FREE ESSAY ON VIOLENCE AND TELEVISION

VIOLENCE AND TELEVISION

Violence and Television
Boink! Boom! Crack! The sounds of the fight scene rage on. Many have fallen in this
particularly bloody battle. The good guys have taken their losses but struggle on to what
is seemingly a victory. Their aggression is fierce and helps them. 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 flying around, hand-to-hand combat would have got the
better of them. It was a classic battle 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 the hopes of
recruiting a mature audience. But it is not. In fact, it is just another Saturday-morning
special of GI Joe, "The Real American Hero," that I watched 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 the gang would handle the likes of King Cobra and his
cronies. GI Joe's early morning time slot encouraged kids, like us, to tune in every
weekend. While eating 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 than
enough to fill the appetite. The truth is, violence on television is on every single day.
It takes its toll on society, especially children. The damage done by violence on
television is detrimental and confirmed by statistics, case studies, and personal
experiences.
Fistfights, shootouts, car crashes, rapes... Take your pick. Violence is everywhere on
television, sometimes gory 
and gruesome, other times clean and remote. It is not just the Saturday morning cartoons;
clips from action-adventure series, the nightly news and MTV are interwoven with violence
and extremely mature content. Prime-time programs can average 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 identification with the aggressor; domination and submission, to
them, are often equated with pleasure and worth. Yet numerous researchers have put much
time into discovering why children are so attached by the television and the action that
takes place within it. They prove that it is definitely a major source of violent
behavior in children. Their research proves time and time again that aggression and
television viewing do go hand in hand. The truth about television violence and children
has been shown. Many people and critics try to ignore it and hope that it 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 be life-long. 
The effects of the television are first visible even at the most basic level of life,
children and adolescents. The modern-day extent of viewing by humans, especially
Americans, is astronomical. Children begin to watch television at very early ages, often
when they are newborns. At this time they are obviously not able to follow along or be
influenced by it, but they are subjected to it nevertheless. This early start will lead
most childhood viewers into a cult-like trance by the time they reach the age of three.
In between breakfast and lunch, playtime and naptime, class and dinner, all children find
a way to watch the tube. The typical American household has the television set on for
more than seven hours each day and children ages two to eleven spend an average of
twenty-eight hours per week viewing (Murray, 1996, p. 1). Some research has also
estimated that by the time a child or teen of today's generation reaches the age of
seventy, he will have spent nearly seven years of his life watching television. That is
nearly ten percent of one's life lives watching television. That is insane; to say that
you and I will spend years upon years, watching television. There is so much that people,
even we, could do in a seven-year period. Entire wars can be fought in seven years,
college educations can be attained, millions of people will be born and millions will
die, many things 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 the fact that
that one thing is watching television, is very, very unfortunate.
The television, as said before, is a very influential object. Being worse for children,
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 hypnotic powers of the television. This is
not to say that it cannot happen, but studies show that most people are fairly set in
their ways, especially mentally, once they reach adulthood and it takes a lot for them to
be affected. Children, on the other hand, are prime candidates to the influences of the
television. They are the most avid viewers and the most vulnerable. It is here where most
violent tendencies, if any, are fostered. With the addition of cable television to
broadcast television, a recent survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs
identified 1,846 violent scenes broadcast and cablecast between 6 a.m. to midnight on one
day in Washington, D.C. The most violent periods were between 6 to 9 a.m. with 497
violent scenes (165.7 per hour) and between 2 to 5 p.m. with 609 violent scenes (203 per
hour) (Murray, 1996, p. 2). This statistic probably seems quite outrageous, but it is
true and there are numbers even higher than that on given days. 
Two hundred violent scenes per hour are gaudy numbers, yet the even more baffling but
more concealed truism is the time slots of these major occurrences. The times: 6 to 9
a.m. and 2 to 5 p.m. are the most popular times for child and adolescent viewers. These
are the times in the morning when young children will watch most avidly and in the
afternoon after school when school-aged children are most attentive to it. This just goes
to show that the children, already established as the most vulnerable, are also the ones
subjected to the most violent scenes. This is a bad combination and it stimulates bad
tendencies and violence in the children.
Now that the extent to which the television is being watched has been established, and
with some idea of just how much violence there is on an average day, it is time to look
at an even more telling tale. Yes, we said that children may be subjected to more than
six hundred acts of violence in a three-hour time period, but who's to say that these
acts are in any way severe? Well, the truth is that while many acts are subtle in their
appearance, they still have an overwhelming effect over time. This is not to mention the
fact that the major acts of violence add up as well. By the time a child of today's world
reaches the age of eighteen he will have witnessed over 8,000 simulated murders on the
television. That is an average of 1.22 murders per day, counted from birth. What you see
here is a repetitive bombardment of violence and violent material upon children. Seeing
this every day gives it the same effect as eating, or sleeping; it's nearly habitual,
which is a truly sad state of affairs. Getting into a habit of seeing murders and
violence on television, is an obvious sign that should lead us to believe that it will
influence children in a negative way.
Numbers are easily crunched and manipulated by both sides of the argument. I see that
there are quite a few numbers involved here in the argument. They are mostly in favor of
violence being a bad influence, making these facts hard to ignore. Especially when they
are as blatant and obvious as they appear. Statistics, when used responsibly, are perhaps
some of the best insights we have into helping us discover problems and their solutions.
As helpful as they may be, there are still other kinds of information even as persuasive
as statistics. What I have to show now are case studies. There have been numerous case
studies performed over the past few decades involving children and television. I can
throw out statistics all day at people in the hopes that they will see that violence on
television is bad. While it is effective, my argument is much like any claim a scientist
would make: it is not truly valid until tested. With this in mind, we see testing the
real influence of violence on television shows that it is dangerously harmful. For an
example, there is a case of a study done by a group Stein and Friedrich for the Surgeon
General's project in 1972 (Murray, 1996, p. 3). Their study consisted of taking 97
preschool children and exposing one third 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 the final third were exposed to neutral programming (neither
antisocial or pro-social). These children watched over twelve half-hour episodes of their
respective programs over a four-week period. They were then observed in their classroom
and playroom environments. The psychologists running the study found that the children
who watched the Batman and Superman cartoons were remarkably aggressive and not very apt
to share and interact. While on the other hand, the children who watched Mr. Roger's
Neighborhood were more social, and more likely to share and interact. The middle third
remained close to the same as they were before. There are many more studies just like
this previous one, and all of them lead to the same conclusion: violent television does
foster more aggressive and violent behavior in children. 
It feels like just yesterday that I was sitting down to watch my Saturday morning
cartoons on my family room television. Every Saturday was like clockwork for me. I would
always eat my cereal and toast and then watch my GI Joe and Transformers. I was so in
love with GI Joe, I can remember always wanting to re-enact the scenes with my plastic
toy soldiers. Explosions, death, and carnage were my rations on Saturday and I loved
every minute of it. In fact, although this is embarrassing, I still remember to this day
getting in trouble at pre-school for hitting a classmate who took a toy away from a
friend of mine. Why? You might ask. Well, it was because I saw on GI Joe that your
supposed to stick up for your friends and protect 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 for my violent actions. I received timeout for the rest of the day.
This may seem a little preposterous, or maybe even dumb. Regardless, the truth is that GI
Joe partly formed my identity as a young child and the only reason I was able to later
tell the right from wrong was because I had parents to tell me. My parents would often
try to sit with me and watch a few shows, not for just their pleasure but rather to tell
me what was fake and not to be repeated. Many children go without the parental
supervision when watching television, and it leads to a lack of knowledge from
determining right from wrong. They eventually forget the real and the fantasy, the
violent and the non-violent. Now do not get me wrong, there are measures that prove and a
few studies that show that with proper supervision children will not be affected by
television violence. 
Case studies are out now that show children being unaffected by television violence as a
whole. I previously mentioned a study done for a Surgeon General's Project, which
acknowledged an existence of non-violent cases. When I read this information, I thought
to myself, "that's awesome, if children are not really affected by the television." Only,
I found but one or two instances of these reports meaning that they were few and very far
between. Leading me to conclude that it was merely wishful thinking to be able to reverse
my study and maybe argue from the other side.
The amount of studies showing that violence is a factor in the lives of children is just
too large in number to even compare the reports that oppose it. To be honest, I have only
shared a few statistics and studies with you. I could have rattled off a thousand; it is
just not necessary though. I believe that you can agree with me when I say that violence
on television is detrimental to the lives of children and that it has a bad influence
upon them. You should agree with me, and if you do not, well I can not wait to hear about
your child in the police blotter.
Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.Bajpai, S., & Unnikrishnan, N. (1996). The Impact of Television Advertising on
Children. London: Sage Publications.
2.Murray, John P. (1996) Impact of Televised Violence [Online]. Available via Kansas
State University: