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Once a week, the monitors and the entire staff met in the monitoring room to examine the programs that had been reviewed. After the first four months, we had reporters, writers, producers, television executives, academics, members of advocacy groups and others as guest observers. Although these meetings often lasted more than four hours, everyone involved felt they were a fascinating and invaluable part of the process.
The highly trained students were an important part of the project. At no time, however, did they have any control over decisions about, or definitions of, violence. They were trained to include all types of violence in their sheets. Using a very broad definition of violence, we asked students to fill out a scene sheet for any act of violence falling within that definition. At the meetings a student would sit at a monitor and say something like the following:
I watched NBC on Sunday night. The first program I examined was Earth2, which contained four acts of violence. The most intense was the second scene, which aired at 7:16 p.m. It involved the lead character shooting a ray gun at an aggressive alien.
The monitor would offer more detail setting the context. Members of the group would ask questions such as:
After a short discussion, the monitor would show the scene to those at the meeting. Sometimes it would be watched several times. Then more questioning would ensue. The purpose of the meeting was to ultimately decide whether or not the program raised concerns about television violence (discussed in the next section). Nothing could be declared a problem without a direct ruling from the director of the Center. In many instances, the senior staff of the Center decided to review the entire program themselves.
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