Media Violence: A Contrary View

I'm currently doing a review of the literature on TV violence, and it is enormously frustrating. All the meta-analyses insist that there is a widespread and definite consensus on the connection between televised depictions of violence and violence in society, that images of murders and deaths leads to actual murders and deaths. But then when you look at the evidence being used to conclude that, the proof simply isn't there. What it proves is that when you watch isolated examples of media violence, for a short time afterwards you are more likely to act more agressively than you would have otherwise. But being more agressive is a long, long way away from violent crime, and no one's worried about TV violence causing more shoving.

The typical study used to prove the connection goes something like this: you do an experiment where you get two groups of kids and you show one group some violent scenes and the other some non-violent scenes, then you let them play together and see how they act. And yes, it's been pretty well proven that the kids who saw the violent clips will act more agressively. But they are not going out and murdering people. Certainly we can all see that acting more agressively could conceivably eventually lead to being more murderous, but if all you can prove is that seeing Batman cartoons makes kids pushier, it would take a whole hell of a lot of cartoons to get them to the point where they're knife-wielding maniacs.

Showing that televised violence causes short-term aggression doesn't show that TV violence actually results in an increase in violent crime. The few studies I've seen that do attempt to prove this are highly problematic.[1] For instance:

According to Centerwall, prior to television's emergence in the United States, the national homicide rate was 3 per 100,000. By 1974, the homicide rate had doubled. Centerwall agues that this increase is directly linked to massive exposure to television throughout the culture.

Now, those of you not making your living as media-violence researchers can probably already see a few problems with this claim, mainly having to do with other changes besides the invention of TV in that period, like increased urbanization, changes in firearm technology, drugs, etc. But what makes me actively angry is that the statistic he's quoting is not true.

Take a look at this graph of the national homicide rate since 1900 and see if you notice anything:



Centerwall is not only picking two data points extremely convenient to his argument (the little valley around 1942 and the spike around 1972), but the ones outside his cherry-picked range directly contradict his hypothesis. In the 30s, prior to the introduction of TV, the homicide rate was at the highest level it would hit until the 70s, and in the 10 years following the introduction of TV, the homicide rate hit--and maintained--the lowest level since 1910. If Centerwall was looking at this same graph, and presumably he was, he was doing something awfully close to lying.

Plus, though Centerwall couldn't have known about it since he was writing in 1989, the current homicide rate is pretty darn close to the homicide rate when TV came around. This is something you'd think today's supporters of media violence effects would have to explain if they want to continue to insist that media violence causes violence in society. Or has TV itself gotten less violent? The beginning of the current decline seems to roughly coincide with the premiere of The Sopranos, and so by that evidence, extreme media violence has actually served to lessen violent crime.

The counter to these sorts of points is that there is no way to experimentally prove that TV violence leads to homicides, since for practical and ethical reasons you can't do it. After all, how would you? Force someone to watch so much violent TV that they eventually snapped and killed someone? Following around enough people--and, judging by the above graph, enough people would be around 50,000--to find one that actually committed murder so we could analyze their TV-watching habits?

But it seems to me that if you can't prove that media violence leads to violent crime, then you can't say that media violence leads to violent crime. And people, even well-informed people, do. Here, for instance, is a quote from an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

[T]he epidemiological evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.

Certainly we can all agree that excessive exposure to violent imagery is probably not the best thing, and children should probably be kept away from violent TV shows to whatever extent is practical. But even leaving aside the many other objections to TV violence research--that it confuses the existence of violence in the mass media with people's actual viewing of violence in the mass media, that people generally don't watch only violent programming or only the violent bits of programming when watching TV, that agression is not violence, and is certainly not violent crime--the fact that the agreed-upon findings (i.e. that exposure to TV violence leads to short-term agressive behavior) cannot be linked to any actual increase in violent crime, except by willfully misinterpreting statistics, shows that no responsible person should be making such outrageous and inflammatory claims. And, clearly, no one should be claiming that there is a consensus that media violence leads to real violence; if it exists, it is a false one, and I think to anyone concerned with responsible scholarship, it is a troubling one.

[1] Inside-baseball qualification: I'm ignoring Gerbner's cultivation theory here, because to me it seems to argue not for violent crime as a media effect, but for fearfulness or acceptance of consumerism. Lord knows I could be wrong though.

Labels: media studies, theory, TV, violence

posted by Mike B. @ 3:14 PM