Television Violence

8 Pages 2062 Words

t disappeared as the public increasingly treats teenagers as a robot-like population under sway of an exploitative media. White House officials lecture film, music, Internet, fashion, and pop-culture tycoons and accuse them of programming kids to smoke, drink shoot up, have sex, and kill.
A recent report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pooled evidence from over 2,500 studies within the last decade. The studies were done on over 100,000 subjects from several nations. The compiled evidence of the media’s influence on behavior is so “overwhelming” that there is a consensus in the research community that “violence in the media does lead to aggressive behavior” (Methvin 49). Given that the majority of scientific community agrees that “the research findings of the NIMH publication support conclusion of a causal relationship between television violence and publication aggressive behavior (Wurtzel 21), why is it that “the Saturday morning cartoons” are the most violent time slot on television?” (Methvin 49) “Despite slight variations over the past decade, the amount of violence in the media has remained at consistently high levels” (Wurtzel 23).
Despite the negative effects media violence has been known to generate, no drastic changes have been made to deal with this problem that seems to be getting worse. We, as a whole, have glorified this violence so much that movies like “Natural Born Killers” and television shows such as “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” are viewed as normal, everyday entertainment. It is even rare now to find a children’s cartoon that does not depict some type of violence or comedic aggression.
It is the aggression that is rubbing off on our society, and it is this aggression that we are trying to hide. Why is it that, like the tobacco companies twenty years ago, the pre...