Violence in Mass Media: Overview

Introduction

Violent images and narratives frequently pervade all mediums of communication in modern Western culture, from novels and comic books to films and television to video games and music lyrics. The effect of violent depictions on human beings, particularly children and adolescents, has been widely debated. The massive presence of media in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has inspired numerous studies, but few certainties about its ultimate effect on society.

Controversy over violence in the media has led to an abundance of media critiques from sociologists as well as parents and politicians. At one extreme, critics argue that regular contact with violent images and concepts produces violence, or at least heightened aggression, in its consumers. Children are considered more vulnerable to media’s images and language and less discerning of the difference between fantasy and reality and the consequences of violence.

Therefore, the effects on their development have often been the focal point of arguments for control of violent media. There have been thousands of studies examining the impact of violent television on children.

Others have noted that a direct connection between violence in the media and violent or aggressive behavior has not been adequately established. While some argue that the possibility of a connection requires the exercise of caution, others discount it in favor of the argument that the depiction of violence can have a positive effect on consumers in that it provides a harmless outlet for the relief of violent and aggressive emotions.

Understanding the Discussion

Catharsis: The idea, originating from Greek philosopher Aristotle, that the viewing of tragedy has a cathartic, or purgative, effect on viewers. Contemporary media theorists have redeployed the idea to suggest that violent media elicits a similar, positive effect.

Deregulation: The reduction or elimination of government oversight over a sector of private industry.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC): A federal body vested with the authority to regulate communications within the United States.

Happy violence: Violence depicted with humor and with few or no consequences; generally featured in comedies, including children’s cartoons.

Mass Media: Forms of communication that reach a broad audience and include television, radio, film, music, books, and the internet.

Media Literacy: The ability to understand and evaluate the different forms of media with the goal of encouraging critical thinking about mass communication.

Self-Censorship: The process by which professional communicators voluntarily censor their material to avoid giving offense or causing harm.

History

With the advent of mass communication in the twentieth century, media studies evolved into a discipline in its own right. As media became more varied and widespread, so too did critical attention. Most of the controversy centered on violent images from television, films, video games, and the internet. Violent language in music gained some attention as well. As television spread to more homes in industrialized nations in the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists began to pay attention to its effects on viewers. One proposed effect, prompted by a rise in juvenile delinquency, was that juveniles were acting out scenarios that they had first seen on television. Such fears resulted in congressional hearings in 1952 as well as other hearings at the national level. Film, too, was the subject of significant attention. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) adopted a rating system as a means to warn parents about the content of films, including violence, deemed inappropriate for children.

The notion that a correlation exists between depictions of violent and violent or aggressive behavior gained further popularity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The social theorist Albert Bandura was one critic who made this case. In several books, the most famous being Social Learning Theory (1977), he set forth the theory that children model their behavior on examples around them, including television; behavior is learned rather than genetic or instinctual. Bandura did not argue, however, that exposure to violent media was the sole cause of aggression and deviant behavior.

As concern grew, a profusion of studies were published and further hearings took place. In 1972, the report “Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence” was released by the US surgeon general’s advisory committee; it too argued that televised violence had a negative, dangerous impact on childhood development.

As a result, national organizations began campaigning for television networks to exercise self-censorship in order to limit the depiction of violence. However, with the profusion of new types of mass media and the deregulation of network television that took place in the 1980s in the US, such organizations were able to exercise less pressure to effect change. At the same time, high-level reports purporting to have established the link between pretend violence and real violence continued to be published, and it seemed a consensus had been reached.

Organizations such as the American Psychological Association worked to increase pressure on networks and the US government in the 1990s, with few sustained results. In 1993, major television networks agreed on a volunteer basis to preface programs with parental advisories in cases where the programs had content considered inappropriate for children.

Groups such as the National Council for Families and Television, devoted to regulating television, were also formed. One blow to the movement was the 1993 federal appeals court decision to lift the ban on indecent broadcasting that the FCC had enacted because the ban had been deemed too broad and in violation of rights granted under the First Amendment.

To regulate offensive content on television, however, legislation was passed in 1996 requiring all televisions of a certain size to have a “V-Chip” installed by 2000. The chip was designed to block the display of television programs that were inappropriate for children, according to its rating system and based on parental preference.

As violent incidences involving youth continued, these measures were considered by some to be vital to the welfare of US society. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two students killed twelve classmates and one teacher and wounded twenty-four others before killing themselves, was partially blamed on the violent video games and films that the perpetrators played and watched.

Critics who promote government regulation of the media argue that violent imagery and narratives adversely affect people, especially children and adolescents. Their primary argument is that such material leads people to become aggressive and, in the worst situations, to copy the violence that they have seen. Moreover, while the media readily depicts violence, it rarely depicts its consequences. In fact, violence is often depicted as amusing. This is what communications scholar George Gerbner has called “happy violence,” which is often found in comedies, including children’s cartoons. These features, according to critics, lead to desensitization and make it more difficult for people to discern between real and unreal violence. It has been estimated that, on average, a child in the United States sees 8,000 murders depicted on television before they finish elementary school. By age eighteen, it has been estimated that the average child in the United States has viewed more than 200,000 murders on television. Some critics also view the profusion of violent media as a cynical ploy to sell products and to manufacture unfounded fears.

Critics on the opposite side of the controversy take a varied approach to the issue. At the most extreme, they recall ancient arguments of catharsis by stating that violent media has a positive effect insofar as it provides an outlet for people to rid themselves of aggression and violent impulses. Moreover, they point out that despite the numerous studies written on the subject, social theorists have been unable to prove a connection between media violence and violent crime; most of them accept that it can cause levels of aggression to rise, however. Instead, they argue that media violence can lead to violent crime only if several other factors converge, including lack of parental supervision. What is needed to reduce violence in society is not federal regulation, these critics have argued, but responsible parents and training in media literacy.

In the twenty-first century, the debate has generally followed the same contours. Technology, upon which mass media depends, has also been widely viewed as the best solution to the problem, in the form of the V-Chip and computer programs which restrict access to websites that are considered inappropriate for certain media consumers.

A twenty-first-century model attempted to demonstrate the correlation between the media and violence and aggression, and refute once and for all the idea that media violence does not affect viewers. According to the General Aggression Model, viewers learn how to behave in stressful situations in part by watching media depictions of similar situations. Both short-term and long-term exposure increases aggression and the risk of violent behavior. Some critics, however, continued to question whether such a risk is a problem particular to US culture. One argument in support of this viewpoint has been that media consumers in other countries have similar or higher levels of violence in their media, yet do not experience the same levels of violent behavior.

Violence in the Media Today

The discussion of violence in the media received increased national attention after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. The Sandy Hook shooting was one of the deadliest school shootings in history, with a death toll of twenty-six people, including twenty children at the school. The shooter was known to play a number of violent video games, including Call of Duty. This incident renewed the debate over violence in the media and violence in contemporary entertainment culture; consequently, politicians, parents, and the video game industry were further questioning the appropriateness of violent games. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) outlined a number of potential effects of violence in the media on children, including becoming numb or desensitized to the horror of violence, learning that violence is a way to solve problems, or imitating the violent scenarios they have seen on television. The AACAP has warned that children with emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and impulse-control problems are more easily influenced by violent media than children without these problems. While an American Psychological Association study in 2015 found a connection between playing violent video games and aggression, it was also noted that evidence was not found to definitively deem that aggression a cause of criminal violence. Additional studies continued to consider and draw different conclusions about video games and aggression.

As mass shootings, including incidents proving particularly deadly, seemed to only increase in occurrence throughout the remainder of the 2010s and into the 2020s, and larger numbers of people came to rely on varied, readily accessible internet sources such as social media for news information in addition to steady traditional television and radio coverage, the debate remained prominent. Some of the incidents prompting further consideration of the issue of violence in the media included the 2015 shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which the White shooter killed nine people; the shooting at an LGBTQ night club in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 that resulted in the deaths of forty-nine people; the 2017 shooting at a musical festival taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, in which sixty people were killed and hundreds were injured; the 2018 shooting at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in which a teenager opened fire and killed seventeen people; the shootings at grocery stores in both Colorado and New York in 2021 and 2022, respectively, each of which led to the deaths of ten people; and the 2022 Texas elementary school shooting, in which nineteen young students and two teachers were killed. All of these incidents were widely and comprehensively covered by media outlets, and, in several cases, live streams or other videos of violent crimes were being posted to sites such as Facebook and Twitter by witnesses or even offenders themselves. The concern over the potential for media coverage of violence to inspire copycat incidents remained, with some commentators noting that mass media had continued to devote a large amount of coverage to violence but had made some adjustments in terms of refraining from focusing the coverage on the offender. In some cases, critics of media coverage suggested showing more graphic content representative of the physical and emotional damage caused by violence to potentially motivate actual change, particularly legislatively. Opponents of this approach cited a need for victim privacy and dignity as well as exploitation prevention. Into the 2020s, these incidents had brought additional claims from some, such as politicians, that violent video games were playing a role.

Meanwhile, true crime–based series and documentaries had become prolific and popular on television by the 2020s, including through multiple streaming platforms. The ubiquitousness of such media raised questions about whether violent crime was subsequently becoming too sensationalized, and whether these programs could be dangerous in terms of informing or inspiring further violence, especially among more easily influenced or vulnerable viewers.

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