Mass Media Violence the Impact

Mass Media Violence

The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides by David Phillips (1983) describes how this author attempts to prove that mass media violence has an impact on aggressive behavior. To prove his point, Phillips chose to compare championship heavyweight prize fights for the period 1973-1978 with archived data of daily counts of U.S. homicides. His hypothesis was that these prize fights where violent behavior is rewarded had led to an increase in homicides.

Phillips performs a detailed time-series regression analysis on this data, correcting for secular trends, seasonality and various other extraneous variables. He found that immediately after the heavyweight championship prize fights homicides increased by 12.46% when there was widespread media coverage of the event. He found that the observed number of homicides rose by 11.127 after the average "publicized" fight, defined as discussed on the network evening news, and by only 2.8333 after the average unpublicized one. Further, Phillips found that there was a peak in homicides on the third-day after the boxing match.

More interestingly, murders of young white males increased after the defeat of a white boxer and murders of young black males increased after the defeat of a black boxer. This is what Phillips attributes to as victim modeling where imitation of behavior is taking place. Phillips suggests that seeing the behavior makes it more acceptable or at least introduces it as an option.

Phillips also discounted personal experience as being a factor in the increase in homicide by analyzing data on both domestic and international fights.

Phillips asserts that his study shows that prize fights provokes imitative, aggressor behavior which results in an increase in homicides.

However, Phillips does not appear to have proven a full-blown cause and effect relationship as claimed for a number of reasons. Perhaps people who watch or read about violent events are more inclined to violence than others, meaning that watching the prize fight wasn't what really caused the homicide. The research makes a huge leap of faith that the perpetrators of the homicides had actually been exposed to media coverage of the fights. This is perhaps the largest flaw of the study. and, even if the people committing homicides had been exposed to media coverage, there's absolutely no way of knowing what sequence of events the people committing the homicides were exposed to between the media coverage and the homicide and if these events were the real influencer of the homicide. Finally, though not a problem with the study itself, there's no reason give for the three day peak in homicides after boxing events.