Violence in the media
Violence in the mediaBy: William
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Violence in the Media �Monkey see, monkey do� has become a well-known saying in today�s modern, media warped society, but is it correct? What has the world come to these days? It often seems like everywhere one looks, violence rears its ugly head. We see it in the streets, back alleys, school, and even at home. The last of these, our homes, is a major source of violence. In many peoples' living rooms there sits an outlet for violence that often goes unnoticed. It is the television, and the people who view it are often pulled into its realistic world of violence scenes with sometimes devastating results. Much research has gone into showing why our society is so mesmerized by this big glowing box and the action that takes place within it. Only a mere sixty years ago the invention of the television was viewed as a technological breakthrough with black and white ghost-like figures on a screen so small, hardly anyone could see them. Today that curiosity has become a constant companion to 90% of the American population (Sherrow 26), mainly, children and teenagers. From reporting the news and advertising in order to persuade us to buy certain products, to providing programs that depict violence, television has all but replaced written material. Unfortunately, it is these violent programs that are endangering our present-day society. Violent images on television, as well as in the movies, have inspired people to set spouses on fire in their beds, lie down in the middle of highways, extort money by placing bombs in airplanes, rape, steal, murder, and commit numerous other shootings and assaults. (Brown 78) Most of what is broadcast or transmitted even in the news today is with reference to the chaotic condition of our planet, or something else that society as a whole sees as detrimental or damaging. "The average American child will witness...200,000 acts of media violence by the time that child graduates from high school.� (Sherrow 6) "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders," James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows my Name. "But they have never failed to imitate them." (Sherrow 56) This basic truth has all but disappeared as the public increasingly treats teenagers as a robot-like population under sway of an exploitative media. White House officials lecture film, music, Internet, fashion, and pop-culture moguls and accuse them of programming kids to smoke, drink, shoot up, have sex, and kill. A recent report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pools evidence from over 2,500 studies within the last decade on over 100,000 subjects from several nations to show that the compiled evidence of the media�s influence on behavior is so "overwhelming" that there is a consensus in the research community that "violence in the media does lead to aggressive behavior" (Methvin 49). Given that the majority of scientific community agrees that "the research findings of the NIMH publication support conclusion of a causal relationship...
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