Lock up your TV set - violence on television

National Review, Oct 18, 1993 by Amitai Etzioni

Violence can be as damaging to children as sexual license. But how to protect them?

THE GADGET is small: it can easily be incorporated into your next TV set. (Or, if you insist, attached to your old one.) By punching in a few numbers, you can ensure that your child will never see another violent show on your home TV set. The issue at hand, however, is far from small. Nothing less is at stake than the question of whether a community may edit its culture, or whether it must be subject to limitless gore and filth so as not to curb anyone's right to express himself and make money.

Until recently there was less than a broad consensus that television violence is a problem in need of treatment. On the contrary, while conservatives railed against pornography (sometimes in an uneasy alliance with feminists), liberals insisted that we have no business regulating show business. While these liberals did bemoan the spread of violence in the culture, they had neither the ideas nor the stomach to do anything about it.

Moreover, the social sciences, which act as a kind of semi-independent source of facts and observations, offered no further illumination. I hate to admit it, but over a lifetime of teaching sociology, I too tended to follow the dictates of the social sciences. Violence in the media was harmless, went the textbook mantra; there was no evidence of any "correlation" between exposure to violence (or, for that matter, hard-core porn) and anti-social behavior. On the contrary, social scientists used to opine, expressing violent urges when watching, say, Fatal Attraction, The Last Action Hero, or Lethal Weapon may vent these feelings in a harmless manner and obviate the need to act them out.

True, there were some incidents that contradicted the social sciences. Friday the 13th, a slasher movie, quickly found a live imitator. A movie about violence in the ghetto, Colors, led viewers to riot in several cities. A group of black teenagers, incensed over the violence depicted in Mississippi Burning, beat a white 14-year-old into unconsciousness.

Some media moguls, such as Disney's Michael Eisner, still suggest that movies like Terminator release more aggression than they build up. However, by now the social sciences have caught up. There is mounting evidence that violence in the media is one factor that breeds real violence in the body of society.

--A rural Canadian town began receiving TV signals for the first time in 1973, and the rate of violent behavior among young children increased 160 per cent in the following two years. University of British Columbia researchers found that the rate of aggression rose among both boys and girls and was widespread. Two similar towns nearby had had TV for some time and experienced no such increase between 1973 and 1975.

--A University of Illinois at Chicago study found that the amount of television a child watches at age eight predicts the severity of violent acts later committed as an adult. Even after controlling for factors such as intelligence, socioeconomic status, and baseline aggressiveness, the study found that individuals who watched more television as children were more likely to become abusive adults. This statistic becomes particularly alarming when one considers that about half of children six and older have their own TV set in their bedroom.

--A study commissioned by CBS in 2978 found that children who had watched an above-average amount of violence on television before adolescence were, as teenagers, committing acts such as assault, rape, major vandalism, and abuse of animals at a rate 49 per cent higher than those who had experienced little TV violence.

--A Harvard psychologist, Ronald G. Slaby, pointed out that the impact goes beyond increasing aggression. Children also experience a victim effect (increased fearfulness) and a bystander effect (increased callousness and desensitization to violence).

--After the anti-Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter was first shown on national television, with the Russian-roulette scene left intact, some 29 copycat incidents were reported, 26 of which were fatal.

As the body of evidence accumulated and public concern mounted, Congress moved to conduct hearings on the subject. Predictably, media moguls protested that TV should not be blamed for having caused all that violence. Warren Little field, president of NBC Entertainment, argued that children are affected by poverty, broken homes, and communities awash with drugs and handguns.

Fair enough. However, even television producers and broadcasters had a hard time denying that media violence is one of the key ingredients in the complex mix of factors that produce anti-social conduct.

Freedom to Self-Destruct

IF IT WAS not easy to reach a consensus that there is a problem, it is even more challenging to find an antidote. In part the issue is philosophical. There is a strong sense, at least in the sizable parts of the community influenced by libertarians, that as people must live with the consequences of their acts, they should be free to choose their own poison if they so desire. Thus, if they wish to numb their minds by watching re-runs of HeeHaw, it is their minds that are deactivated. If they are too busy watching boxing matches on HBO to taste the joys of reading a fine novel, it is their lives that are diminished. This argument has less validity when it comes to footage that fosters violent predispositions, the consequences of which others must bear. However, very few see the nexus between watching violent television and acting out as sufficiently binding to justify anything even remotely resembling censorship. (After all, the correlation between possessing handguns and violence is much stronger, and guns are not banned.)