand occur automatically in the human child. Children automatically acquire scripts for the behaviors they observe around them in real life or in the media along with emotional reactions and social cognitions that support those behaviors. Social comparison processes also lead children to seek out others who behave similarly aggressively in the media or in real life leading to a downward spiral process that increases risk for violent behavior.

One valid remaining question is whether the size of this effect is large enough that one should consider it to be a public health threat. The answer seems to be “yes.” Two calculations support this conclusion. First, according to the best meta-analyses [ 18 , 19 ] the long term size of the effect of exposure to media violence in childhood on later aggressive or violent behavior is about equivalent to a correlation of .20 to .30. While some might argue that this explains only 4% to 9% of the individual variation in aggressive behavior, as several scholars have pointed out [ 39 , 40 ], percent variance explained is not a good statistic to use when predicting low probability events with high social costs. For example, a correlation of 0.3 with aggression translates into a change in the odds of aggression from 50/50 to 65/35 -- not a trivial change when one is dealing with life threatening behavior[ 40 ].

Secondly, the effect size of media violence is the same or larger than the effect size of many other recognized threats to public health. In Figure 1 from Bushman and Huesmann [ 41 ], the effect sizes for many common threats to public health are compared with the effect that media violence has on aggression. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer.

The Relative Strength of Known Public Health Threats.

In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat. However, that does not diminish the need to address the threat.

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GBH Openvault

Television on television violence: perspectives from the 70s and 90s.

On January 10, 1995, PBS’s Frontline aired an episode provocatively titled Does TV Kill? The show investigated television viewing habits of average families in upstate New York, and promised to “reveal unexpected conclusions about the impact TV has on Americans’ world view.” But if one looks at the history of television discussions about television effects, Frontline only reiterated issues that have troubled academics and filled popular opinion since the introduction of television. Frontline ’s investigation is part of a much longer history of television effects research, and decades-long concern that violent television was to blame for a broad range of social violence. This article takes a historical approach to the topic of how media discusses media violence by considering how television programs have addressed the problem of television violence and discussed available evidence. These programs are often prompted by real-world incidents, resulting in what media scholar Kirsten Drotner calls a “media panic.” 1 How commentators viewed television in the 1990s has origins in the concern over the amount of social violence occurring in the nation during the 1960s. The debate over the effects of media violence has of course been going on for millennia. But television was seen in the fifties and sixties as something completely different from any other previous media. Like radio, but unlike cinema, it was ubiquitous within the home, often called a “member of the family.” But like cinema, and unlike radio, it was captivatingly visual. It was thus family entertainment capable of corrupting innocent children all over the United States from within the home. When unprecedented social violence erupted during the 1960s, primarily among high-school and college students, many adults assumed television – seemingly the only thing to have changed in their immediate environment – was the culprit. In addition, brand new experimental research protocols on the effects of television were devised in the early 1960s that correlated violent television with real-world aggressive behavior, and in 1972, the United States Surgeon General had deemed television violence as a public health problem. 2 Thereafter, there were periodic televised discussions with industry executives and research experts about the effects of media violence. In this collection, I explore four of these types of public television programs, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, and consider what, if anything, has changed in the questions asked and what progress the media commentators have made in discussing the issue. I conclude that, while certain questions about practical matters of television viewing have changed- such as how real the graphics look, or what type of programming is available at which times, the questions about the effects of television violence stay essentially the same.

1 Drotner, Kirsten. 1999. “Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity∗.” Paedagogica Historica 35 (3) (January): 593–619.

2 United States Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior. 1972. Television and Growing Up: the Impact of Television Violence. United States Public Health Service Office of the Surgeon General.

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On January 10, 1995, PBS aired an episode of WGBH Educational Foundation’s Frontline , provocatively titled Does TV Kill? The show investigated television viewing habits of average families in upstate New York, and promised to “reveal unexpected conclusions about the impact TV has on Americans’ world view.” 1 But if one looks at the history of television discussions about television effects, Frontline only reiterated issues that have troubled academics and filled popular opinion since the introduction of television. Frontline ’s investigation is part of a much longer history of television effects research, and decades-long concern that violent television was to blame for a broad range of social violence. This article takes a historical approach to the topic of how media discusses media violence by considering how certain public television programs have addressed the problem of television violence and discussed available evidence. These programs are often prompted by real-world incidents, resulting in what media scholar Kirsten Drotner calls a “media panic.” 2 Media panics occur each time a medium is implicated in a real-world tragedy and have basic characteristics:

[T]he media is both instigator and purveyor of the discussion; the discussion is highly emotionally charged and morally polarised [sic] (the medium is either "good" or "bad") with the negative pole being the most visible in most cases; the discussion is an adult discussion that primarily focuses on children and young people; the proponents often have professional stakes in the subject under discussion as teachers, librarians, cultural critics or academic scholars; the discussion, like a classic narrative, has three phases: a beginning often catapulted by a single case, a peak involving some kind of public or professional intervention, and an end (or fading-out phase) denoting a seeming resolution to the perceived problems in question. 3

How commentators viewed television in the 1990s has origins in the concern over the amount of social violence occurring in the nation during the 1960s. The debate over the effects of media violence has of course been going on for millennia. But television was seen in the fifties and sixties as something completely different from any other previous media. Like radio, but unlike cinema, it was ubiquitous within the home, often called a “member of the family.” But like cinema, and unlike radio, it was captivatingly visual. It was family entertainment, capable of corrupting innocent children all over the United States from within the home. 4 When unprecedented social violence erupted during the 1960s, primarily among high school and college age students, many adults assumed television – seemingly the only thing to have changed in their immediate environment – was the culprit, having turned respectful children to violence. In addition, brand new experimental research protocols on the effects of television were devised in the early 1960s that correlated violent television with real-world aggressive behavior, and in 1972, the United States Surgeon General had deemed television violence as a public health problem. 5

Thereafter, there were periodic televised discussions with industry executives and research experts about the effects of media violence. In this collection, I explore four of these types of public television programs, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s. 6 The significance of the role of public television in broadcasting these discussions, informing the public of the transgressions of entertainment violence, cannot be overstated. Producing television violence was seen as something “The Networks” did to the public. There was a constant assertion by members of the public, by the scholarly community, and by public officials that commercial networks were exploiting public viewers and scheming to make profits at the expense of American values, decency, and culture. Public broadcasting, historically and ideologically separate from commercial television in the United States, was in a unique position of detachment to raise questions about the effects of violence on commercial television, and question network executives about how they saw their responsibility in public life. Public television programming also assumes a certain degree of objectivity as a non-commercial public education resource. That these conversations, involving experts and network executives alike, were on public broadcasting was meant to inform the public from seemingly neutral ground.

In this essay I consider what has changed in the questions asked about the effects of television violence between the 1970s and 1990s, when presumably more information was known about how television affected behavior. I also consider what progress media commentators made in presenting and discussing the issue. Interestingly, despite decades of research and debate, commentators in the 1990s still relied on research conducted in the 1960s. I conclude that, while certain questions about practical matters of television viewing have changed – such as how real the graphics look, or what type of programming is available at which times – the questions about the effects of television violence stay essentially the same.

Television in the 1960s

In the early twentieth century, cinema garnered much anxiety about the effects on children and society. The first attempt at gathering empirical evidence for effects of cinema on youths and young adults occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s in a series of questionnaire studies known as the Payne Fund studies. A monograph discussing the findings was published in 1933 by Herbert Blumer, titled Movies and Conduct , and explained that the potential for negative influence was very real and very effective. 7 The book became a best seller, and a media panic ensued. Cinema was blamed for juvenile delinquency and much else. 8 Cinema continued to battle arguments for censorship throughout the century, but television seemed to be different from cinema. Television was much more insidious. It was in the home . In the 1960s, when film was rather familiar, television was still relatively new and inspired deep and extensive fear. To understand the context of the public broadcasting programs I have selected from GBH Open Vault, it is important to understand the impact of television as a dangerous cultural phenomenon in this era.

Television reached 94% of American homes in the 1960s, with estimates of daily usage averaging between three to eight hours per day. By the end of the decade, more people owned television and more watched television than any other form of mass communication. 9 Television also became the principal medium by which Americans received news. 10 Coverage of the war in Vietnam was an astonishingly new experience. Americans saw violence they had only read about unfold before their eyes. 11 Televised images of university campus and street riots across the nation shocked parents. Civil tensions exploded amidst antiwar and civil rights movements, and the incidence of violent crime (defined as murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravate assault) doubled over the decade. 12 Racial beatings and murder continued to be rampant in the South, and the political assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968) scarred the nation. By the late 1960s, there was widespread concern that an “age of violence” had come. . 13

To television critics, the threat of violent television was substantial. For example, letters to President Lyndon B. Johnson and to editors of the New York Times indicated that television should share the blame for Bobby Kennedy’s death, since the medium’s message was that guns solve problems. 14 Television critic Jack Gould was quick to caution against a causal relationship between television and real-world violence, but called on the television industry to “exhibit more self-restraint in their liberal use of violence in entertainment programming” just in case. 15 With westerns and crime shows, how could children not pick up violent behaviors? That problems were solved by violent means was a common complaint, often legitimized by research scholars. For example, then professor of educational psychology at Boston University, Ralph J. Gary, expressed that violence is used as an effective means to a profitable end in television, adding that “money and power are goals to strive for.” 16

Television as Teacher of Violence

Captain Kangaroo was often praised, but it was a rare star in what was available. 17 Parents and activist organizations rallied to confront the television industry and demand better quality programming. Mothers and fathers were called to rally together to restore “good taste, decorum and believability” to television. 18 Exemplary of this effort is the advocacy group National Association for Better Radio and Television (NAFBRAT) of Los Angeles, which began publishing quarterly newsletters in 1959 about the state of television as a threat to children and the nation. Their chief concern was that television was doing little to raise the cultural level of youth. Each year NAFBRAT published a survey that rated television shows as “Excellent,” “Good,” “Fair,” “Poor,” “Objectionable,” or “Most Objectionable.” Excellent shows included content that had educational value or showed benign family life: Capt. Kangaroo (“Like a jovial uncle with a pocket full of tricks and goodies”), Leave it to Beaver (“An excellent, humorous story of the mishaps and adventures of a small boy”), and Watch Mr. Wizard (“a stimulating and wonder-filled half hour of science experiments”). Objectionable shows taught that violence was the preferred method of solving problems and included Lone Ranger (“The masked man and his Indian companion always appear in the right spot to help the victimized fight the evil oppressors as plots involve much gunfire and fisticuffs”), and Robin Hood (“Arrows are sent soaring and swords are unsheathed at the slightest provocation in defense of some poor person in danger… does not justify the morality of the outlaw’s actions, such as stealing, fighting with murderous weapons, kidnapping, etc.”). 19

Most Objectionable to NAFBRAT, and indicative of their concerns discussed throughout their publications, was Superman :

The essence of Superman is that he is violent – to those whom he thinks deserve it. He is permitted to commit violence under the pretence [sic] of imposing punishment. He is immortal and has powers beyond any physical, natural, or religious law. Clark Kent as Superman shows up at just the right time and the right place to fight for “truth, justice, and the American Way”. There is no division between reality and fantasy. Crimes are solved because –and only because- a reporter can turn into a super-human investigator. Murder, kidnapping and other crimes make this an outstanding example of exploitation of children, serving them poison mental food, to make sales and money. 20

Television was thus characterized as an electronic medium and purveyor of a “myth of a violent America,” by which children and teenagers learned violence and learned to appreciate violence for its efficiency in resolving social conflict. 21 Senator Thomas J. Dodd, after conducting hearings on television violence in 1961, said the violence was being shown “at the expense of our children’s social health and emotional stability.” 22 In response to what he described as an increase in delinquency among children of middle-class and white-collar families, thereby characterizing the issue as a class issue, Dodd said he felt “the mass media has a lot to do with twisting values of these previously law-abiding children.” 23 In this frame of reference the television as “video campus” told youngsters that cities were filled with violence, and that violence was heroic. 24 To emphasize the effect American Westerns were having on cultural values of democracy and peace, the TV Editor of the Chicago Tribune highlighted that even Japan was banning American cowboy shows from Japanese television. 25

The defense of television

A few commentators were emphatic about what seemed to be a ridiculous accusation. That “television portrayals of crime, conflict, violence, and gunplay bid fair to destroy the moral fiber of the nation is so much poppycock,” Francis Coughlin, radio writer and television columnist, said. 26 The real problem was real crime, stemming from the broken home. Coughlin went on:

I do not believe that the American teenage population stands on the verge of moral ruin. It is, very likely, the cleanest and most forward looking group of young people in our history. Nor am I aware of notable trends toward sadism and savagery afflicting men and women in their twenties. Or their thirties. Or their forties. For that matter, I have yet to hear a single critic -by his own account more intuitive, more sensitive, and more suggestible that most viewers- allege that he has been brought to the brink of moral infamy thru [sic] the exercise of his calling.

In fact, executives argued, the television industry was already instituting more self-regulation and pushes for federal censorship were unnecessary and un-American. There were indeed voluntary changes to how violence was treated in programming. For example, in 1961, the manager of NBC’s Western division decided that wholesale killing was forbidden and toned down the violence. For example, rather than a dynamite explosion destroying an entire “band of thugs,” the hero would fire a bullet into the dynamite, which would only knock them down. At that point the hero would issue a warning to behave. Any violence would have to be well motivated, and brawls would involve “less breakage of furniture.” 27 And by 1964, television Westerns were to “fade into sunset” altogether. 28

Television violence and the scholarly community

Regardless of these taming practices, the overwhelming social apprehension about television was met with a surge of negative attention throughout academic disciplines. According to some scholars, by the late 1960s American society itself was being destroyed, or at least in part, by television, and the nation’s future was at stake. Political scientist, historian, and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remarked in 1968 that riots and political assassinations were testament to the “evident incapacity of the presidential candidates of either major party to address themselves to the problem” of violence. 29 Schlesinger dedicated an entire chapter in a book on violence in America to what he called “televiolence,” where he expressed the climate of violence in the United States is not just a result of American historical culture. Violence culture stemmed from the way mass media dwell on violence, especially television and film. Media do not create the violence, but “reinforce aggressive and destructive impulses, and they may well teach the morality, as well as the methods, of violence.” 30 He continued, “children of the electronic age sit hypnotized by the parade of killings, beatings, gunfights, knifings, maimings, brawls which flash incessantly across the tiny screen.” One has to look no further than television to understand the appeals to violence. 31 The violence prompted President Johnson to establish the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (NCCPV), to assess the phenomenon in 1968. In his prepared statement to the NCCPV’s Media Task Force hearings on December 19, 1968, FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson wrote:

How many more crises must we undergo before we begin to understand the impact of television upon all the attitudes and events in our society? How many more such crises can America withstand and survive as a nation united? Are we going to have to wait for dramatic upturns in the number and rates of high school dropouts, broken families, disintegrating universities, illegitimate children, mental illness, crime, alienated blacks and young people, alcoholism, suicide rates and drug consumption? Must we blindly go on establishing national commissions to study each new crisis of social behavior as if it were a unique symptom unrelated to the cause of the last? I hope not.

Of course, no one would suggest that television is the only influence in our society. But I hope that this Commission will posses both the perception and the courage to say what is by now so obvious to many of the best students of American society in the 1960’s. There is a common ingredient in a great many of the social ills that are troubling Americans so deeply today –the impact of television upon our attitudes and behavior as a people… One cannot understand violence in America without understanding the impact of television programming upon that violence. 32

While the reports of the NCCPV were ultimately ignored by the incoming Nixon Administration, the United States Surgeon General carried out a new investigation of television violence research in 1972. 33 Acknowledging conflicting interpretations of results in the behavior psychology community, the conclusions of the report to the Surgeon Genearl were: (1) preliminary findings indicate a casual relation between viewing violence on television and aggressive behavior, (2) this relation operates on only some children “who are predisposed to be aggressive,” and (3) this relation only operates in some contexts. 34 It was suggested that television violence was a public health problem that needed immediate attention. Indeed, Leo Bogart, sociologist and media expert, published an anxious article summarizing the report in The Public Opinion Quarterly titled, “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That TV Violence is Moderately Dangerous to Your Child's Mental Health.” 35

The report to the Surgeon General also considered national crime statistics in relation to televised violence. The statistics showed that crime had actually decreased between the 1930s and early 1960s. However the 1960s saw an increase in violence, and by1968 the murder level reached that of the 1930s. But while crime statistics were not found to be related to violence in television programming, social psychologists continued to argue for a causal relationship. 36 It is in this backdrop of terrifying concern over the impact of television that this small collection of television programming is embedded.

A 1970s Public Television Approach to Television Violence

October 2, 1973 in a Boston neighborhood, a 24 year-old white woman, Evelyn Wagler, was walking back to her stalled car with a 2-gallon jug of gasoline. Six African American teenagers coerced Wagler into an alley, forced her to drench herself in gasoline, and then set her on fire. She died in a hospital two days later; the incident was immediately labeled a race crime. The Boston Police Commissioner also attributed the murder to the film Fuzz (Richard A. Colla, 1972), which aired on Boston’s local ABC station just two nights previous. In the film, which is set in Boston, a man is set on fire. The incident inspired panic over the effects of television violence (films broadcasted on television were considered television violence) and inspired a GBH public broadcasting program, A Reporter’s Special on TV Violence , to discuss the issue. The program, aired October 10, 1973 and hosted by Ed Baumeister, featured a unique roundtable discussion from the perspective of local television station executives. The panel included James Thistle, Executive Producer for Programming at WBZ TV; James Coppersmith Vice President of RKO Television and General Manager of WNAC TV; and Richard Burdock, Vice President and General Manager for Creative Services at WCVB TV. Two non-industry participants were Bill Greeley, television reporter for Variety magazine, and Dr. Ithiel de Sola Poole, MIT psychologist and advisor to the Surgeon General’s television violence committee. Baumeister questioned the panel about the responsibility television networks have in social violence, and what networks are doing to curb violence portrayed on television.

Baumeister first asked panelists to respond to the Surgeon General’s conclusions that under certain conditions, television violence can instigate aggressive acts. In a rare moment of self-awareness, these local station executives agreed that the industry did have some responsibility in what they air, and claimed to stand by the National Association of Broadcaster’s Code, established in 1915. Part of the Code’s policy on violence as cited in the program was:

Violence physical or psychological may only be projected in responsibly handled contexts, not used exploitively [ sic ]. Programs involving violence should present the consequences of it to its victims and perpetrators. Presentation of the details of violence should avoid excessive gratuitous and instructional violence. The use of violence for its own sake and the details dwelling upon brutality or physical agony by sight or by sound are not permissible.

The executives adamantly agreed. The conversation continued based on two common questions television critics ask television executives: Why must there be so much violence on television?

Bill Greeley argued that violence shows conflict; “it’s action, it’s visual, it grabs the audience.” That violence “grabs the audience” has been both the biggest criticism and the biggest defense of television violence, as Richard Burdock argued during the program. Burdock explained, as many television creators had, that violence was part of dramatic literature since ancient Greek theatre. In Burdock’s view, the people want it, and ratings reflect that. James Coppersmith agreed and argued that television had become part of literature in the United States. What they should be doing, he said, is consider what role literature has in reflecting society. If we are in a violent society, Coppersmith asked, is television not a commercial literature capitalizing on what might “unfortunately be the nature of people?” This was (and is) a hotly contended assertion as Schlesinger’s comments attest, but television executives believed in this firmly. “Television is not a beacon,” Burdock said, “it’s a mirror of what is reflected in society.” If there is a “dilution of decency,” he asked, that is being showed in films, in newspapers, and in books, should we not be concerned with what to do about society? For Burdock, the question of violence on television was absolutely misplaced and frankly irrelevant: “What about crime in the streets?”

Dr. Ithiel de Sola Poole interjected that these kinds of conversations are just a “red herring.” Unlike many television effects researchers, de Sola Poole agreed that television was a mirror of society. But, he said, it is “a twisted mirror.” There are a few children at home, he argued, that do not receive proper guidance, and those children are likely to imitate brutal acts on television. This argument, of course, was the conclusion of the Surgeon General’s report, for which he was a consultant, and a major point for many behavioral psychologists. For de Sola Poole, you cannot sidestep the problem by saying that the rest of children are unaffected. The question everyone should be asking, he said, is “are [we] going to pay the price for the small minority that are predisposed to taking out the wrong things from the picture?” James Thistle argued vehemently that it is near ridiculous to “ask whether or not to try to program around some vague lunatic fringe that might pick things out of something.” Violence, he asserted, was not a time-worthy issue. More important to the public, Thistle pointed out, were issues of race and gender. The mail he received from viewers was not about violence. Instead, he said, his letters showed that viewers were more concerned with how comedy and “light” entertainment reinforce bigotry in society and contain ethnic slurs. Coppersmith underscored this by pointing out that the highest rated evening on CBS was Saturday night, which featured All in the Family (1971-1979) and M A S H* (1972-1983), programs “not without social question marks,” he said.

de Sola Poole’s concern over programming was that it “begins to be part of the education of the children who are watching adult programs.” The formulas on television taught children that violence is appropriate and useful in resolving conflict, and consequences are never shown. This is precisely what the next program in this collection, a June 24, 1977 episode of Say Brother , addressed: what do children learn from television, and what can we do about it? In this episode, titled “Television Violence and its Effects on Children,” host and psychologist Dr. Melvin Moore held a conversation with two research professors who were collaborating on a project to study how children evaluate television program content. Aimee D. Leifer, associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Sheryl B. Graves, professor of psychology at New York University, answered questions regarding the evidence that television violence promotes real-world violent behavior, and whether there are gender or racial differences in what children learn from television. 37 The two conducted experiments different from the conventional protocol in television effects research. It is helpful here to explain just what kind of research protocols were devised in the 1960s to understand just how Leifer and Graves differed.

Arguably the most famous studies come from social psychologist Albert Bandura and his colleagues, Dorothea and Sheila Ross, in 1961-1963. Bandura, Ross and Ross performed tests to understand the degree to which children could learn to act from what they saw on a television set. The studies, based on the use of a Bobo doll, have been collectively and colloquially grouped together as the infamous “Bobo doll experiment.” 38 During the experiment, aggressive behaviors were shown in three different situations: by an adult in real life, by an adult on film, and by an adult dressed as a cat (to simulate cartoons) on film. 39 In the first situation, children were brought in a room, one by one, in which play materials were available. In the corner, an adult was sitting quietly with tinker toys, an inflated Bobo doll, and a mallet. When the child was playing, the adult began to attack the Bobo doll “in ways children rarely would.” The model laid the doll on its side, sat on it and punched it repeatedly in the nose; the doll was picked up, struck with the mallet, and tossed about the room. The sequence of physically aggressive acts was repeated, interspersed with verbally aggressive phrases such as ‘Sock him in the nose…,’ ‘Hit him down…,’ ‘Throw him in the air…,’ ‘Kick him…,’ ‘Pow…,’ and two nonaggressive comments, ‘He keeps coming back for more’ and ‘He sure is a tough fella.’” 40

The second group of children witnessed the same events, but screened on a television set. The third group watched a film of the same events, but this time the adult was dressed as a cat (to mimic cartoon effects). A fourth group of children did not view any aggressive models and served as the control group. At the end of ten minutes, the child was taken to an observation room in which an experimenter recorded behavior. Each child was “mildly annoyed” prior to entering the observation room. 41 The room included aggressive toys (mallet, dart guns, and a Bobo doll) and nonaggressive toys (tea set, crayons, coloring paper, cars and trucks, plastic farm animals). Each child spent 20 minutes with the toys. The authors reported that those who had seen the adult model attacking the Bobo doll showed twice as much aggression than those in the control group, as evidenced by their playing with the aggressive toys. Their conclusions were that viewing violence reduces a child’s inhibition against acting violent and that violence viewed on film is as influential as seeing violence in real life. 42

The result for the scholarly community, and the public at large, was that television could no longer be ignored as a influential source of social behavior. Conclusions were immediately reported to the public, characterizing television as a cause of real-world violence. In one article Bandura’s work was reduced to the following statement: “children who watched TV violence displayed twice as much aggression as those not exposed to it.” 43 According to the article, Senator Dodd cited Bandura’s work during his 1961 hearings as evidence that television taught children to act violent in the real world. In 1963, Albert Bandura discussed television-induced aggressive behavior in Look magazine in an article titled “What TV Violence Can Do To Your Child.” 44 He wrote that children were being raised on a “heavy dose” of violence on television and scolded parents, teachers, and self-defined “experts” who held the view that television violence had neither harmful nor beneficial effects on children, except for those who might already be insecure or emotionally disturbed. 45 All subsequent studies on the effects of television (and film) utilized similar experimental protocols, with only a few studies finding contrary evidence. 46 These experimental methods have been criticized for flaws and a lack of external validity since the early 1960s, but these criticisms have gone largely unnoticed outside the small, but influential, effects-research community. Bandura is now one of the most well-known names in social psychology, and this is the experimental backdrop in which Leifer and Graves worked.

As if to confirm that nothing had changed in network television in the four years since A Reporter’s Special in 1973, and seemingly since 1961, Dr. Moore raised the question in Say Brother why there was so much violence on television. Leifer reiterated what the station executives had said in A Reporter’s Special , that violence makes money for the networks. But networks, Graves clarified, were not allowed to show all types of violence. The networks abide by the National Association of Broadcaster’s Code, which prevents networks from showing “blood and gore.” As a result, Graves says echoing the concern of de Sola Poole, the “real” consequences of violence are not shown. This, she says, teaches children nothing about the reality of violence. Leifer, reiterating a common interpretation among scholars, argued that children learn that violence is acceptable and useful in real life and that they should be frightened of the world outside. These assertions, as mentioned above were reflected over and over again in newspapers. But what is strikingly unique about Liefer’s and Graves’ responses is how they discuss whether there is evidence to suggest whether laboratory results extend into real life.

Leifer and Graves argued that, while television has effects on children, researchers cannot conceivably make the connection that if there were, say, 100 acts of violence on Monday night television there would be 400 acts of violence on Thursday in the streets. And if you cannot quantify or measure real-world effects, what could anyone say conclusively about the effects of television violence? Leifer and Graves thus took a different approach to studying television effects. Rather than ask adults to evaluate children for being aggressive, then showing them a video clip, and then re-assessing their aggressive behavior, Leifer and Graves decided to ask children and adolescents what they thought was real on television, what they thought was pretend, and how they decided which was which. The goal was to figure out how young viewers differentiate between fictional narratives that conform to their values and those that do not conform. The sophisticated viewer, Graves said, is not one who discounts everything, but one who can say there are some good thing and some bad things, and they “have to figure out what’s what.”

Just briefly touched upon in A Reporter’s Special in 1973, the issues of race and gender were quite important on Say Brother in 1977. Moore asked the two researchers how we can deal with racism or sexism, since they are forms of violence and “do violence to one’s self confidence and image.” Violence had been defined in this way by other scholars, and reiterated by the Surgeon General’s report. Since television allows one to learn about self-worth, the Surgeon General’s report explained, the medium “does violence to blacks and minorities by portraying them in ways that lower their self-esteem.” 47 Graves and Leifer indicated that there were only minor racial and gender differences in what children learn from television. Nevertheless, Graves and Leifer argued, a variety of values and practices exist in society, and we “cannot presume to say there should not be this or that value or practice.” In the case of effects on children, they say, children will compare what they see to what they know from their home environment and what is being taught in the family. Rather than suggesting that racism and sexism should be done away with on television, in their view it is better to leave those lessons in the parents’ control rather than with someone “at a higher level of deciding.”

Leifer emphasized that the solution is not to actively ban racist or sexist content, but instead provide more variety in programming. The result would be an overall reduction in violence, racism, and sexism. Graves agreed. Even with special advocacy groups working at the federal level to combat television indecencies, Graves said, advocacy agendas are limiting. The only solution was greater diversity; new ideas and new people must to be brought to the medium. The essence of their argument was that any other solution would amount to censorship and counterproductive. And because the content of television was “not going to change” based on research, their strategy was to work around the issue. If they could learn from those children who seem to be “immune” from the images of violence, if they could figure out how those children watch and interpret television programming, perhaps those practices could be taught to other children. If they could not influence content, maybe they could influence viewers. Unlike the Bobo Doll studies, this kind of research attempts to be highly representative and highly practical. But also unlike Bandura, Ross, and Ross’s single 1961 study that has been cited 470 times, Leifer and Graves’ study has been cited only 39 times since their publication in 1974. 48

These two 1970s programs summarized for the public audience a few common and long-standing questions about the effects of television violence, industry opinion on the matter, and what could be done about television violence. Interestingly, the industry executives acknowledged that they have some responsibility, a rare position for industry executives then and nonexistent moving forward as we will see in the next sections. Yet both programs ultimately emphasize that the viewer has sole responsibility in their viewing habits. Industry executives argued that viewers could communicated by their wants by influencing ratings, and Leifer and Graves emphasized the role parents play in monitoring their children’s television viewing.

The 1990s Shift to Guns

Before a looking at public television discussions of television violence in the 1990s, it is important to consider the context of violence of the time. In the early 1990s, the United States was faced with what some described as “epidemic proportions” of violence, and the public was keenly aware of gun violence in particular. 49 Though increased trends in violent crime in general could be attributed in part to changes in police practices and reporting standards, and while specific trends in rape, robbery, and burglary did not increase over time, trends in youth homicide and aggravated assault did escalate, and escalated as a direct result of proliferating gun violence. 50 Homicide and aggravated assault showed steady increases since 1980, with the peak rate for homicide occurring in 1993 at more than twice the rate at 1980. 51 For example, in that year in California, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, murder was the leading cause of death among those between 20 and 24 years old, and the second leading cause of death for those 13 to 19 years old. 52 Much of the increased violence was due to rampant, and widely publicized gang activity of the 1980s and early 1990s in many urban communities. 53 The violence was so prevalent in so many communities, that it was reflected in mainstream art and pop culture. For example, the lyrical content of gangsta rap, the most globally lucrative of all hip-hop movements, during this era was heavily themed on gun use, drug use, and violent crime, consistent with the realities of inner-city violence. 54 Of course the violence was not limited to the inner cities, but the Los Angeles riots in 1992 only emphasized the obvious disparity.

According to statistics from the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence in 1994, handguns cost 24,000 lives annually; while murder by non-firearm weapons had gone down by 11%, murder by handguns had gone up by 52% since 1987. 55 In January of 1994, the New York Times conducted a poll, co-sponsored by CBS, which asked respondents to identify “the single most important problem facing the country.” 56 Surpassing healthcare (15% of respondents), the economy (15%), and jobs (12%), the leading issue was gun violence (21%), followed closely by violent crime (19%). Almost two-thirds of respondents said they believed crime had increased in the passed year, and over half responded that crime increased in their community (though there was no concomitant increase in the number of people that felt afraid to go outside compared with earlier studies, and only 7% of respondents had installed a home security system). 57 Congressional members debated crime bills during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when another Crime and Violence Committee was established, with much attention to gun control legislation. Congressional attention on gun violence in these years is significant.

On March 30, 1981 John Hinckley, Jr., attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. At close range, the shots seriously wounded the President and three others. While Reagan recovered, Press Secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head, was left permanently paralyzed and permanently confined to a wheel chair. Brady and his wife, Sarah, campaigned thereafter for effective gun control, since the 1968 Act proved to be largely symbolic and lacked any practical use. However, unlike the immediate passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 after the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., legislation following the attempt on Reagan was not introduced into Congress until 1988, and it was consistently debated on for several more years without passage, and with heavy lobbying by the NRA. 58 Meanwhile, handgun violence escalated, and several highly publicized mass shootings occurred involving high-capacity, military style firearms:

In 1983, a masked gunman opened fire outside a party store in Detroit and wounded four people. 59 In January 1989, Patrick Purdy opened fire with an AK-47 in an elementary school in Stockton, California, killing five children and wounding twenty-nine others and a teacher. In October 1991, twenty-three people were killed and nineteen others wounded when a man drove his truck into a cafeteria and started randomly shooting with a copy of an AK-47. In January 1993, a Pakistani man shot five people in the front yard of the CIA facility in Virginia using a Glock-17 and a Ruger P89. The next month, four ATF officers were killed and sixteen others wounded at the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, where the cult hoarded nearly 200 semi-automatic rifles. In July 1993, eight people were killed and six others wounded at a San Francisco law office shooting involving semiautomatic assault pistols; and finally in December 1993, two days before the Senate hearings on video games, a gunman used a semiautomatic pistol, randomly killing six people and wounding twenty. In all cases, large amounts of ammunition were used or within reach. 60 In 1992, over 35,000 people were killed by gunfire (including suicide) in the United States, with only cars causing more fatal injuries.

Gun violence was very much on the minds of citizens. There was widespread public opinion that the access to firearms was a major contributor to violence, and advocacy groups, such as the Children’s Defense Fund, joined the campaign against assault weapons. 61 Though delayed almost 14 years after the assassination attempt on Reagan, the “Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act,” as it came to be known (also the Brady Bill or Brady Act) was finally passed and signed by President Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993. 62 While the Act called for a waiting period during the purchase of handguns, a crime bill passed in 1994 included a limited assault weapons ban. 63

But some people were not convinced crime bills and gun bans were sufficient. Looking at newspaper and magazine articles of the early 1990s, popular opinion still included indictment of television, film, and video games. In 1990, A New York Times reporter linked crime in New York with violence and gunplay on television, and on cartoons where people who are hurt do not show pain or damage. 64 In 1991, lawyers for three teen-agers who plotted to kill a school bully blamed their behavior on media violence. The teens’ public defender said children were learning that “violence was commonplace,” from television and video games. 65 In a letter to the Editor of The New York Times , one person wrote:

Of course you’re right about the extremity of the crime problem (“The Tides of Crime,” editorial, April 25). And getting rid of guns would surely help… Can I be the only one who thinks that we all live in the climate of violence created by television and the movies? I recently bought a television after three years without one, and I am astonished at the level of violence there. Half of the shows involve someone getting killed or beaten. “The Silence of the Lambs” won the Oscar. All this creates the belief that violence is normal . And as long as we think that, we will never solve the crime problem. We will also never get real gun control, because most Americans want their guns, because violence is normal . - Bob Johnson, Ann Arbor, Mich., May 4, 1992 66

The Clinton Administration agreed and looked to entertainment media as a source for increased social violence. In late 1993, despite a decrease in gun-related violence on television, Attorney General Janet Reno had warned the television industry that the federal government would intervene if it did not decrease the amount of violence on television. A few weeks later, President Clinton urged film and television executives during a fund-raising event to take more responsibility for their role in shaping the morality of American youth with violent entertainment. 67 Eventually the Administration would pass the Television Communications Act of 1996, which included a provision for the V-chip, allowing parents to control programming. In addition, the Administration required the television industry to employ ratings, but no overt content regulations were passed.

A 1990s Public Television Approach to Television Violence

On February 12, 1993 in Liverpool, England, 2-year-old James Bulger was found brutally tortured and murdered by two 10-year old boys who had abducted Bulger from a nearby shopping center. It was asserted in UK tabloids and press that the 10-year-olds had watched the movie Child’s Play 3 (Jack Bender, 1991), and had imitated what they had seen. Authorities could never establish whether they had seen the film, but the incident fueled the controversy over the real-world impact of violence on television. This incident inspired an episode of GBH’s The Group, which aired on February 22, 1993 titled “On Kids, TV and violence.” Panelists were Peggy Charren, Founder of Action for Children’s Television; Craig Latham, Forensic and Child Psychologist; Caesar McDowell, Assistant Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Ronald Slaby, Senior Scientist, Education Development Center; Juliette Tuakli-Williams, Pediatrician at South End Health Center. They discussed the responsibilities of parents in monitoring children, as well as the impact of television as a “babysitter” for children.

Responding to the murder of James Bulger, Craig Latham pointed out that the event is evidence against the “myth” that violent offenders “look different” and more “defective” from the rest of us. Contrary to what the Surgeon General’s report and other researchers had concluded years earlier that only certain children are affected, Latham asserted that any one of us could become violent as a result of exposure. Juliette Tuakli-Williams agreed; we only need to look at what television shows us. The Incredible Hulk , she said, taught children that even “mild-mannered men” can be provoked enough to “turn into an animal.” And finally Richard Slaby argued that television as a contributing “member of the family,” must be investigated for interactions with children. For these commentators, it simply was not true that a violent person must be different from the “normal” person.

Peggy Charren, however, immediately criticized the blaming of television for the behaviors of children or other aggressive people. Perplexed, Charren bemoaned the standard and immediate implication that television should be faulted “when something peculiar happens with children.” Charren argued that much larger issues account for how a child behaves. If there was an equal distribution of wealth in the U.S., if family leave policies allow for more time to be spent with children, and if the child always came first, she said, the problem would be much less of a problem. Charren “stop[ped] short of blaming television,” she said, because it would “let everything else of the hook.” Caesar McDowell agreed that if we lay the blame on television, we neglect the issue of what goes on in the family. Latham, in answer, suggested that the public wants to externalize the causes of violence. To accept that behaviors result from inside the family dynamic, meant that something was “wrong” with the family. It is hard to see 10-year-olds as evil, he said, so blaming some external cause makes sense. But, Charren argued, while the research may have showed that children believe violence is an easy solution to problems, the research does not show that children who watch violence on television then “go pick up weapons.” Moreover, “for most of us,” she said, we don’t open the door expecting to be shot.”

We are too quick in society to “get it off the air,” Charren said echoing earlier sentiments of Leifer and Graves. Censorship, she argued, is never the right tactic. She cautioned against bringing religion into schools as a way of solving problems and as a method of developing “correct” morals in children, something political pundits were considering. The solution, the group surmises, is to have more awareness in the family. The public must share their concerns with networks, and conversations must be had across disciplines- pediatricians, public health professionals, criminologists, and parents must all be part of the discussions at all levels.

What happens in the family is precisely what Frontline investigated two years later in 1995, in a special sensationally titled, “Does TV Kill?” Bill Moyers introduced the program with views similar to the 1940’s Catholic Church Legion of Decency characterization of comic books, that with television, the “appliance from hell had gotten into everyone’s home,” feeding a “dose of something evil,” and planting the “seeds of violence.” 68 Just what impact was this having? To attempt an answer to the question, correspondent Al Austin and a camera crew rented a house in Schenectady, New York, where Frontline says television was invented in 1928. Al Austin selected three families to document for several weeks. The families allowed cameras to be set up in their homes to have their television viewing monitored. Footage of the households revealed exactly the concerns of The Group, that parental guidance and family environment provide better explanation for their children’s behaviors than television effects. The episode also incorporated a history of effects research, and Frontline investigated the evidence on whether TV was truly “killing people and corrupting the world,” or as industry executives claim, whether television simply reflected the world as it was.

Frontline introduced viewers to Albert Bandura’s 1961 research by way of a video clip of his Bobo doll experiment. The black and white video is of a woman actively beating up the Bobo doll, and Austin explained that children were later left alone with the doll while researchers observed how they behaved. Austin pointed out that it was still hotly argued what, if anything, these studies proved. Austin then introduced a 1963 research study by social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz, as a way of confirming Bandura’s findings. During Berkowitz’s experiment, he showed college students a clip from the film Champion (Mark Robson, 1949) in which Kirk Douglas’s fights in a boxing match. 69 Austin summarizes that half of the participants were told Douglas was a villain, and the other half was told Douglas was a hero figure. The results showed that perceived “justified violence” encouraged men to use violence. In short, Austin said, it was then widely regarded by social scientists that violent images can have a powerfully negative effect on viewers.

One of the families Frontline monitored showed distressing images. While the other two families seemed to have normal childhood behavior, a child in the third family exhibited obsessive amounts of television viewing. A monitor in his bedroom showed this boy watching television alone, nonstop throughout the day, only pausing to eat dinner after pleas from his mother. This behavior was repeated daily. The child admitted to being a minor bully in school and not reading very well. Do these behaviors stem from his viewing habits, or do they instead stem from an obvious lack of involvement from his mother? Frontline considered whether laboratory studies had any bearing on the real world. To answer this, Austin presents the work of psychologist Leonard Eron who observed children in Hudson County in 1960 and found that television violence led to aggressive behaviors. Devising a longitudinal study, Eron went back to the community ten and twenty years later to check up on the children in his original study. He and his collaborators on these studies (including Berkowitz) found that boys who watched a lot of violent television as children were more likely to get into trouble as teenagers and adults. Boys who were more aggressive at age 8 had more criminal convictions, more serious offenses, more traffic violations, more drunk driving incidents, and more aggressive at home. 70

Frontline tracked down two of these men, Pat and Mike, who were part of the original study and had watched violent television as children. They were 42 years old in 1995. While Pat had chronic issues with illicit drugs and eventually lost his wife family, Mike had “never been aggressive in his life.” Mike was living comfortably with his family of four, and was genuinely confused by the statistics of Eron’s studies. Pat allowed cameras to be placed in his house, and what Frontline found was indeed nothing shocking. Mike’s four-year old snuck downstairs to watch television on a Saturday morning; the family had the television on during dinner time; some programs were watched, others were left on for an empty living room; and some viewing was not viewing at all, but endless channel surfing. Despite the television being on, the family interacted often.

Pat, and others like him, posed a conundrum to television violence researchers. Just as Graves had explained in 1977, research could simply not predict who or what would be affected by television. A glaring problem was that there was no way to compare children who watched television and children who did not watch television, since everyone had television by the 1960s. Television intervention experiments suffered from the lack of true control groups, save for one unique 1973 study. In that year, Frontline explains, television arrived for the first time to a small town in British Columbia. A psychologist from the University of British Columbia, Tannis Macbeth Williams, observed children, teenagers, and adults just prior to television’s arrival there. She had a checklist of 15 different aggressive behaviors, such as kicking, slapping, and verbal aggression. After 2 years of television use, Williams found that there was a significant increase in physical and verbal aggression in elementary school children, community activities decreased, and creativity decreased. 70 Al Austin told viewers the study was considered “rock solid.” However, he said, not all independent variables were accounted for when assessing effects. At the same time television was brought to the rural BC community, a new road opened the town to the outside world, and business tripled. A crime wave, the usual indicator for television critics that television was causing violence, never hit the town. Importantly, parental guidance was not assessed. A member of the BC town summarized the study this way: there is always the “odd individual” that says television changes things.

Television executives corroborated this attitude. Frontline interviewed Fox Network’s Executive Vice President, George Bradenburg. According to Bradenburg, the television industry has overwhelmingly rejected the view that television contributed to violence in society. Instead, “the problem today is that kids have knives and guns.” 71 Television writers concurred. At the Universal Studios lot, Frontline asked Dick Wolf, creator of Law and Order (Universal, 1990-2010) about the issue. “We’re an easy target,” Wolf said, “We’re overpaid pinheads.” He reiterated Bradenburg’s assertion that television is a scapegoat, and that access to guns was the real problem in addition to the lack of effective parenting. Frontline interviewed social scientists then looking into the issue. In response to the claim that television was a scapegoat, George Gerbner, communications scholar, argued that this response sidestepped the real issue. Television violence, he said, is “happy” violence; it is “cool, swift, and funny,” and easily leads to a conclusion. Just as Leifer suggested in Say Brother , Gerbner suggested that television “cultivates a sense of meanness.” In what he has termed the “mean world syndrome,” people believe they live in a mean world and behave accordingly. 72 The most destructive message of television, he says, is fear; people are gripped by fear and are afraid to go out in the street. Then professor of the History of Ideas at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, Barry Sanders agreed despairingly with Gerbner and added that television creates a “remotest kind of behavior,” where “if I don’t like you, I can click you off.” Television, for Sanders, robs children of imagination. This, in his interpretation, is worrisome “if we care about anything like hope.” Life is not going on inside the child, he says; television is an “electronic eraser” of life.

What is interesting is that the actual statistics did not support these views. While the incidence of violent crime had doubled since the 1960s, violent crime rates during the 1990s dropped dramatically. In Hudson County they dropped as much as 42%, Austin pointed out. It is unfortunate that Frontline did not interrogate these statistics further. Instead, the program ended with Bill Moyers having a conversation with three contemporary experts on media and children: Elizabeth Thoman, Former Director for the Center for Media Literacy; Milton Chen, assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist. While both Thoman and Chen adhere to a panic attitude, Rushkoff emphasized that we need to consider the new crime statistics and what is actually happening in society, and society must move the conversation forward. To him, children are becoming more sophisticated as new media technologies come out (he used Nintendo as an example) and parents should embrace the new “interpersonal connectivity” that media foster. For him, TV does not kill. “We can’t fight real world violence by fighting fictional violence,” he argued, if we manage media, “we kill it.”

Concluding remarks

Television programs like these all investigate similar questions about the effects of television violence: why there is so much violence on television, what do children learn from television, and are effects indeed measurable. The most obvious issue that has changed over time is the issue of race and sexism in television that seems to drop out of concern in the 1990s. This makes sense given civil and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s and the blatant racism and sexism of the time. But television programming, despite continuing criticism, expanded to include shows depicting strong African American and women characters during the 1980s and 1990s. Violence, however, continued to be a great concern.

Other questions remained utterly the same. Why was there so much violence on television? Do networks have a responsibility to the nation in helping to raise healthy and non-violent children? Does television violence negatively affect children? It seemed to be agreed upon by everyone and through time that commercial television employed violence because it was a moneymaker. However, was violence on television manifest as problematic in the real world? Despite decades of research, the answers to these questions were hopelessly convoluted, contended, and unclear. Several social scientists were and remained adamant about the ill effects of television, as evidenced in The Group . However the practical connection to reality was terribly ambiguous, as Frontline showed. Ultimately, even with the benefit of historical reflection, not much changed in 1995 with respect to specific questions asked since 1973, and not much more seemed to be added. The question of whether television kills seems to be even more difficult to answer after over thirty years of research.

Unlike other media panics, Frontline ’s “Does TV Kill” was not inspired by a single tragic incident, but by a general sense in public opinion that violence on the street was increasing and television was bad for children. Moyers asks his post-show panel about broad television culture of the nineties, probing Thoman, Chen, and Rushkoff whether we are “creating a new kind of being, a consciousness that is new and different and beyond reach of usual traditional influences.” Reiterating Barry Sanders’ dismay, Moyers asks if this “new creature has lost faith in goodness of life… is television producing a new human being?” It is absolutely evident to Rushkoff that from the fear of television culture in the 1960s discussed above, and the questions and answers presented in television specials on television violence, that the nineties were not at all producing a “new kind” of hopeless being. In fact, children, adolescents, and adults continue to be creative, he said, in spite of television and despite what Sanders feared. Indeed, crime waves had not continued, and in fact dropped dramatically in the 1990s. Frontline in the end reiterated Drotner’s assertion that media panics repeat, and repeat often. Children may be glued to the set, but they have been glued to the set for decades. There have not been epidemics of listless, lifeless adults. That, it seems, is simply the work of zombie fiction.

1 Frontline , Does TV Kill? , Michael McLeod. (1995; WGBH Educational Foundation).

2 Drotner, Kirsten. 1999. “Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity.” Paedagogica Historica 35 (3) (January): 593–619.

3 Ibid., 596. It bares emphasis that the designation of a moral or media panic does not imply a rejection of the objective reality of a problem. The designation, moral panic scholar Stanley Cohen writes, “does not question the existence nor dismiss issues of causation, prevention and control. It draws attention to a meta-debate about what sort of acknowledgment the problem receives and merits,” Cohen, Stanley. 2002. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edition. Routledge, xxxiv.

4 For in depth discussions of the effects of television, see Boddy, William. 1990. Fifties television: the industry and its critics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make room for TV: television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Bodroghkozy, Aniko. 2001. Groove tube: sixties television and the youth rebellion. Durham: Duke University Press.

5 United States Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior. 1972. Television and Growing Up: the Impact of Television Violence. United States Public Health Service Office of the Surgeon General.

6 A Reporter’s Special on TV Violence , Charles Stuart. (1973, GBH); Say Brother, “Television Violence and its Effects on Children,” Barbara Barrow. (1977, GBH); The Group , “TV, Children, and Violence.” (1993, GBH); Frontline

7 Blumer, Herbert. 1933. Movies and Conduct . New York: The Macmillan company.

8 For discussions on the Payne Fund studies, see Lowery, Shearon, and Melvin L. DeFleur. 1983. Milestones in mass communication research: media effects . New York: Longman; Mark Lynn Anderson, “Taking Liberties: The Payne Fund Studies and the Creation of the Media Expert,” (42-43) and Lee Grieveson, “Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct,” (9-10) in Grieveson, Lee, and Haidee Wasson. 2008. Inventing film studies . Durham: Duke University Press.

9 Lange, D L, R K Baker, and Sandra J Ball. 1969. Mass Media and Violence: a Staff Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence . Washington, DC. US Government Printing Office.

10 Steiner, Gary A. 1963. The People Look at Television, a Study of Audience Attitudes . Knopf, 4; Mass Media and Violence , 207.

11 Michael Mandelbaum. 1982. “Vietnam: the Television War,” Daedalus 111, no. 4, 157–169.

12 U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States : 2003, “No. HS-23. Crimes and Crime Rates by Type of Offense: 1960 to 2002,” http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-23.pdf

13 Emanuel K Schwartz. 1961. "The Family in an 'Age of Violence'." New York Times (1923-Current File) , Jan 22, 1-SM47; David N Daniels, Marshall F Gilula, and Frank M Ochberg, Eds. 1970. Violence and the Struggle for Existence . Little Brown GBR. For the foundational work on the concept of the “subculture of violence,” see Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. 1967. The subculture of violence: Towards an integrated theory in criminology . London: Tavistock Publications; A year after publication, Marvin Wolfgang (then Professor of Criminology at University of Pennsylvania) became a Co-Director of Research (with James Short Jr., Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University) for the NCCPV Task Force on Historical and Comparative Perspectives.; Schlesinger, Arthur M. 1968. Violence: America in the sixties . New York: New American Library.

14 National Archives, Lyndon B. Johnson Papers, Collection 283, FG 795 “National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,” Box 418.

15 Gould, Jack. 16 June 1968. “Surrender to Television?” New York Times , 15; quoted in Cooper, 23.

16 "Crime Tripled on TV, Senate Probers Told." Jun. 9, 1961.Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), 1-c7.

17 Lowry, Cynthia. 1960. "Captain Kangaroo Sounds Off on Television's Baby Sitters." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Oct 16, 1-n13. http://search.proquest.com/docview/182670473?accountid=14512 .

18 Wolters, Larry. 1963. "TV Needs Clean-Up for Young Viewers." Chicago Tribune (1963-Current File), May 12, 1-w10. http://search.proquest.com/docview/182687565?accountid=14512

19 National Association for Better Radio and Television (U.S.). June 1959 and Summer 1960. NAFBRAT Quarterly . Los Angeles: National Association for Better Radio and Television

20 Ibid., 8-9. It should be noted that the comic book version of Superman was indicted along with every other comic book during the 1950s, when the United States Senate held hearings on the comic book industry and its effects on children. For a discussion on these events, see Nyberg, Amy Kiste. 1998. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code . Jackson [Miss.]: University Press of Mississippi.

21 While most critics tended to say that children need to be protected, both children and teenagers were a concern, and there was often no distinction between groups.

22 "Dodd to Open Drive Against TV 'Crime Diet'." Feb. 10, 1962. Chicago Daily Tribune , 1-a12.

24 Wolters, Larry. 1961. "Westerns Face Stern Revision." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Aug 13, 1-s4.

25 Wolters, Larry. 1960. "Japanese TV to Shun Cowboys and Samurai." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Jul 04, 14-14.

26 Coughlin, Francis. 1961. "Crime on TV Called Harmful Only to TV." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Mar 07, 1-a5.

27 Schumach, Murray. 1961. "NBC Acts to Subdue Violence." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Jun 25, 1-n8; Wolters, Larry. 1961. "Westerns Face Stern Revision." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Aug 13, 1-s4.

28 Wolters, 1964.

29 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 1968. Violence: America in the sixties. [New York]: New American Library; ix.

30 Ibid., 50

31 Ibid., 54; McLuhan’s theory was rather different to Schlesinger’s interpretation, however, and Schlesinger acknowledges the difference. It would not matter, for example, if the content were children’s cartoons or overt violence; the effect on society would be identical.

32 Johnson, Nicholas. “Television and Violence: Perspectives and Proposals,” Statement prepared for the NCCPV, Mass Media Hearings , 369. Original italics.

33 Interoffice memoranda, Nixon Administration. 1969. FG 168 (National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence). Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

34 Surgeon General, 1972.

35 Bogar, Leo. 1972. “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That TV Violence is Moderately Dangerous to Your Child's Mental Health.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 36, 4: 491-521.

36 Surgeon General, 49.

37 It is worth noting that the introductory montage of this episode was of still images of real-life violence. Images are shown of recent city riots, people running from uniformed officers, windows being broken, individuals being arrested, teenagers yelling, and finally, horrifying lynchings. The suggestion, of course, is the question of whether television images have a role in creating these violent episodes. No single incident stood out as inspiring the conversation.

38 Bandura, Albert., Ross, Dorothea, & Ross, Sheila. 1961. Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology . 63, 3; 575-582; Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. 1963. Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology . 66, 1; 3-11; Bandura, A. 1965. Influence of models' reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1, 6; 589-595.

39 Bandura, Ross, and Ross 1961, 576.

41 “Mildly annoyed,” meant that the child was told s/he could not play with certain toys they thought they would be able to play with.

42 Children were not inclined to copy the cartoon cat, however.

43 “Dodd to Open Drive”

44 Look magazine was a general interest large-format magazine with a distribution second only to Life magazine. Look had a peak circulation in 1969 with 7.75 million; see "Cowles Closing Look Magazine After 34 Years." Sep. 17 1971. New York Times (1923-Current File), 1-1; "Look Magazine to Halt Publication." Sep. 17, 1971. Chicago Tribune (1963-Current File), 1-1.

45 Bandura, Albert. October 22, 1963. “What TV Violence Can Do To Your Child.” Look. p. 46-52. Cowles Communications, Inc.

46 See for example, Feshbach, Seymour. 1964. “The Function of Aggression and the Regulation of Aggressive Drive.” Psychological Review 71 (July): 257–272.

47 Surgeon General, 34.

48 Leifer, Aimee D, Neal J Gordon, and Sherryl B Graves. 1974. “Children's Television More Than Mere Entertainment.” Harvard Educational Review 44, 2; 213–245; citation check via Web of Science ; it should be noted that a citation check by Google Scholar reports “cited by” numbers of 91 (Leifer et al. 1974) versus 1,698 (Bandura et al. 1961).

49 Tobia, Jill A. “The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act: Does It Have a Shot at Success.” Seton Hall Legislative Journal 19 (1994): 894–920, 894.

50 Zimring, Franklin E. “The Youth Violence Epidemic: Myth or Reality?.” Wake Forest Law Review 38 (1998): 727–744, 728.

51 Zimring, Franklin E. “The Youth Violence Epidemic: Myth or Reality?.” Wake Forest Law Review 38 (1998): 727–744, 729. Zimring shows that, compared with homicide and aggravated assault, other violent crimes, such as rape, robbery, and burglary showed varying, but not significantly increased trends since 1980.

52 Editors. “$30 Million Campaign Underway to Halt Growing Youth Violence.” Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) , August 5, 1993.

53 Zimring, 1998.

54 See Hagedorn, John. 2008. A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, and Quinn, Eithne. 2010. Nuthin' but a ""G"" Thang The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap . New York: Columbia University Press.

55 Ibid.,note 2.

56 Berke, Richard. Jan 23, 1994 “Crime is Becoming Nation’s Top Fear.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009) . A1.

58 Cozzolino, Marc Christopher. “Gun Control: the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.” *Seton Hall Legislative Journal *16 (1992): 245–268.

59 Campbell, James R. “Detroit Street Crime Up: Mayor Imposes Curfew to Curb Teen Crime.” Afro-American (1893-1988) ProQuest Historical Newspapers: the Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) , December 6, 2013.

60 Lenett, Michael G. “Taking a Bite Out of Violent Crime.” University of Dayton Law Review 20, no. 2 (1994): 573–617, 577.

61 Ibid., 578 and 583.

62 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, Pub. L. No. 103-159 [H.R. 1025], 18 USCS prec § 921 (1993).

63 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103-322 [H.R. 3355], 108 Stat. 1796.

64 Hechinger, Fred M. “About Education: a Haven Amid Rising Urban Crime, a School Where ‘People Do Not Expect Violence’.” New York Times (1923-Current File) ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009) , November 7, 1990.

65 Editors. “Kids Punished for Plot to Kill Bully.” Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) , December 26, 1991. Johnson, Bob. May 20, 1992. “TV's 'Normal' Violence.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009) A22; original italics

66 Jehl, Douglas. Dec 6, 1993. “Clinton Gently Chides Hollywood on Violence. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009) A12. Weintraub, Bernard. Dec. 28, 1993. “Despite Clinton, Hollywood Is Still Trading in Violence.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009) A1.

67 See Hajdu, David. 2008. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

68 Berkowitz, Leonard, and Edna Rawlings. 1963. “Effects of Film Violence on Inhibitions Against Subsequent Aggression.” Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 66, 5; 405–412. Aggression was measured by the application of electric shocks from one participant to another participant.

69 Eron, Leonard D, L Rowell Huesmann, Monroe M Lefkowitz, and Leopold O Walder. 1972. “Does Television Violence Cause Aggression.” American Psychologist 27, 4; 253–263; Huesmann, L Rowell, Leonard D Eron, and E F Dubow. 1985. “Television Viewing Habits in Childhood and Adult Aggression.” Aggressive Behavior 11 (2): 160.

70 Williams, Tannis MacBeth. 1979. “The Impact of Television: a Natural Experiment Involving Three Communities.”

71 It’s worth noting that Fox Kids Network aired Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (MMPR Productions, Inc., Renaissance Atlantic Films, 1993-1996), a show that was banned in Canada at the time.

72 Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nanci Signorielli. 1980. “The ‘Mainstreaming’ of America: Violence Profile No. 11.” Journal of Communication 30, 3; 10–29.

• Child-development
• Television Violence: Content, Context, And Consequences

Television Violence: Content, Context, and Consequences

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• Media violence can encourage children to learn aggressive behavior and attitudes.
• Media violence can cultivate fearful or pessimistic attitudes in children about the non-television world.
• Media violence can desensitize children to real-world and fantasy violence.

According to Eron (1992), "(t)here can no longer be any doubt that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime, and violence in society. The evidence comes from both the laboratory and real-life studies. Television violence affects youngsters of all ages, of both genders, at all socio-economic levels and all levels of intelligence. The effect is not limited to children who are already disposed to being aggressive and is not restricted to this country" (p. 1).

This digest reports recent findings on violent television content, highlights the recently developed television ratings system, and offers suggestions for parental guidance and mediation of children's viewing of television programs.

Not All Violence Is Equal

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The National Television Violence Study, (NTVS) is the largest study of media content ever undertaken. It is a three-year study that assesses the amount, nature, and context of violence in entertainment programming, examines the effectiveness of ratings and advisories, and reviews televised anti-violence educational initiatives. The study, which began in 1994 and is funded by the National Cable Television Association, defines television violence as "any overt depiction of the use of physical force--or credible threat of physical force--intended to physically harm an animate being or group of beings. Violence also includes certain depictions of physically harmful consequences against an animate being or group that occur as a result of unseen violent means" (National Television Violence Study, Executive Summary, 1996, p. ix).

Not all violence is equal, however. While some violent content can convey an anti-violence message, it is typical to sanitize, glamorize, or even glorify violence on U.S. television. According to the National Television Violence Study (Federman, 1997), only 4% of programs coded had a strong anti-violence theme in the 1995-96 season. In the two years of the study that have been reported, 58% (1994- 95) and 61% (1995-96) of programs coded contained some violence.

Certain plot elements in portrayals of violence are considered high risk for children and should be evaluated by parents when judging possible program effects for children. Characterizations in which the perpetrator is attractive are especially problematic because viewers may identify with such a character. Other high-risk factors include showing violence as being justified, going unpunished, and having minimal consequences to the victim. Realistic violence is also among the high-risk plot elements.

NTVS findings from 1995-96 indicate that these high-risk plot elements abound in U.S. broadcast and cable television. Of all violent acts, 40% were committed by attractive characters, and 75% of violent actions went unpenalized and the perpetrators showed no remorse. In 37% of the programs, the "bad guys" were not punished, and more than half of all violent incidents did not show the suffering of the victim.

Based on reviews of social science research, it is possible to predict some effects of violent viewing in conjunction with specific plot elements:

Aggressive Behavior . Learning to use aggressive behavior is predicted to increase when the perpetrator is attractive, the violence is justified, weapons are present, the violence is graphic or extensive, the violence is realistic, the violence is rewarded, or the violence is presented in a humorous fashion. Conversely, the learning of aggression is inhibited by portrayals that show that violence is unjustified, show perpetrators of violence punished, or show the painful results of violence.

Fearful Attitudes . The effects of fearful attitudes about the real world may be increased by a number of features, including attractive victims of violence; unjustified violence; graphic, extensive, or realistic violence; and rewards to the perpetrator of violence. According to the work of George Gerbner and his colleagues (1980), heavy viewers of violent content believe their world is meaner, scarier, and more dangerous than their lighter-viewing counterparts. When violence is punished on television, the expected effect is a decrease in fearful attitudes about the real world.

Desensitization . Desensitization to violence refers to the idea of increased toleration of violence. It is predicted from exposure to extensive or graphic portrayals and humorous portrayals of violence and is of particular concern as a longterm effect for heavy viewers of violent content. Some of the most violent programs are children's animated series in which violence is routinely intended to be funny, and realistic consequences of violence are not shown.

Viewer Differences

Just as not all violence is equal, there are distinctions to be made among viewers. Characteristics such as age, experience, cognitive development, and temperament should be considered as individual factors that can interact with the viewing of violent content. Very young children, for example, have an understanding of fantasy and reality different from that of older children and adults. They may be more frightened by fantasy violence because they do not fully understand that it is not real. When parents consider their children's viewing, both age and individual differences should be taken into account.

Using Television Ratings as Guidelines

As a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a ratings system has been developed by the television industry in collaboration with child advocacy organizations. It is currently in use by some of the networks. Eventually ratings will also be used in conjunction with the V-chip, a device that can be programmed to electronically block selected programming. Beginning in 1998, new television sets are to include V-chip technology.

Ratings categories are based on a combination of age- related and content factors as listed below. These ratings may help parents determine what they consider appropriate for their children to watch. However, it is important to consider that ratings may make programs appear more attractive to some children, possibly creating a "forbidden fruit" appeal. Furthermore, critics point out the potentially problematic nature of having the television industry rate its own programs, and these critics support the development of alternative rating systems by non-industry groups.

TV-Y: All Children TV-Y7: Directed to Older Children TV-G: General Audience TV-PG: Parental Guidance Suggested TV-14: Parents Strongly Cautioned TV-MA: Mature Audience Only

A content advisory for fantasy violence, FV, may be added to the TV-Y7 rating. Several content codes may be added to the TV-PG, TV-14, and TV-MA ratings. These are V for intense violence; S for intense sexual situations; L for strong, coarse language; and D for intensely suggestive dialogue.

Beyond Ratings: What Can Parents Do?

Parents can be effective in reducing the negative effects of viewing television in general and violent television in particular.

• Watch television with your child. Not only does watching television with children provide parents with information about what children are seeing, but active discussion and explanation of television programs can increase children's comprehension of content, reduce stereotypical thinking, and increase prosocial behavior.
• Turn the program off. If a portrayal is upsetting, simply turn off the television and discuss your reason for doing so with your child.
• Limit viewing. Set an amount of time for daily or weekly viewing (suggested maximum limit is 2 hours per day), and select programs that are appropriate for the child's age.
• Use television program guides or a VCR. Television program guides can be used to plan and discuss viewing with your child. A VCR is useful for screening programs, building a video library for children, pausing to discuss points, and fast-forwarding through commercials.
• Encourage children to be critical of messages they encounter when watching television. Talking about TV violence gives children alternative ways to think about it. Parents can point out differences between fantasy and reality in depictions of violence. They can also help children understand that in real life, violence is not funny. Discussion of issues underlying what is on the screen can help children to become critical viewers.

For More Information

• Boyatzis, Chris J. (1997). Of Power Rangers and V-chips. Young Children, 52(8), 74-79.
• Center for Media Literacy [Homepage of the Center for Media Literacy], [Online]. (1997). Available: http://www.medialit.org/ [1997, November 4].
• Eron, L. D. (1992). The impact of televised violence. Testimony on behalf of the American Psychological Association before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Congressional Record, June 18, 1992.
• Federman, J. (Ed.). (1997). National Television Violence Study: Vol. 2. Executive summary. Santa Barbara: University of California, Center for Communication & Social Policy.
• Gerbner, George, & Gross, Larry. (1980). The violent face of television and its lessons. In Edward L. Palmer & Aimee Dorr (Eds.), Children and the faces of television: Teaching, violence, selling (pp.149-162). New York: Academic Press.
• Levine, Madeline. (1996). Viewing violence: How media violence affects your child's and adolescent's development. New York: Doubleday. ED 402 085.
• Molitor, Fred, & Hirsch, Kenneth W. (1994). Children's toleration of real-life aggression after exposure to media violence: A replication of the Drabman and Thomas studies. Child Study Journal, 24(3), 191-207. EJ 496 752.
• National Television Violence Study, Executive summary, 1994- 95. (1996). Studio City, CA: MediaScope, Inc.
• Paik, Haejung, & Comstock, George. (1994). The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis. Communication Research, 21(4), 516-546. EJ 487 681.
• S.1383, Children's Protection from Violent Programming Act of 1993; S.973, Television Report Card Act of 1993; and S.943, Children's Television Violence Protection Act of 1993. Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. United States Senate, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. Congress of the U.S. (1993). ED 386 658.
• Singer, Dorothy G.; Singer, Jerome L.; & Zuckerman, Diana M. (1990). A parent's guide: Use TV to your child's advantage. Reston, VA: Acropolis Books.
• Smith, Marilyn E. (1993). Television violence and behavior: A research summary. ERIC Digest. Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology. ED 366 329.
• The TV Parental Guidelines [Homepage of the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board], [Online]. Available: http://www.tvguidelines.org [1997, November 4].

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• Television Violence Essay

Violence in the media has been a controversial topic for many years. With the recent increase in mass shootings and other acts of violence, the question of whether or not media violence contributes to aggressive behavior in children has come under intense scrutiny. While there is no clear consensus on the matter, there is evidence that suggests that exposure to television violence can lead to increases in aggression in children.

One study found that children who were exposed to more than four hours of television per day were significantly more likely to engage in violent behavior than those who watched less television. Another study found that boys who had access to violent video games were more likely to display aggression and hostility than those who did not have access to such games.

There are a number of potential explanations for why media violence might lead to increases in aggression in children. One possibility is that children who are exposed to violence in the media become desensitized to it and are more likely to engage in violent behavior themselves. Another possibility is that children who see violence on television or in video games may believe that it is an acceptable way to resolve conflict.

It is important to note that not all children who are exposed to violence in the media will become aggressive. However, there is evidence that suggests that media violence can contribute to aggression in some children. Parents and caregivers should be aware of this when choosing what media their children are exposed to.

It is critical to examine what impact children have on society today. One of the most significant influences American youngsters may have is television. Children may be drawn into the TV program’s realistic world of violence, with sometimes deadly consequences. The influence of television violence on youth behavior has been a problem for many years. Children and teenagers who watch violent shows on television develop undesirable behavior.

The effects of television violence can be both immediate and long-lasting. Violence on television desensitizes children to real-life violence and makes them believe that the world is a “scary” place. It also teaches children that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems. Studies have shown that children who watch a lot of television are more likely to be violent themselves. In addition, children who watch a lot of violence on television are more likely to become victims of violence.

The best way to protect children from the negative effects of television violence is to limit their exposure to it. Parents should monitor what their children are watching and make sure that they are not exposed to too much violence. If you are concerned about the amount of violence your child is watching, talk to your child’s doctor or a mental health professional. Children who are exposed to too much violence may need help dealing with their feelings.

As a result, we are confronted with the difficulties of identifying children who need help. We need to find out what programs work. However, there is no easy solution for this problem since we do not yet understand how television influences children’s behavior or development. There can be no doubt that frequent exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of juvenile aggressiveness, crime and violence in society.

The facts come from both laboratory and real-world research. Televised violence has an impact on youngsters of all ages, genders, socioeconomic levels, and intellectual abilities. This isn’t limited to kids who are violent by nature; it also works on kids who aren’t inclined to be aggressive. Television violence encourages people to act violently offline as well (not just in the US).

“The amount of time children spend watching television is a better predictor of aggressive behavior than any other single factor. Studies have shown that the more time children spend watching TV, the more likely they are to be aggressive. The link between TV violence and aggression is one of the most studied and best established in social science. Children who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be violent as adults.”

“A number of studies have found that early exposure to TV violence places children at increased risk for developing aggressiveness and violent behavior later in life. A classic study by Bandura and colleagues showed that children who watched an adult model behaving aggressively toward a Bobo Doll were much more likely to behave aggressively themselves when they were later given the opportunity to play with the doll.

Other studies have found that children who watch a lot of TV violence tend to become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, more fearful of the world around them, and more likely to believe that using force is an acceptable way to resolve conflict.”

“The impact of television violence on children is not just limited to aggressive behavior. Studies have also found that children who are exposed to a lot of TV violence tend to have difficulty concentrating, are easily distracted, have trouble paying attention, and are less able than other children to remember what they have seen or heard. All of these effects can lead to problems in school and in social situations.”

“There is no single answer to the question of how to protect children from the harmful effects of TV violence. But there are a number of things that parents and others can do to reduce the amount of violence that children see on TV.”

“One thing parents can do is to limit the amount of time their children spend watching television. The average child spends more than four hours a day watching TV, and many children watch much more than that. Research has shown that the more time children spend watching TV, the more likely they are to be aggressive. So one way to reduce the amount of violence your child sees is to limit his or her TV viewing.”

“Another thing parents can do is to pay attention to the shows their children are watching and to watch some of them with their children. This gives you a chance to talk about what you’ve seen and to help your child understand that what happens on TV is not always real. You can also use TV viewing as a way to spend time together as a family and to teach your children about values such as respect for others.”

“There are also a number of steps that can be taken at the community level to reduce the amount of violence in the media. These include working with television station managers and producers to create more non-violent programming, supporting groups that monitor the portrayal of violence in the media, and advocating for stricter government regulation of the amount of violence in television programming.”

More Essays

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Arrests Expose Rift Between N.Y.P.D. and ‘Violence Interrupters’

An outreach worker trained to intervene in street conflicts was hospitalized after he and a colleague were arrested amid an altercation with the police.

By Maria Cramer and Hurubie Meko

For years, New York City has employed a two-pronged approach to reducing gun violence, relying on the police and on the publicly funded conflict mediators known as violence interrupters, who try to defuse disputes before they escalate, including into gunfire.

But the February arrests of two interrupters has caused simmering tensions with the police to boil over and threatens to undermine a key part of Mayor Eric Adams’s approach to curbing shootings and murders.

The two sides share a fundamental goal, despite their strikingly different methods. Where officers have the power to arrest, interrupters, often former gang members who in some cases have served prison time, rely on street credibility to steer people from crime.

Over the past year, though, interrupters say officers have cursed at them; shoved them out of the way when they tried to break up fights; and arrested them for minor offenses. Then, on Feb. 9, two members of Save Our Streets, a longtime anti-violence group in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section, said officers had handcuffed them after they tried to calm a man being detained for drug possession.

At the time, the two, Mark Johnson and his supervisor, Dequann Stanley, were wearing clothing that identified them as outreach workers. Still, a swarm of officers dragged them to the ground, according to video of the arrests reviewed by The Times, with some punching and kicking Mr. Stanley.

“I just felt so helpless,” he said in an interview.

In the video, Mr. Johnson can be heard saying, “Calm down,” to the young man who was detained by the police.

“It’s all right. Calm down. Calm down.” “That’s it. Calm down, man.” “Calm down. Y’all running for nothing. Calm down.”

Mr. Stanley sustained a gash on his forehead and bruised ribs and spent hours with his ankle shackled to a hospital gurney. He and Mr. Johnson received summonses for disorderly conduct that were later dismissed.

They have indicated in court documents filed by their lawyer, M.K. Kaishian, that they plan to sue the city. Since December, two other interrupters have notified the city of their plans to sue over what they say were false arrests stemming from other encounters.

The arrests and ensuing fallout pose a challenge to Mr. Adams’ public safety strategy , which leans heavily on expanding the use of interrupters, a community-based supplement to traditional policing that has taken root in other major U.S. cities.

Although studies indicate the presence of interrupters can help reduce crime and gun violence, some rank-and-file officers are less accepting of their presence. The resistance, policing experts said, arises from suspicions about the criminal records of some outreach workers, including some who have been convicted of serious crimes .

“Some of the most effective violence interrupters aren’t far removed from the violence,” said Brandon Del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University and a former New York Police Department precinct commander. “Their commitment to ending it is what makes them valuable. But that also is viewed with skepticism.”

The Police Department declined to comment on the arrests or on its interactions with interrupters more broadly, and also declined requests for officers’ body camera footage of the Feb. 9 altercation, citing the pending litigation.

The confrontation involving Mr. Johnson and Mr. Stanley shook members of other interrupter groups, which operate under the city’s Crisis Management System . The system, a network of programs geared toward reducing gun violence, is independent of the Police Department and run by the Department of Youth and Community Development.

Less than a week after Mr. Stanley and Mr. Johnson were arrested, some police leaders tried to mend the relationship at a meeting with dozens of interrupters.

The gathering was arranged to discuss dealing with potential violence over the summer. Some outreach workers who attended expressed disappointment that officials did not apologize for the arrests of Mr. Stanley and Mr. Johnson.

Courtney Bryan, the executive director of the Center for Justice Innovation, which runs Save Our Streets, said in a statement that her organization had met with the police and city leaders about the arrests “to ensure our staff and all violence interrupters are treated as the indispensable, skilled partners they are.”

City officials plan additional meetings between the two sides, more funding for violence-interruption programs and training for the police and outreach workers “to form better partnerships,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams said in a statement.

“This vital work will produce the best outcomes if our officers and violence interrupters continue to work together,” the spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak, said.

Interrupters said they were not sure why tensions with the police had increased, but many believe officers have become more aggressive amid the “defund the police” movement and other calls for criminal justice reform.

“I don’t think the rank and file get it,” said A.U. Hogan, whose title is chief of streets at Life Camp, a Queens anti-violence group. “A lot of them are threatened by the work we do.”

The Police Benevolent Association, which represents rank-and-file officers, declined to comment. Privately, officers say some interrupters interfere with arrests, attracting crowds and increasing tension on the streets.

Officers see themselves as the “legal arm of the government that is supposed to confront violence,” while violence interrupters are supposed to work more “upstream” to prevent violence, said Ian Adams, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and a former police officer in Utah.

In the heat of the moment, it can be difficult for officers to discern who is who in a scene, Professor Adams said.

“While there’s something active going on right now, that’s going to be the police’s role,” he said. “And if they’re perceiving that as interference, then, from a policy perspective, we have to figure out where these groups belong and where their appropriate place is.”

Conflicts between the police and interrupters also emerge when interrupters are charged with crimes. Michael Rodriguez, the former director of Bronx Rises Against Violence, an anti-violence program, was indicted in Orange County, N.Y., last year on charges that included gun and cocaine possession.

Kenneth Corey, a former chief of the New York Police Department, said that when he was the commander of a Staten Island precinct from 2018 to 2020, shootings fell 50 percent in a year. He credited the drop in large part to violence interrupters.

Generally speaking, he said, some tension stems from officers expecting interrupters to act as informers, and then becoming frustrated when they do not share information.

“Police don’t really understand what violence interrupters do,” Mr. Corey, who retired in 2022, said.

Tiffany Burgess, an outreach worker with the Brooklyn group Brownsville In Violence Out, filed a claim against the city after she was charged with disorderly conduct in November.

On the night in question, she said, she went to a barbershop after work and was there with other neighborhood residents when the police came in. Officers accused the crowd of smoking, drinking and gambling with dice, and demanded identification, according to her court filing.

Ms. Burgess, who was wearing her work identification badge at the time, was arrested after declining to provide a state-issued ID. She was held at the precinct for more than an hour, her wrists and ankles shackled. The charge was later dismissed.

The police, she said, “don’t care for us to be in the neighborhood.”

“We’re not trying to be police officers,” she said. “We’re trying to get the crime rate down. We’re trying to help them.”

The violence-interrupter concept took its current form in New York in 2014, when Mayor Bill DeBlasio and the City Council formed the crisis management system to organize interrupter groups. Such groups now operate in more than 30 areas of the city. Mr. Adams, a former police captain, announced $86 million in funding for the system in the 2024 fiscal year.

Cities like Baltimore , Chicago and St. Louis have made similar investments. In 2021, the Justice Department announced $444 million in grants for violence reduction, including intervention programs.

Overall, the interrupter model appears to be effective, according to a 2017 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice . In one Bronx neighborhood, the number of shooting victims fell 63 percent during a period when interrupters were active compared with rates before the program began, the study found.

The results show that the approach should be adopted in “any city trying to get a handle on gun violence,” said Jeffrey Butts, who worked on the study and is the director of the college’s Research and Evaluation Center.

Interrupters talk to victims and perpetrators of gun violence; defuse conflicts; and broker delicate truces. The work can be dangerous. In January, an interrupter in Brownsville was shot and wounded while on the job , a year after another outreach worker in the neighborhood was shot under similar circumstances . In Baltimore, three violence interrupters were killed from 2021 to 2022.

As for Mr. Stanley, two weeks after his arrest he was too anxious to return to work. It was one thing, he said, to worry about being hurt stopping a conflict between people on the street.

“But then to think about dealing with the N.Y.P.D. as well,” he said. “I just feel like I can’t do my job the way I felt like I could.”

Although not fully back to work, he volunteered to help preside over a vigil for Troy Gill, a 13-year-old boy who was fatally shot on Feb. 29 while returning home to Crown Heights after a Brooklyn Nets game.

As he moved through the crowd, mourners shook his hand or hugged him. Then, a cruiser parked nearby, and two officers got out.

Mr. Stanley stood in the middle of the playground, not far away. All three watched the crowd silently.

Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas. More about Maria Cramer