Remote Controlled: Part Two

Children and T.V.:<BR> Blood and Guts: Violence on Television

By Leonard Jason

It's a curious twist of logic. On the news, on the street, and at the funerals we abhor the pain and agony that violence brings. Yet on television and in the movies, we can't seem it to get enough to satisfy our cravings. Leave it to the great psychological minds of the world to sort out this strange dichotomy; meanwhile, the television industry is getting rich off our secret penchant for blood and guts.

This appetite for televised violence--and Hollywood's eagerness to indulge it--has stirred up what is surely the most controversial television debate of all. It is hardly one that we will settle here, for it involves issues that are themselves impossible to settle: notions like freedom of speech, censorship, fear of crime and crime itself, divergent scientific views, divergent social views, governmental obligations, and the imprecise development of a child's brain, heart, mind, and conscience. Such complexity makes the going a bit bumpy. Still, there are some things that can be said with certainty.

We'll begin with the incontrovertible fact that a great many Americans are attracted to violence on television. And a great many of these Americans are children whose tender developmental stages make them most vulnerable to television's mean streak. It is a fascination that begins innocently enough. Toddlers giggle and grin as the hapless Wiley Coyote gets steamrolled flat as a pancake by Road Runner at every turn. Never fear, for he is always back in full, furious form at the end of the commercial break! A few years later they tune in to watch morphed teenagers and masked turtles, the adored vigilantes who karate chop and flip-flop their way to the moral high ground. Alas, the adoration is temporary, for growing children will self-consciously realize that these shows are made for kids. Never mind that the young viewers are still kids--peer pressure and simple curiosity propels them on. At the next level of television violence the gates of adult fare swing wide open: knife-wielding sadists in tacky horror films, fleeing crack sellers on Cops," fiery car explosions on "Walker, Texas Ranger," and stretchers bearing bloody victims on the 6 o'clock news.

These are the scenes our children dutifully watch again and again and again. The litany of statistics is familiar, though still astonishing. A recent five-year study by the American Psychological Association estimates that the average child has watched 100,000 acts of violence and 8,000 acts of murder by the time he or she leaves elementary school. By the end of high school, 200,000 acts of violence have flashed before most kids' eyes.

To be sure, scenes of violence vary greatly, ranging from a cartoon cat being blown to bits by Acme dynamite to the high psychological drama of a round of Russian roulette. Do both examples count as true TV violence? A team of researchers led by George Gerbner of the University of Pennsylvania subscribes to the following definition of violence: "The overt expression of physical force (with or without a weapon, against self or others) compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt and/or killed or threatened to be so victimized as a part of the plot."2 Importantly, their standard does not omit violence occurring in an accidental, natural, humorous, or fantasy context, landing the cartoon cat and the Russian roulette in the very same category.

Using this broad definition, the research team conducted a nearly two-decade-long project analyzing the violence content of network television. Through the use of a "Violence Index," the researchers found that the frequency and patterns of violence remained remarkably stable over the past two decades. In the last year of the project, 1979, they found that 70% of all prime-time programs contained violence. Nearly 54% of all leading characters were involved in the violence--men typically as its perpetrators and women, particularly non-white and older women, as its most frequent victims. Shifting to children's weekend and daytime television, the team determined that over 90% of the programs contained violence, with nearly 75% of its leading characters inflicting or suffering it.3 More recently, in 1992 the American Psychological Association reported that violent incidents occur five to six times an hour on prime time television and 20 to 25 times an hour on children's Saturday morning cartoons.

While the incidence of TV violence may have remained fairly stable over the years, the nature of that violence has not. Early westerns featuring dueling white and black hats seem refreshingly tame compared to today's fare. Violence has since become more mean, more realistic, more random, and more sophisticated. The weaponry seen on TV is highly advanced and highly visible, with characters flashing Uzis and M-60 machine guns with practiced regularity. The use of psychological violence on television has also increased. Hostage situations, terrorist campaigns, and psycho-killers are familiar plot elements in many of today's action shows and movies; most programs are also boosted by a liberal dose of verbal and emotional abuse. And finally, the hats have fallen off the good guys and bad guys, allowing their characters to take on more and more moral ambiguity. While real people have never been as flat and predictable as television often portrayed them, TV characters are now swinging to the other extreme. Perhaps spurred on a number of disillusioning news stories in recent years, television has responded with its own version of the human condition. There is now a plethora of "bad cops" roaming the TV streets, menacing both criminals and innocents alike. The thugs, on the other hand, have been infused with a strong measure of humanity and humor, further complicating questions of guilt and culpability. This shift in characterization is not a problem per se, for humans are complex creatures. Children, however, tend to see things in black and white, and those kids who routinely observe such heavily shaded characters may struggle with the issues of trust, integrity, and fear.

Advances in electronic technology have also changed the face of violence. Cable and video options, for example, permit a highly flexible viewing schedule. In TV's pre-cable days, the dedicated viewer had to fight off yawns and sleepy eyes to watch scary stuff on the late, late show. Concerned parents could in part monitor their children's violence intake by simply declaring an early bedtime. Today that approach is not nearly so effective as kids have 'round-the-clock, every-day-of-the-week access to gunshots and gore. This problem of access is exacerbated by the fact that cable programs and video movie selections enable children to see violence far more graphic than that allowed by network television. Whereas violence might once have been suggested by a menacing shadow, today it is shown in its full Technicolor glory. Blood squirts, eyeballs dangle, knives meet flesh, and skulls shatter in slow motion. The unspeakable stuff of nightmares is now played on the small screen over and over again.