By Philip Meyer, USA Today, December 15, 1998
Copyright USA Today Information Network
 

What product, when used as intended, causes premature death and needless disability? When I ask my journalism students, they are puzzled by the question. Why talk about tobacco in a course on media ethics?

But the hazard that should concern them comes from television, not tobacco. And the parallel with smoking as an unacknowledged health hazard is real.

When five teen-age boys in Burlington, Wis., were arrested last month for conspiring to kill school administrators and fellow students, police ruled out a variety of theories. The boys did not belong to a gang nor were they members of a satanic cult. There was no such sharply confined evil influence.

Instead, it is all around us like polluted air. And the media business, like the tobacco business, is in denial.

When causes are diffuse and slow acting, they are hard to recognize. If a specific young person copies a particular antisocial behavior seen on TV or in a movie, the link is clear. But what if young people everywhere are systematically taught that violence is an acceptable method of problem solving? A subtle but pervasive effect can reach the threshold of horror in the most benign locations, as in the Wisconsin town, without warning.

Among academics who study the TV-violence link, the effect isn't even controversial. Study after study has shown that television robs families, churches and schools of their ability to show the young how the world is supposed to work. TV and movies do the job now, and teach that violent solutions to everyday problems are fast, fun, and often unpunished. TV is the main culprit because it is routinely watched by young children.

George Gerbner of Temple University calls this "cultural pollution." Instead of having their values cultivated by stories and examples from parents and teachers, children are turned over to the TV set for babysitting. The statistical link between TV and violent actions is found at every level: in studies that follow individuals and those that follow nations.

The tobacco firms, long in denial about the connection between smoking and cancer, could claim no specific cancer-causing mechanism had been found. In the case of TV and violence, the mechanism is obvious.

Children watching television grow up confusing TV's world with the real one. Even as adults they carry a picture of the world inside their heads that remains closer to TV's version of reality than to actual reality.

And they grow up afraid. A nation of fearful adults is prone to aggression, isolation, and attitudes supportive of a police state. In this decade, with violent crime receding slightly, thanks to temporary changes in the age structure and more vigorous enforcement, the fear may be down. But it is still higher than the actual risk of victimization justifies.

Besides the learning, the imitation, and the fear, there is another effect: desensitization. Growing up with television violence makes children callous toward the victims. Researchers have been unfolding this picture for three decades.

We in the media and media-related jobs don't like to think about it. We shy away from thinking about it because the only efforts at reform that seem workable could start us down a slippery slope toward restrictions on freedom of speech.

Gerbner wants to put social and political pressure on the producers of television content. In 1996, he organized a coalition of non-profits and individual citizens called the Cultural Environment Movement (www.cemnet.org). It is an uphill task.

Four years ago, the National Cable Television Association funded a study by researchers at four universities in the hope of demonstrating that television's content creators are becoming more responsible. That hope proved empty.

The report's final volume (National Television Violence Study 3, Sage Publications, 1998) finds that the number of programs containing violence has remained constant over the past three years. So has the proportion of violent depictions that have the most risk of damaging children, i.e., those showing violence committed by attractive role models, violence that appears justified, and violence that goes unpunished or has minimal consequences for others.

Television could undo at least part of its harm by offering programs with anti-violence themes, and sometimes it does -- but in only 3% to 4% of all violent programs. That paltry share, the researchers found, is not growing.

Tobacco defenders said smoking was an individual decision. TV's advocates say violent content is a problem of parental control. But for those who can control their own children's viewing, the culture doesn't change. The kids will pick up violence-friendly attitudes from their peers just like nonsmokers sucking in second-hand tobacco fumes.

Pollution, whether in the cultural or the physical environment, can't be managed by individual decision-making. There is no economic incentive to stop your own polluting unless everybody else does it.

That's why regulation is sometimes necessary.

My late colleague Vermont Royster, who wrote for The Wall Street Journal from his Kenan professorship at Chapel Hill, liked to remind his fellow media workers of the possibility. The First Amendment, he said, holy as it may seem, is not God's blessing, but a gift from the people. They can take it back. But they would have to wake up first. Most in the information business would rather let them sleep. Like the tobacco people, we find our comfort in denial.
 

Philip Meyer is Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He also is a consultant for USA TODAY and member of the newspaper's board of contributors.