When Attorney General Janet Reno appeared before Congress to urge that the media do something about its portrayal of violence - or else - she brought back on stage all the tired players in a morality play that has been going on for decades now: Politicians on horseback riding in to save the town from the young guns of television; academics who don't like any medium newer than the book citing grave evidence about the baneful impact of television; and the television network executives themselves, more flattered in the end than horrified that such importance could be imputed to their work.
People with common sense and their eyes on the future long ago walked out, but the play goes on, fueled by the audience's need to find a simple solution to the complex problem of violence in our world.
And what exactly is the evidence linking violence in the media to violence in the real world? Scholarly journals have served it up in two flavors:
One kind of study seeks to show that frustration in real life plus exposure to violence in the media evokes explosive behavior. In these studies, children in a classroom are randomly divided into four groups:
Group A is treated unfairly (marked wrong for correct answers on an exam, for example) and then shown a film with violence;
Group B is treated unfairly and then shown a film with no violence ("The eucalyptus tree of Australia is a favorite feeding ground for Koalas...");
Group C is treated fairly and shown the violent film; and
Group D, lucky devils, is treated fairly and shown the non-violent film.
The kids in all four groups are then given some version of a "violence-profile exam" ("If someone bumps into you in the hall, do you [a] say 'excuse me,' [b] run away, [c] let it slide, or [d] haul off and punch the jerk?"). The results of these kinds of exams - lo and behold - show that those in Group A - frus-trated and exposed to media violence - indeed choose the "punch" option more frequently. The link between violence in media and real life has apparently been proven.
Not really. All that has been demonstrated is that frustrated kids exposed to media violence choose a violent response on a paper-and-pencil exam - in other words, media violence selects for media violence.
As long as the jerk being punched out is reflected on paper, instead of sitting next to the puncher, no connection between violent film and acting out its message in the off-screen world has been shown.
So researchers have trotted out a second kind of study, in which parents are asked to keep a careful record of television programs watched by their kids, and the number of real-life fights and violent episodes the kids get involved in.
A panel of experts (ah, the ubiquitous experts) then rates the TV programs for their violence content - how many times fists fly and guns blaze in the show - and a correlation is worked up between TV viewing and real-life behavior. The result: Those who watch programs with the highest violence content are indeed most likely to have the highest number of violent interludes in real life. The link between violence in the media and real life has once again been apparently proven.
Er, no - not really. Because correlation does not indicate causation in one direction over the other: The kids in this study might be for whatever reason violence-prone, and this propensity expresses itself not only in real-life violence but in their choice of TV shows.
Correlation need not indicate causation at all, as the infamous statistical parallel between sunspots and stock-market activity vividly shows.
But if the scholarly evidence is faulty, what then of real incidents in which lying down in the street and setting a house on fire mimicked recently viewed media presentations on the same themes? No doubt that media can put ideas in people's heads, especially children's, but the implementation of such ideas requires a specific dysfunctional set of circumstances in the real world.
A little kid setting his house on fire couldn't do so without his parents leaving him alone in the house with matches in easy reach. Such lack of parent supervision - in the child's real world activities, not viewing behavior - would sooner or later result in tragedy regardless of Beavis and Butt-head and their playing with fire on MTV. Similarly, anyone who would lie down in the street after seeing a similar stunt in a movie, anyone who could commit a violent act after seeing violence in the media, would sooner or later do the same - media or no.
Most of us behave neither violently nor self-destructively after exposure to media. And therein lies the worst danger of blaming the media for real-life violence. It is not that such blame may lead to censorship - though that is indeed a serious concern. It is rather that focus on the media distracts attention from the real-life problems that generate violence and self-destructive behavior - and these real-life circumstances need all the attention we can give them.
In the real world, one word or gesture from another person - even via a computer screen - is worth far more than a thousand passive, non-interactive pictures on a TV or a movie screen. The impulse to violence lies in ourselves, dear Brutus, not in our stars.
