Media Violence
The Surgeon General has long suspected that media violence, like cigarette smoking, can be dangerous to your health. A number of years ago he commissioned many research studies to try to find out if there was a connection between viewing violence and subsequent violent behavior. Of special interest was the impact on youth.
Many of the research studies seemed to show a connection in children between viewing violence and doing violence. The problem is that there may be other factors that are causing the violent behavior; perhaps a particular child has an abusive parent and that is the reason the child exhibits this behavior. TV networks, in particular, said the studies did not prove that TV violence caused subsequent violent behavior.
There's little doubt that the amount of violence has increased on TV (and in films, and on video, and in computer games). Psychologists and media experts worry about various aspects of this:
1. Children and senior citizens especially are likely to develop a "mean world view" from all this violence. There is actually more violence in our media than there is in our individual lives. This excessive media violence convinces the young and the elderly, especially, that the world is actually meaner than it really is.
2. Much of the violence in children's programming is tied to commercially marketed toys. Some TV programs are, in reality, half hour commercials for a product. Children are victimized twice: by violence and by the need to buy products.
3. Another concern is that TV tends to show a sanitized violence. We see the cars crashing and we hear the bullets whizzing, but we don't really see the resulting damage or harm. Some children are unaware of the ghastly result of bullet holes because the media often don't show these messy parts. So the dreadful reality is not there before us.
4. Finally, there's real concern about whether we might all be insensitive to violence because we are exposed to so much of it. If our news consists of violent events night after night, and then we switch immediately to a McDonald's hamburger commercial, people can become immune to the horror simply because it washes over us day after day. We can also feel more and more helpless in the face of so much violence; a feeling grows on us (as individuals and as nations) that we can't do anything about it, so why try?
The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that tries to protect children from these pressures. TV networks have at times promised to cut back on the amount of gratuitous violence in their programs.