Essay on Violence On The Tube

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Violence on the Tube

Matt Chisholm

Jeb Beck

English 110

Dec. 13, 1996

One Saturday morning many years ago, I was watching an episode of the ‘

Roadrunner' on television. As Wile E. Coyote was pushed off of a cliff by the

Roadrunner for the fourth or fifth time, I started laughing uncontrollably. I

then watched a ‘Bugs Bunny' show and started laughing whenever I saw Elmer Fudd

shoot Daffy Duck and his bill went twirling around his head. The next day, I

pushed my brother off of a cliff and shot my dog to see if its head would twirl

around.

Obviously, that last sentence is not true. Some people believe that

violence on the tube is one of the main factors that leads to real-life violence,

but in my opinion, television is just a minor factor that leads to real-life

violence and that it is the parents responsibility to teach kids the difference.

According to Rathus in Psychology in the New Millennium, observational

learning may account for most human learning (239). Observational learning

extends to observing parents and peers, classroom learning, reading books, and

learning from media such as television and films. Nearly all of us have been

exposed to television, videotapes, and films in the classroom. Children in day-

care centers often watch Sesame Street. There are filmed and videotaped

versions of great works of literature such as Orson Welles' Macbeth. Nearly

every school shows films of laboratory experiments.

But what of our viewing outside of the classroom? Television is also

one of our major sources of informal observational learning. According to Sweet

and Singh, viewing habits range from the child who watches no television at all

to the child who is in front of the television nearly all waking hours. They

say that on average, children aged 2 to 11 watch about 23 hours of television

per week, and teenagers watch about 22 hours per week (2). According to these

figures, children spend less time in the classroom than they do watching

television. During these hours of

viewing, children are constantly being shown acts of violence.

Why? Simple: violence sells.

People are drawn to violence in films, television dramas, books,

professional wrestling and boxing, and reports of crime and warfare. Does

violence do more than sell, however? Do media portrayals of violence beget

violence in the streets and in the home?

It seems clear enough that there are connections between violence in the

media and real violence. In the 1990's, for example, audiences at films about

violent urban youth such as Colors, Boyz N the Hood, and Juice have gotten into

fights, shot one another, and gone on rampages after the showings. The MTV

cartoon characters, Beavis and Butt-head, who comment on rock videos and burn

and destroy things, may have been connected with the death of a 2-year-old and a

burned room in Ohio. The victims 5-year-old brother, who set the blaze that

killed the 2-year-old, had begun playing with fire after he observed Beavis and

Butt-head to say that fire is fun. A few more examples are shown on the picture

to the left (Leland 47). Obviously, these are just a few isolated incidents.

If everyone acted this way after watching violence then we would really have a

problem.

Children are routinely exposed to murders, beatings, and sexual assaults

just by turning on the television set. The public is wary of it, of course.

Psychologists, educators, and parent groups have raised many questions about the

effects of media violence. For example, does media violence cause real

violence? If there are causal connections between media violence and real

violence, what can parents and educators do to prevent the fictional from

spilling over into the real world?

Media violence affects children through observational learning,

disinhibition, increasing arousal and priming aggressive thoughts, and

desensitization. The Mean World Syndrome, which suggests that children who

watch a lot of violence on television may begin to believe that the world is as

mean and dangerous in real life as it appears on television, and hence, they

begin to view the world as a much more mean and dangerous place, is another way

in which media violence affects children (Murray 9).

Children learn from observing the behavior of their parents and other

adults. Television violence supplies models of aggressive “skills.”

Acquisition of these skills, in turn, enhances...