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Concerns about media violence have been with us since before television. Throughout the 19th century, moralists and critics warned that newspapers were the cause of juvenile crime. There was concern that the great flow of stories about crime and vice would lead people to imitate the vividly described immoral behavior. In the 1920s, many were alarmed at what they saw as rampant sex, violence and general lawlessness on the movie screen. During that era, the motion picture industry was not protected by the First Amendment. This protection did not come until the Supreme Court's Miracle decision in the 1950s. To forestall governmental regulation, the film industry created its own production standards under the supervision of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). The man the MPPDA chose to supervise the film industry, Harding Administration Postmaster General Will H. Hays, became so powerful that the organization became known as the Hays Office.
The Hays Office Codes, which discuss sexuality as well as violence, established the following standards regarding criminal violence:
The codes list brutality, gruesomeness and cruelty to children or animals as repellent subjects. In explaining the reasons for some of the codes, the Hays Office explained that crimes against the law must not:
The concerns embodied in the Hays Codes regarding the effects of film images, particularly on the young, led to the landmark Payne Fund studies (1933-1935). These studies concluded that movies contradicted social norms in regard to crime (and sex) and that motion pictures directly influenced youngsters to become juvenile delinquents and criminals.
When the production codes finally disappeared in the 1960s, they were replaced by the voluntary rating of motion pictures under the MPA. Originally created in 1968 as G, M, R and X, these ratings still exist today, with some changes, as G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17.
After World War II, there was concern about violence and gruesomeness in comic books such as Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear and Vault of Horror. The comic book industry was attacked for contributing to juvenile delinquency. This led to the establishment in 1947 of the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers, which drafted a code in the 1950s banning, among other things, torture, sadism and detailed descriptions of criminal acts. A seal of approval then was printed on the cover of acceptable comics.
Significant penetration of television into American households began after World War II. By 1960, 150 million Americans lived in homes with television. Homes with children were more than twice as likely to have a television than those without children. By 1960, children were spending more time with television than they were with radio, comic books, babysitters or even playmates. As television became a staple of the American home, concern grew over what effect the medium might have on children. Would it stimulate or stunt intellectual development and creativity? Would it make kids passive, aggressive, friendly or empathic? Would it corrupt children by introducing them prematurely to an adult world of sex, smoking, liquor and violence; or would it make them better able to cope with the world around them?
There were concerns in the 1950s and early 1960s about the violence in television series such as The Rifleman or The Untouchables. In 1961, the results of the first major investigation of the effects of television on children in North America were published. Television in the Lives of Our Children (Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle and Edwin Parker) presented the findings and conclusions from 11 studies conducted in 10 American and Canadian communities between 1958 and 1960. This investigation covered a wide variety of topics and research areas, including the physical, emotional, cognitive and behavioral effects of television on children. The study addressed the most common concern about television: that it contributed to delinquent and violent behavior. The researchers found the content of television to be "extremely violent." Fighting, shooting and murder were common, as were themes of crime.
Violence constituted an important part of programs in more than half of the hours monitored. The researchers argued that television could contribute to violent and delinquent behavior in some cases. This might result, for example, in the case of a child who confuses the rules of the fantasy world, as seen on television, with the rules of reality or an already aggressive child whose aggression is increased by identifying with a successful "bad" character on television. But the researchers cautioned that television was, at most, a contributing factor in causing violent and delinquent behaviors, or any behaviors for that matter. For example, they noted: "Delinquency is a complex behavior growing usually out of a number of roots, the chief one usually being some great lack in the child's life--often a broken home or a feeling of rejection by parents or peer groups. Television is, at best, a contributing cause."
Schramm and his associates summed up their conclusions in regard to the possible behavioral effects of television as follows: "For some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children, under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither harmful nor particularly beneficial." They also stressed that parents had little to fear from television if they provided their children with a warm, loving, interesting, secure family environment.
The 1960s was a tumultuous decade in the United States. Violent street demonstrations relating to the civil rights movement, inner-city turmoil, student activism and antiwar protests shook the country. The rate of violent crime soared. Major political assassinations occurred. Americans saw brutal images of the world on their television sets, including the Vietnam War (called "The Living Room War" by Michael Arlen), the suppression of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In June 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in response to concerns about domestic violence and the recent assassinations, convened the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. While looking at all sources of societal violence, the commission, through a media task force, devoted much attention to the mass media, particularly television. This effort produced the massive Violence and the Media (1969), edited by Sandra Ball (now Ball-Rokeach) and Robert Baker. The third part of this three-part work focused on entertainment television and the issue of violence. It included summaries of past research assembled by experts in the field and new research prepared specifically for the report.
The media task force was concerned not only with the quantity of violence on entertainment television, but also with its quality. In other words, how was the violence portrayed? Who killed whom? Which weapons were used? Where did the violence take place? Was the violence justified? Were the aggressors rewarded or punished? Were the consequences of the violence fully shown? To conduct a content analysis of entertainment programs on television, the task force contacted Professor George Gerbner of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading experts who had already been studying violence in the media for several years. Gerbner defined violence as "the overt expression of force intended to hurt or kill."
It is important to reiterate that Gerbner and his staff analyzed both the extent of violence on television and the qualitative world of the violence. They not only quantified what portion of crime, comedy and cartoon shows contained violence, they also qualitatively examined the context in which the violence occurred. They noted, for example, that most violence was portrayed as serious rather than funny, and that most occurred between strangers at close range and involved weapons. They found that the consequences of television violence were unrealistic since little pain or gore was visible. They distinguished the violence of good guys from that of bad guys (good guys were as violent, but did not suffer negative consequences). Among their other qualitative findings were the following: Police officers were nearly as violent as criminals. Criminals usually received violent punishment from their enemies or the police rather than from the judicial system. Most violence was committed by young or middle-aged unmarried males. Nonwhites and foreigners also committed more than their fair share (and were usually villains). Violence was rarely punished. Historical setting was another important contextual factor analyzed. Nearly three-quarters of programs set in contemporary settings contained violence. But almost all programs set in the past and the future contained violence.
From Gerbner's content analysis, the media task force established what it saw as the basic messages or norms in regard to violence that were portrayed on broadcast television. Overall, they concluded that violence was shown as a useful means of resolving problems and achieving goals. Viewers learned from television that conflicts are best resolved through use of violence. There was a notable absence of alternative means of conflict resolution, such as debate, cooperation and compromise.
From a comprehensive review of the effects-related research, the task force concluded that television portrayal of violence was "one major contributory factor which must be considered in attempts to explain the many forms of violent behavior that mark American society today." The media task force report was criticized for making assertions that were not well grounded in the data. There were many suppositions and conjectures in their conclusions. Nevertheless, the work stimulated further research.
Many felt that the report of the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence pointed to the importance of the link between media violence and violence in the real world but that a more detailed examination of the issue was desirable. The issue of television violence had also entered the political arena. Senator John Pastore (D-R.I.) argued that a "public health risk" might be at stake. If television was responsible for making the children of America more aggressive, he asserted, then government might have to step in and force the industry to clean up its act. The First Amendment prohibited government censorship, but scientific evidence showing a link between television violence and real world violence might be used to convince the industry to restrain itself. With this in mind, Congress appropriated $1 million to fund research studies focusing on television violence and its effect on children and adolescents.
The result was a massive, six-volume work known as the "Surgeon General's Report," which includes both extensive reviews of the relevant existing literature and specially commissioned research. The project was managed by the U.S. Surgeon General and coordinated and administered by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). An advisory committee composed of distinguished scholars was created to draw conclusions from the earlier research and the specially commissioned papers.
Content analysis in the Surgeon General's Report was again provided by George Gerbner. He compared programming in 1969 with the results of the analyses he had completed for 1967 and 1968. Again, he applied both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. One important conclusion of his work was the lack of reality in television violence. The people, relationships, settings, places and times of television violence, he argued, all differed dramatically from those in real life.
Muriel Cantor ("The Role of the Producer in Choosing Children's Television Content") and Thomas Baldwin and Colby Lewis ("Violence in Television: The Industry Looks at Itself") reported on interviews with television professionals to provide insight into how television content is created. The professionals tended to see violence as synonymous with action which they argued was the best tool to keep the interest and attention of viewers, young and old. They claimed that they limited violence to those places where it was contextually appropriate, such as where it was essential to plot or character development. They insisted that violence was portrayed as immoral unless it was used for self-defense or by law enforcement officials and that heroes only resorted to violence when absolutely necessary, and, even then, always acted in accord with the law. Generally discounting criticism of television violence, they argued that television violence accurately reflected the real world, and cited influences other than television as responsible for the real violence in society. They also criticized parents for blaming television while ignoring their own responsibilities.
In a major effects-related study conducted by Robert Liebert and Robert Baron ("Short-Term Effects of Televised Aggression on Children's Aggressive Behavior") they found that viewing a violent scene increased the willingness of children to be an aggressor in a laboratory situation. Liebert, summarizing the research from his own and other studies within the Surgeon General's Report and 54 earlier experimental studies, concluded that children who view media depictions of aggression that is rewarded, subsequently become more violent in their own behavior.
Monroe Lefkowitz and his associates ("Television Violence and Child Aggression: A Follow-up Study") conducted a 10-year longitudinal study that found the television habits that an 8-year-old boy had established would influence his aggressive behavior throughout his childhood and into his adolescent years. The more violence an 8-year-old boy watched, the more aggressive his behavior would be at age 8 and at age 18. The link between his television viewing at 8 and his aggressive behavior at 18 was even stronger than the link between his television watching at 8 and his aggressive behavior at 8. Carefully controlling for other variables, Lefkowitz and his associates concluded that viewing media violence regularly seemed to lead to aggressive behavior.
This is but a brief taste of the many different studies that constituted the Surgeon General's Report. Surveying the whole report, the advisory committee concluded: "Thus the two sets of findings (laboratory and survey) converge in three respects: a preliminary and tentative indication of a causal relation between viewing violence on television and aggressive behavior; an indication that any such causal operation operates only on some children (who are predisposed to be aggressive); and an indication that it operates only in some environmental contexts. Such tentative and limited conclusions are not very satisfying [yet] they represent substantially more knowledge than we had two years ago."
Each of the individual studies can be criticized, especially for methodological flaws. For example, one can question whether findings from a laboratory experiment can be applied to the "real world." In some instances, the samples studied were quite small. In many instances, a host of additional variables might account for the correlations found. Moving beyond individual studies, the report can be faulted for its general focus which was on short-term and direct effects. One could argue that the most profound influences of television are long-term and indirect. Nevertheless, overall, the accumulation of evidence supported the hypothesis that viewing of violence on television increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior.
There was some criticism that the conclusions of the advisory committee were overly tentative and cautious. In Senate hearings looking at the committee's conclusions, the Surgeon General himself, Jessie Steinfeld, expressed his view:
While the Committee report is carefully phrased and qualified in language acceptable to social scientists, it is clear to me that the causal relation between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action. The data on social phenomena such as television and social violence will never be clear enough for all social scientists to agree on the formulation of a succinct statement of causality. But there comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come.
During the 1970s there were a number of widely publicized crimes attributed to imitation of televised violence. In 1977 Ronnie Zamora, a 15-year-old Florida youth, was charged with the murder of his neighbor, an 80-year-old woman. His attorney, Ellis Rubin, used "television intoxication" as Zamora's defense, arguing that a steady diet of violent television caused him to act as he did. Believing that television could not be held accountable for the crime, the jury was not persuaded and Zamora was convicted of first-degree murder. About the same time, in Boston a young woman was beaten to death and burned in a vacant lot by a group of youths. When arrested for her murder, the youths claimed they had gotten the idea for the crime from television the night before. Fearful of the potential effect of television, interested groups began protesting against television violence. The American Medical Association argued that it was a threat to the social health of the country. The National PTA sponsored forums on its effects. The National Citizens' Committee for Broadcasting identified advertisers with the violent content they sponsored.
In the summary of the Surgeon General's Report of 1971, the advisory committee called for investigation into previously unexplored areas of television's influence, such as its influence on prosocial behaviors and the study of its effects in the home environment rather than in the laboratory. The scientific community responded to this call with a huge outpouring of research. So much information was produced, over 3,000 titles, that Surgeon General Julius Richard suggested that a synthesis and evaluation of the literature be conducted by the NIMH. This project began in 1979 and was coordinated by David Pearl of NIMH. This report consisted only of reviews of the existing literature and its focus was much broader than that of the 1971 Surgeon General's Report. The two-volume report, Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, was edited by Pearl, along with Lorraine Bouthilet and Joyce Lazar, also of NIMH.
In the 1970s there was more of an emphasis on field studies, in part because many researchers believed that links between violent programming and aggressive behavior had already been well established in the laboratory. Two field investigations conducted by J.L. Singer and D.G. Singer related children's viewing habits at home with their behavior during free-play periods at day-care centers (Television Imagination and Aggression: A Study of Preschooler's Play, 1980). Those children who watched a lot of violent television at home tended to exhibit much more unwarranted aggression in free play. A field study by E.D. McCarthy and his associates showed that watching television violence is related to fights with peers, conflict with parents and delinquency ("Violence and Behavior Disorders," Journal of Communication, 1975). L.D. Eron and L.R. Huesmann found a significant positive relationship between viewing television violence and aggressive behavior in both boys and girls in the United States, Finland and Poland ("Adolescent Aggression and Television," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1980). This study was especially significant, because in earlier research the relationship had only been found for boys.
Not all of the research reviewed supported the causal relationship between television violence and aggressive behavior. One significant study that did not was conducted by J. Ronald Milavsky and his associates (Milavsky, Ronald Kessler, Horst Still and William S. Rubens, "Television and Aggression: Results of a Panel Study"). They did not disagree that viewing television violence is associated with short-term aggressive behavior, but they did argue that their findings disputed the contention that a long-term, cumulative relationship exists.
Some still doubted that the existence of a link between viewing violence and aggressive behavior could be shown. Nevertheless, many scientists argued that researchers should move beyond the accumulation of further evidence establishing a link, and instead shift the focus to the processes that are responsible for this relationship. Therefore, researchers were urged to develop theories that explain why and how that relationship exists.
Observational learning theory, which deals with the imitation of an observed model, was tested in field studies and expanded, and was linked to other factors, such as age. Some researchers attempted to link observational learning with how the brain learns and stores information (cognitive-processing psychology). They showed how certain aggressive behaviors may be learned and stored in the brain for future reference. For example, a young viewer watches a violent television episode. Later in life, when a situation arises similar to the one seen on television, the young viewer may retrieve and perform the violent act once viewed. One study analyzed cases in which youths apparently imitated criminal acts they had viewed on television (C.W. Turner and M.R. Fern, "Effects of White Noise and Memory Cues on Verbal Aggression," presented at meetings of the International Society for Research on Aggression, 1978). In each case, specific visual cues that were present in the television portrayal were also present in the environment in which the criminal act was imitated.
Attitude change theory also received attention. Some of the research suggested that the more violent television a child watches, the more that child tends to have favorable attitudes toward aggressive behavior. This seemed to occur largely because viewers of much televised violence come to see violent behavior as normal. Some scientists contended that television violence leads to aggressive behavior by overstimulating children. In this regard, some research suggested that aggression can be stimulated by large amounts of action programming, even without a high level of violent content. Others claimed that children are anesthetized or desensitized by the same overloading process. One study showed that boys who watch a lot of violent television programming tend to exhibit less physiological arousal when shown new violent programs than do boys who regularly watch less violent fare (V.B. Cline, R.G. Croft, S. Courrier, "Desensitization of Children to Television Violence," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973).
There was some discussion of the catharsis theory which argues that viewing violent behavior serves to "release steam" and dissipate the need or desire to be aggressive. This theory predicts that watching violence on television will reduce aggressiveness. Some have argued that this explains the low levels of social violence in Japan, a country with a high level of media violence. But the Japanese case is probably better explained by cultural variables, and the relevance of catharsis theory is questionable. Since most studies point to an increase in aggressive behavior from viewing violence on television, the available data tend to contradict catharsis theory.
This is not an exhaustive review of the theories that explain the relationship between aggressive behavior and television violence. But these theories do indicate that researchers moved beyond trying to establish that a positive relationship exists to the matter of explaining why that relationship exists.
It was very significant that the NIMH report moved beyond the violence theme to deal with many other effects of television. Prosocial behavior was one area that received considerable attention. The report concluded that television portrayals of prosocial behavior, such as friendliness, cooperation, delay of gratification and generosity, can lead to similar behaviors in viewers. Both laboratory and field studies tended to confirm that observational learning applies to good behaviors on television as well as bad, suggesting television's power as an overall socializing force. An example of this prosocial modeling behavior, which was looked at by other studies beyond the NIMH report, related to the television industry's emphasis of showing people fastening their seat belts before driving. Evidence suggests this may have had an important effect on encouraging viewers to buckle up. The television industry has made similar strides in deglamorizing the use of cigarettes and alcohol.
Not only did the NIMH report expand the focus beyond the violence issue, it also shifted from examining short-term direct effects to long-term indirect effects. Television was presented as an educator, albeit an informal one, that helps construct the social reality in which we live. The following statement from the summary captures the report's overall conclusion:
Almost all evidence testifies to television's role as a formidable educator whose effects are both pervasive and cumulative. Television can no longer be considered as a casual part of daily life, as an electronic toy. Research findings have long since destroyed the illusion that television is merely innocuous entertainment. While the learning it provides is mainly incidental, rather than direct and formal, it is a significant part of the total acculturation process.
Despite the healthy redirection of energy, the popular media uniformly focused on the single conclusion that children who watch violence on television might be influenced to behave aggressively. (For a more thorough review of the television-effects literature see Lowery and DeFleur's Milestones in Mass Communication Research, 1995, upon which much of the above discussion is based.)
Although research has continued over the past decade, the overall conclusions have changed little. While skeptics remain, most social scientists find the evidence from so many studies compelling. Taken together, the many different studies point to a statistically significant connection between watching violence on television and behaving aggressively. In 1992, the American Psychological Association issued a report entitled "Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society." The report concluded that: "The accumulated research clearly demonstrates a correlation between viewing violence and aggressive behavior. Children and adults who watch a large number of aggressive programs also tend to hold attitudes and values that favor the use of violence."
Some researchers have gone so far as to assign a numerical value to the connection between violence on television and violence in the real world. Leonard Eron has stated that 10% of societal violence is attributable to exposure to violent media images.
The accumulated scientific evidence is compelling, but the complex relationship between violence on television and violence in the real world must not be oversimplified. Many of the nuances, qualifications and complexities of the research have, out of necessity, been omitted from the foregoing discussion. Scientific evidence strongly suggests that there is a link between violence on television and that in the real world. The degree and nature of that link is not so clear. More of the possible effects are known than the probable effects. It is known that television does not have simple, direct stimulus-response effects on its audiences. It is further known that the way television affects people is influenced by many other factors, including: habits, interests, attitudes and prior knowledge; how individuals and our institutions use television; and the socio-cultural environment in which the communication occurs. As television has a different impact on different types of cultures, the same television program has different effects on different people. When the impact of television is discussed or when television is blamed for having caused something to happen, it should never be suggested that television alone is a sufficient cause. Anything as complex as human behavior is not shaped by a single factor. Each behavior is caused by a large set of factors. In different individuals, the same behavior might well be caused by different factors. Given these difficulties, the precise influences of television are very hard to determine.
There are others who believe that focusing on whether media violence directly causes social violence is a mistake. These critics argue that long-term indirect effects are of more importance. They believe that the accumulated perceptions and attitudes acquired from watching violent television content in the long run are of greater significance. For example, George Gerbner, contends that the wrong question is being asked. "The contribution of television to the committing of violence is relatively minor, maybe 5%. Whereas the contribution of television to the perception of violence is much higher. People are almost paralyzed by fear" (The New York Times, December 14, 1994). Gerbner argues that frequent television viewers tend to suffer from the "mean world syndrome." They are more likely to overestimate the amount of violence that is actually in the world than those who watch less television. They are more likely to believe the crime rate is rising, whether it actually is or not. They are also more likely to believe that their neighborhood is unsafe and that they might encounter violence there. With these fears, they are more likely to take self-protective measures, such as purchasing and carrying a gun.
Though our study seeks to address the problem of television violence, it also acknowledges the very real danger of making television into a scapegoat for violence in America. A focus on television violence must not divert attention from deadlier and more significant causes: inadequate parenting, drugs, underclass rage, unemployment and availability of weaponry. Compared to problems of this magnitude, television is a tempting target simply because it is so easy to attack. Television's role in contributing to violence in America must be kept in perspective. It will take much more than sanitizing the television schedule to begin to deal with the problem of violence in America.
Although we have been reviewing the scientific literature on the effects of television violence, this report is not an effects study. The public is concerned about media effects and it is important to know what science says about these matters. The effects research serves as important background information for our study. We acknowledge that television violence is a potential danger. If it were not, we would never have been asked to conduct this study. But our effort is a content analysis of television, with a focus on programing which may raise concerns with regard to violence. We make no attempt to draw inferences about the behavior of audience members based on the content of the programs.
To a significant extent, our contextual examination builds on the qualitative analyses conducted by Gerbner and his associates beginning in the late 1960s. Specifically, we expanded upon the idea of delineating the qualitative world of television violence using a detailed contextual analysis of every scene of violence on a program. Every scene is subjected to a whole panoply of contextual criteria as will be described. Ours is probably the most thorough application of a qualitative contextual analysis of violence on television to date.
For over a century, the issue of violence in the media has been a prominent area of concern for government officials, academics and the general public. Research has been conducted and conferences convened, but the issue remains as contentious as ever.
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