Youths not convinced by anti-violence ads

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1996

Cable television's anti-violence public service announcements frequently fail because many adolescent viewers see them as being delivered by hypocritical, violence-prone spokespersons. They also think the announcements offer unrealistic or no solutions to violence, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study revealed. The researchers found adolescent audiences to be sophisticated viewers, quick to criticize public service messages they perceived as being either unrealistic or hypocritical.

"The cable television industry created public service announcements and special programming that aired [in March, 1995! during an intense effort celled `voices Against Violence,'" indicates Jane D. Brown, professor of journalism and mass communication. "We created an archive of many of those PSAs and selected a systematic sample of 15 to test on target audiences."

The PSAs played on MTV, HBO, the Cartoon Network, and other cable networks."Some of the public service announcements included celebrities such as Samuel Jackson, who was in the graphically violent movie `Pulp Fiction.' The kids we studied said, `How could this guy be asking us to stop the violence when he has portrayed extremely violent people in the movies he acts in?' Some also didn't believe the messages of celebrities like Derrick Coleman, a basketball player known for fighting and rough play." On the other hand, some celebrities, like rap artist Chuck D., appeared more believable to adolescent viewers because they historically have preached about non-violent solutions to confrontation.

"We also studied an hour-long, award-winning anti-violence program to see whether it was effective in changing attitudes toward violence," Brown explains. "However, we found little evidence that the students" attitudes toward violence were in any way affected by the program."

Over the next two years, the researchers will concentrate on testing messages that their study suggested might be more likely to be effective in shaping attitudes."For example, it appears as though kids would be more impressed by a PSA that shows the possibility of paralysis from a gunshot rather than death. We also found that the PSAs sometimes leave the impression that those who avoid fighting are less noble or powerful than those who make threats or are confrontational. We have a couple of generations of our youth who unintentionally and/or indirectly have been trained through television viewing to use violence to resolve conflict," Brown says. "Unfortunately, [researchers] are not providing them with alternative strategies and certainly the media are not."