Television's Bloody Hands

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 21, 1998 | by Robert Stacy McCain

Violent television programming, movies and video games are major causes of criminal violence, says an expert in the psychology of killing. And the news long has been suppressed.

Media violence was a significant factor in the series of armed rampages at public schools during the last year, says retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor and Army Ranger. The attacks in Pearl, Miss., West Paducah, Ky., Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., left 12 people dead and 45 wounded.

"What all of the killers have in common to a certain degree was this tremendous fascination with media violence," says Grossman, now an instructor at Arkansas State University. "They all suffered an inferiority complex and were enthralled by violent images from television and film."

Grossman arrived on the scene of the Jonesboro massacre within an hour of the March 23 shootings in which Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, killed five people and wounded 10 others. The young killers in many ways were typical of the phenomenon of media-induced violence, he says.

"They want to be tough, they want to impress people, they want to make a bold statement and they don't know how," says Grossman. "And then the media tells them how. And the message they get from the media is that killing is the route to greatness. Killing is the route to fame."

Exposing children to media violence "is a form of child abuse," argues Grossman. "It is identical to what the military does in basic training. But instead of doing it with a drill sergeant on an 18-year-old volunteer, we're doing it to 3-year-olds over the public airwaves, in order for the networks to increase their ratings."

The parallels between media violence and military training became clear to him while working on his 1996 book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Army officials had discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of U.S. soldiers in World War II actually fired their weapons in combat. The reason, says Grossman, is "a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind." To overcome this inhibition, Army training was changed to make use of psychological conditioning techniques. By the time of the war in Vietnam, the "fire rate" had been increased to 95 percent.

When children watch graphic violence in movies and TV shows and also play realistic, violent video games, it breaks down their natural resistance to killing. Children are being exposed to such media violence at earlier ages. "The average preschooler in America spends approximately 23 hours a week watching television before they even go to school, and that's not good," says Grossman.

He points to crime statistics as overpowering evidence of the connection between violence on TV and in real life. "The, per capita murder rate doubled in this country between 1957, when the FBI started keeping track of the data, and 1992," he points out. Aggravated assaults increased more than 700 percent during the same period.

Aggravated-assault statistics are more significant because advances in medical technology have improved the survival rate for gunshot victims, adds Grossman. What's more, a dramatic increase in the size of the prison population -- which has quadrupled as a percentage of the adult population since 1972 -- and substantial increases in the number of law-enforcement officers have helped slow the growth in violent crime.

Yet there's another statistic to consider: Police officers are being killed in record numbers. "What is happening is that we are buying a minor incremental decrease in violent crime with the blood and lives of our police officers," says Grossman. They are like a Band-Aid strapped onto a bleeding wound, and the root cause of the bleeding is television."

TV repeatedly has been cited as a factor in violent crime since 1964, when a Senate committee explored the link between television and juvenile crime. Americans still are unaware of the connection because news of the link between TV and violence is "repressed and suppressed by the television industry," says Grossman.

"The television industry has blood on their hands -- and they know it," he says. "They will not even discuss this topic. If we reach down into that great big stew of factors that are causing murder, we know that the single biggest chunk is television" -- even news programs advocating gun control. "The reason why television news is antigun is because ... they want to distract attention from themselves and their own culpability. Guns have always been there. The thing you have to ask yourself is, `What is the new ingredient? What is the new factor that is causing this explosion in violent crime?'"

Grossman is working on a book, tentatively rifled The Case Against the Networks, that will expose TV as "a threat to our very civilization, because as we lose our safety we will sacrifice our freedom." According to Grossman, different role models in violent TV shows and movies can generate specific types of crime. He cites the 1995 movie The Basketball Diaries as shaping last year's spree of school shootings.