Television And Violence 12858

Boink! Boom! Crack! The sounds of the fight scene rage on. Many have fallen inthis particularly bloody battle. The good guys have taken their losses butstruggle on to what is seemingly a victory. Their aggression is fierce and helpsthem. Fires consume the background; men and women lie on the ground in pain.Even if it weren’t for the bombs, missiles, bullets, etc.

that are flyingaround, hand-to-hand combat would have got the better of them. It was a classicbattle scene when looking back at it, a true testament of blood, hell, and gore.This may sound like a heroic made-for-TV movie shown only on primetime in thehopes of recruiting a mature audience. But it is not. In fact, it is justanother Saturday-morning special of GI Joe, “The Real American Hero,” that Iwatched with my brother and cousins. We were religious followers of the show,tuning in every week to see how Sergeant Slaughter, Duke and the rest of thegang would handle the likes of King Cobra and his cronies.

GI Joe’s earlymorning time slot encouraged kids, like us, to tune in every weekend. Whileeating our CheeriosTM and Frosted FlakesTM we got a dose of some real fightin’action, in excess of fifty violent scenes for the morning: there is more thanenough to fill the appetite. The truth is, violence on television is on everysingle day. It takes its toll on society, especially children. The damage doneby violence on television is detrimental and confirmed by statistics, casestudies, and personal experiences. Fistfights, shootouts, car crashes, rapes.

..Take your pick. Violence is everywhere on television, sometimes gory andgruesome, other times clean and remote. It is not just the Saturday morningcartoons; clips from action-adventure series, the nightly news and MTV areinterwoven with violence and extremely mature content.

Prime-time programs canaverage eight hostile acts per hour; children's shows four times as much (Bajpai,1996, ps. 45-52). To television Programmers, violence is depicted as a normal,justified response to conflict and threat. They will encourage identificationwith the aggressor; domination and submission, to them, are often equated withpleasure and worth. Yet numerous researchers have put much time into discoveringwhy children are so attached by the television and the action that takes placewithin it.

They prove that it is definitely a major source of violent behaviorin children. Their research proves time and time again that aggression andtelevision viewing do go hand in hand. The truth about television violence andchildren has been shown. Many people and critics try to ignore it and hope thatit will go away. Others do not even seem to care and try to attack these ideas.However, the facts are undeniable and all the results point to one conclusion:Television violence causes children to be violent and the effects can belife-long.

The effects of the television are first visible even at the mostbasic level of life, children and adolescents. The modern-day extent of viewingby humans, especially Americans, is astronomical. Children begin to watchtelevision at very early ages, often when they are newborns. At this time theyare obviously not able to follow along or be influenced by it, but they aresubjected to it nevertheless.

This early start will lead most childhood viewersinto a cult-like trance by the time they reach the age of three. In betweenbreakfast and lunch, playtime and naptime, class and dinner, all children find away to watch the tube. The typical American household has the television set onfor more than seven hours each day and children ages two to eleven spend anaverage of twenty-eight hours per week viewing (Murray, 1996, p. 1). Someresearch has also estimated that by the time a child or teen of today’sgeneration reaches the age of seventy, he will have spent nearly seven years ofhis life watching television.

That is nearly ten percent of one’s life liveswatching television. That is insane; to say that you and I will spend years uponyears, watching television. There is so much that people, even we, could do in aseven-year period. Entire wars can be fought in seven years, college educationscan be attained, millions of people will be born and millions will die, manythings can happen that have more significance than seven years of television.

That is a very large percentage of time to be doing solely one thing, and thefact that that one thing is watching television, is very, very unfortunate. Thetelevision, as said before, is a very influential object. Being worse forchildren, we see that at the later stages in life (ie: eighteen and over,approximately adulthood) most people will not be swayed too much by the hypnoticpowers of the television. This is not to say that it cannot happen, but studiesshow that most people are fairly set in their ways, especially mentally, oncethey reach adulthood and it takes a lot for them to be affected.

Children, onthe other hand, are prime candidates to the influences of the television. Theyare the most avid viewers and the most vulnerable. It is here where most violenttendencies, if any, are fostered. With the addition of cable television tobroadcast television, a recent survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairsidentified 1,846 violent scenes broadcast and cablecast between 6 a.m.

tomidnight on one day in Washington, D.C. The most violent periods were between 6to 9 a.m. with 497 violent scenes (165.7 per hour) and between 2 to 5 p.

m. with609 violent scenes (203 per hour) (Murray, 1996, p. 2). This statistic probablyseems quite outrageous, but it is true and there are numbers even higher thanthat on given days. Two hundred violent scenes per hour are gaudy numbers, yetthe even more baffling but more concealed truism is the time slots of thesemajor occurrences.

The times: 6 to 9 a.m. and 2 to 5 p.m.

are the most populartimes for child and adolescent viewers. These are the times in the morning whenyoung children will watch most avidly and in the afternoon after school whenschool-aged children are most attentive to it. This just goes to show that thechildren, already established as the most vulnerable, are also the onessubjected to the most violent scenes. This is a bad combination and itstimulates bad tendencies and violence in the children. Now that the extent towhich the television is being watched has been established, and with some ideaof just how much violence there is on an average day, it is time to look at aneven more telling tale.

Yes, we said that children may be subjected to more thansix hundred acts of violence in a three-hour time period, but who’s to saythat these acts are in any way severe? Well, the truth is that while many actsare subtle in their appearance, they still have an overwhelming effect overtime. This is not to mention the fact that the major acts of violence add up aswell. By the time a child of today’s world reaches the age of eighteen he willhave witnessed over 8,000 simulated murders on the television. That is anaverage of 1.

22 murders per day, counted from birth. What you see here is arepetitive bombardment of violence and violent material upon children. Seeingthis every day gives it the same effect as eating, or sleeping; it’s nearlyhabitual, which is a truly sad state of affairs. Getting into a habit of seeingmurders and violence on television, is an obvious sign that should lead us tobelieve that it will influence children in a negative way. Numbers are easilycrunched and manipulated by both sides of the argument.

I see that there arequite a few numbers involved here in the argument. They are mostly in favor ofviolence being a bad influence, making these facts hard to ignore. Especiallywhen they are as blatant and obvious as they appear. Statistics, when usedresponsibly, are perhaps some of the best insights we have into helping usdiscover problems and their solutions. As helpful as they may be, there arestill other kinds of information even as persuasive as statistics.

What I haveto show now are case studies. There have been numerous case studies performedover the past few decades involving children and television. I can throw outstatistics all day at people in the hopes that they will see that violence ontelevision is bad. While it is effective, my argument is much like any claim ascientist would make: it is not truly valid until tested. With this in mind, wesee testing the real influence of violence on television shows that it isdangerously harmful.

For an example, there is a case of a study done by a groupStein and Friedrich for the Surgeon General’s project in 1972 (Murray, 1996,p. 3). Their study consisted of taking 97 preschool children and exposing onethird of them to a television diet consisting of Batman and Superman cartoons.The middle third were exposed to a diet of Mr.

Roger’s Neighborhood, while thefinal third were exposed to neutral programming (neither antisocial orpro-social). These children watched over twelve half-hour episodes of theirrespective programs over a four-week period. They were then observed in theirclassroom and playroom environments. The psychologists running the study foundthat the children who watched the Batman and Superman cartoons were remarkablyaggressive and not very apt to share and interact.

While on the other hand, thechildren who watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood were more social, and morelikely to share and interact. The middle third remained close to the same asthey were before. There are many more studies just like this previous one, andall of them lead to the same conclusion: violent television does foster moreaggressive and violent behavior in children. It feels like just yesterday that Iwas sitting down to watch my Saturday morning cartoons on my family roomtelevision. Every Saturday was like clockwork for me.

I would always eat mycereal and toast and then watch my GI Joe and Transformers. I was so in lovewith GI Joe, I can remember always wanting to re-enact the scenes with myplastic toy soldiers. Explosions, death, and carnage were my rations on Saturdayand I loved every minute of it. In fact, although this is embarrassing, I stillremember to this day getting in trouble at pre-school for hitting a classmatewho took a toy away from a friend of mine. Why? You might ask. Well, it wasbecause I saw on GI Joe that your supposed to stick up for your friends andprotect them from the enemy at all costs.

So me, being the noble and“informed” friend that I was, carried-out the mission and took the heat formy violent actions. I received timeout for the rest of the day. This may seem alittle preposterous, or maybe even dumb. Regardless, the truth is that GI Joepartly formed my identity as a young child and the only reason I was able tolater tell the right from wrong was because I had parents to tell me.

My parentswould often try to sit with me and watch a few shows, not for just theirpleasure but rather to tell me what was fake and not to be repeated. Manychildren go without the parental supervision when watching television, and itleads to a lack of knowledge from determining right from wrong. They eventuallyforget the real and the fantasy, the violent and the non-violent. Now do not getme wrong, there are measures that prove and a few studies that show that withproper supervision children will not be affected by television violence. Casestudies are out now that show children being unaffected by television violenceas a whole. I previously mentioned a study done for a Surgeon General’sProject, which acknowledged an existence of non-violent cases.

When I read thisinformation, I thought to myself, “that’s awesome, if children are notreally affected by the television.” Only, I found but one or two instances ofthese reports meaning that they were few and very far between. Leading me toconclude that it was merely wishful thinking to be able to reverse my study andmaybe argue from the other side. The amount of studies showing that violence isa factor in the lives of children is just too large in number to even comparethe reports that oppose it. To be honest, I have only shared a few statisticsand studies with you. I could have rattled off a thousand; it is just notnecessary though.

I believe that you can agree with me when I say that violenceon television is detrimental to the lives of children and that it has a badinfluence upon them. You should agree with me, and if you do not, well I can notwait to hear about your child in the police blotter.Bibliography1.Bajpai, S., & Unnikrishnan, N. (1996).

The Impact of TelevisionAdvertising on Children. London: Sage Publications. 2.Murray, John P.

(1996)Impact of Televised Violence [Online]. Available via Kansas State University