Television and Media Essay - TV, Violence, and Censorship

Fortunately, government officials and television networks have taken steps to limit the amount of violence on TV. They too have recognized the direct link between television viewing and violence. In this paper I’m going to go ... ... middle of paper ... ...eased levels of violence on television they develop sort of a mean world syndrome. This leads the children to perceive the world as much more cruel and sinister than it really is. Many children might grow up being afraid of the world because of the violence that they see in the many hours that they spend watching television.

Consumer advocates clamor against the deceptive marketing of children's toys. In Washington, D. C., politicians anxiously express their regrets, then turn to more pressing business (Landesman, 1995). This paper intends to address the behavioral effects that violent television has on children. Violence and television have been the subject of numerous controversial studies for the past thirty years. The most persistent questions have concerned aggressive, anti-social, or delinquent behavior and their link, if any, to violent television entertainment (Paik & Comstock, 1994).

Through means of mass media, mostly television, violence is reaching Americas youth and turning our culture into a violent hungry society. Television has great influence on children. It opens their eyes to the world and violence on TV has a devastating effect that continues throughout their adulthood. Even though we can’t blame all of our flaws and problems on the media we should at least focus and fix this problem before too much harm is done.

What is fiction and what is real? To an adolescent mind it is very hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Everyday they are exposed to violence, murder, and gore on the television. Television should be censored because it causes children to become desensitized to violence. The television has been around since the 1950’s but it wouldn’t be until the 1960’s that television violence began to become prevalent.

Many scientific studies have tried to prove that there is a link between violent behavior in real life situations and violence in the media, television being the main focus. These scientists believe that humans are desensitized through the violent fictions of the media. Since children, boys and girls under the age of thirteen, are more likely to be consumed by the false realities of media, they are at a higher risk of committing violent acts on others. With many new inventions comes fear. This fear is caused by the unknown factors that the invention stands for.

Others say, and this is backed up with factual evidence, that violence that is seen on television, in the movies and in video games is directly linked to the violence in society. Either way, there is too much violence in the mass media and the outcome of this can in no way, shape or form be of a positive nature. Violence has become an ordinary way to be entertained, settle arguments, or blow off steam. Violence results when many different things come together, and we know that violence in the media is one of those things. Children spend more in a week time watching TV than doing anything else, other than sleeping.

However, how would this revamping of ratings occur? This seems overly ambitious and hard to achieve. “Violence and Suffering in Television News: Toward a Broader Conception of Harmful Television Content for Children” and “Report of the Media Violence Commission” both showed the possible effects violence has on children and adults alike. Children react emotionally and imitatively to violence on television news, and adults react aggressively to being frequently exposed to violence. The effects of violence can vary from person to person; there will be no certain way a person will behave based on what they see, because every person is different.

It affects to children’s psychology which is not formed yet. Additionally in mass media, in any type of it, there is a presence of racism, drugs, sex and issues that stimulates the degradation of ethics. Violence in TV screen, video game, song, movie and others turns to violent behaviour in real life. There are many theories of how and when impact of mass media violence is seen and occur. The problem of violence in mass media took place from the early past.

Our culture has been terrorized by violence too long, and it has to be restrained from our children. Violence in Television has recently become the main focus for many parents of young children. Due to so much of the violence, television stations are now forced to put certian ratings on TV programs. At first many stations were hesitant to put this system on their stations, but now it is located on every station. Many parents state that acts of violence are committed by many teens today due to them watching too much violence on television.

Television violence and its effects on viewers has been a controversial issue for many years. Some viewers believe that there is an increasingly large amount of violence on television and this widespread public concern has "led to calls for stricter controls on the depiction of violence in programmes" (Gunter and McAleer 1990:92). Exactly how much violence is there on television though? Many cultivation theorists have studied this, acquiring data in the form of content analysis. They agree on a definition of a violent act, for example Gerbner in his study used the definition, "an overt expression of physical force against self or other, compelling action against ones will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing" (Gunter and McAleer 1990:94).