Effects of media on children

TV Violence

Violence on TV has become very common. The news is filled with crimes in the United States and about the Iraq war. The news programs show how a crime was done and actual pictures of murdered bodies. Other shows have live videotapes of police officers chasing criminals. A lot of these shows are shown when young children are still awake and watching TV with their family. Does this violence affect them? If it does, how much? There still is a lot of debate about this. Most reviews of the studies done show that it does not cause aggression or crime, but there is agreement that the media should be more responsible about violence and television and have more shows about positive behavior.

There are studies that say that violence does cause more aggression and those that say violence does not have an effect. Browne and Hamilton report about a national TV violence study in the United States that reviewed the contents of TV shows. The study found that 61% of the programs included violence, 55% in realistic environments; 71% of these shows did not show any guilt by the criminal or criticism about the violence. Also, 54% of the TV programs had lethal violent content, 39% committed by attractive individuals. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that youth who are between 2 and 18 years old spend approximately six and a half hours with media every day, like TV, films, video games, and computers. They spend more time on these activities than any other during the day except for sleeping (Cheng et al.).

Such statistics disturb children health professionals and parents and have resulted in thousands of different studies on the influence of violent media on children and adolescents' aggressive behavior and criminal acts. James Hamilton, who is a professor at Duke University in public policy, economics and political science and wrote Economic Market for Violent Television Programming, spoke to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the concerns of violent shows. He believes that violence seen on TV will be imitated if the show does not also show the person being punished or suffering in some way for the crime. He says that most programs do not show these negative affects. (Colorito). Colorito says that the special TV news programs are the worst problem. In order to increase the number of viewers of the show, these newsmagazines frequently look like "violent feature films." The networks say that shows like "20/20" and "48 Hours" are just reporting the information as it happened, what news programs are supposed to do.

On the other hand, there are those who say that people are making a bigger problem out of media violence than there really is. All the commotion about violence on TV is greatly exaggerated. Most reviews of a number of different studies say that overall the research does not show that media violence is harmful to children. It is too difficult to separate the affect the media has on youth from other influences, such as education, parents' attitudes, social values and home environment. Felson argues that the topic of violence in the media has been continually debated over the past several decades. There are a lot of empirical studies that show the effects of TV on aggression. However, no review looked at the criminal aggression. He concludes that even though the possibility of TV and film violence leading to violent crime remains, most of the studies show that viewing violence does not cause crime. Likewise, Kirsh looked at many different studies about media violence and children and adolesence and said that there is not a strong link between media violence and aggression.