aggression IN THE MEDIA

Violence in the Media

Violence in the Media

It is guns, it is poverty, it is overcrowding, and it is the uniquely British problem of a culture that is infatuated with violence. We love it, we glamorize it, we educate it to our children.

The overhead testimony by Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith on gangs and youth violence presented before the U.S. Senate comprises two significant points in relation to the mass newspapers and youth violence. First, it does not mention the media as a factor in aggression, lending support to the outlook that the media are not crucial agencies in youth violence. Second, it does cite an British culture that is infatuated with violence, and the glamorization and teaching of violence to our children, as problems. Culture, glamorization, and direction, although, are localities where the media have been shown to play important communal roles. The overhead declaration simultaneously presents support for the position that the media are really important players in the output of youth aggression and yet paradoxically furthermore supports the place that they are not contributors. The relation validity of these two dichotomous places, the media as unimportant and the newspapers as central in fostering youth aggression, has dominated the public consideration, resulting in much confusion about this topic and public posturing by diverse groups and one-by-ones. The actual connection of the media to youth violence lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Research interest in the connection of the mass newspapers to communal aggression has been increased for most of this century. Over the twentieth century, the issue of the newspapers as a source of violence has moved into and out of the public consciousness in predictable ten-to twenty year cycles. If a consensus has appeared from the study and public interest, it is that the causes of aggression are complex and joined to our most rudimentary environment as well as the communal world we have conceived and that the media's specific connection to communal violence is exceedingly complicated. (See the discussion in this author's Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice [1992] and in Crime and Human Nature [1985] by J. Wilson and R. Herrnstein.)

Therefore, when discussing the nature of the relationship between the media and violence, it is important not to be myopic. Social aggression is embedded in historical, communal forces and phenomena, while the newspapers are components of a bigger data system that conceives and circulates information about the world. The media and communal aggression should both be advanced as components of phenomena that have many interconnections and routes of leverage between them. Too slender a perspective on youth violence or the media's role in its lifetime oversimplifies both the difficulty and the answers we pursue. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current concern about media, youth, and violence.

The source of this concern is revealed by a brief review of the statistics of youth violence. Youth violence, and particularly violent crime committed by youth, has recently increased ...