Violence On Television Essay

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To find a realistic and logical answer to this question I felt it important to begin at the beginning. I wanted to know if this is a legitimate problem, or if this was another politically correct way of blaming television for a societal problem. So, on this journey I began with the introduction of television to the public.

The official starting date for television in the United States was in 1939, at the World's Fair. At the time of the debut, there were mixed reactions to television because it was a little green screen with a constant flicker. One observer, and social critic, who captured this divergent view was E. B. White, who wrote in Harper's magazine in 1938: "I believe that television is going to be the test of the modern world, and in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our own vision, we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television, of that I am sure" (White, 1938, cited in Boyer, 1991, p. 79). While this quote seems perceptive, it is not concrete evidence that anything negative will happen as a result of the invention of television.

I feel it also important to note how many people owned televisions at different periods of time. This would give me an idea of how many people could be affected by television, if, indeed, they were affected at all. This would also give me an idea of the scope of how widespread the effects of television could be. The first broadcasting stations were licensed in 1941, but broadcasting as we think of it now did not take shape until the late 1940's. Despite the slow start, it took off and diffused throughout the United States in ways that no other invention ever created to date has so diffused. In 1949, only 2% of American households owned television, by 1955 that number increased to 64%, and by the mid 1960's, 93% of American households owned a television set. Today, there are very few people (only 2%) who do not have television (Andreasen, 1990).

My next goal was to find out when experts started watching for the effects television was having on society, and the results of this monitoring. I searched the Internet and found that the TV violence concern made its official debut in 1952 with the first of a series of congressional hearings. That particular hearing was held in the House of Representatives before the Commerce Committee (United States Congress, 1952). The following year, in 1953, the first major Senate hearing was held before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, then headed by Senator Estes Kefauver, who convened a panel to inquire into the impact of television violence on juvenile delinquency (United States Congress, 1955a; 1955b). Senator Kefauver established the model hearing by inviting several panels of experts or interested parties to discuss TV violence. In one of the early hearings, a developmental psychologist, Eleanor Maccoby, who was -- and is still -- a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, and Paul Lazarsfeld, who was a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, testified on the effects of television violence. Both of those social scientists noted that, while information was scarce on the impact of television (because social scientists were not studying that issue), they did know something about the way films influence children and they could make some suggestions about television. This early testimony initiated a series of congressional hearings on television violence and set a pattern for congressional hearings that have been held to this date.

Back in the mid 1960's, Senator John Pastore from Rhode Island, who was chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, held another hearing. This hearing differed slightly from any of the prior hearings because Senator Pastore included more than the usual parents, teachers, social scientists, and network executives that had been used in the past. He added a wrinkle by inviting the Surgeon General of the United States to attend the hearing. When the Surgeon General was asked to make some comments on what had been presented at the hearing, he responded by placing the TV violence controversy in the same context as the smoking and lung cancer controversy -- a public health context. That was the first time that TV violence had ever been framed as a public health issue. A 12-member panel was appointed with social scientists, professionals in psychiatry and child development, political scientists, and two representatives of the industry. The resulting report, released in 1972, concluded that violence on television does influence children who view that programming and does increase the likelihood that they will become more aggressive. Not all children are affected in the same way, but there is evidence that TV violence can be harmful to young viewers (Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, 1972; Murray, 1973). In essence, life was imitating art, rather than art imitating life.

Since this report was from the 1970 s, I wanted to see how this idea changed over the past 15 years. The next landmark report was the 1982 study from the National Institute of Mental Health (1982). This review was a ten-year follow-up to the Surgeon General's report. The conclusion of this report was that with 10 years of more research, more is known about the violence on television and how it affects the behavior of children, and adults for that matter, and that there are many more reasons for concern about violence on television. "The research question has moved from asking whether or not there is an effect to seeking explanations for that effect" (National Institute of Mental Health, 1982, p. 6)....

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