A Calvalcade of CarnageAt 7 o'clock each weekday morning, the Fox station here in Nashville runs an animated kids program called "The Magic School Bus." In each episode, a bunch of curious tykes are off with their eccentric but ever-inquisitive teacher (Lily Tomlin does the voice) on cosmic field trips to explore scientific phenomena – weather, gravity, volcanoes, dinosaurs, whatever. My 4-year-old loves it, and seems to pick up a little scientific knowledge in the bargain. Matter of fact, I usually pick up quite a bit of scientific knowledge myself when I catch it. From a parent’s perspective, it’s perfect children’s TV – clever, educational, fun. (Parents who deny their kids all television may smugly leave the room.)
Actually it’s not quite perfect. It seems the nice folks down at Fox are mostly incapable of selling advertising that runs on the show to anyone other than purveyors of toys that glorify and promote violence. Action figures that brawl with and shoot at one another, armed vehicles and my personal favorite, dinosaur-like creatures that appear to be lugging around built-in cruise missiles for battling other armed reptilians. When it’s not a commercial, it’s a network promo featuring Power Rangers doing their hand-to-hand combat thing or animated beings wielding arsenals of incendiary firepower. One recent morning featured a promo for "The Simpsons" – yes, a singular source for social and political satire of the highest order, but singularly inappropriate for young children watching "The Magic School Bus." (This particular promo featured adults whacking animals over the head repeatedly.)
All of which turns my child’s innocent Magic School Bus ride into a bumpy journey where science and wonder are punctuated with 30-second and one-minute bursts of conflict, hostility, injury and death (breaking occasionally for a one-minute pitch by a cereal company passing off caked sucrose as a nutritious breakfast food).
Yes, I know, this all sounds rather cranky, and of course I have the power to turn the damn thing off if I don’t like it. But as a parent who thinks (a) that children ought to be able to watch a little TV that opens up their world a bit, and (b) that small children should play in ways that avoid, not celebrate, violence, my reaction is somewhere between rage and disgust. If I want to let my kid enjoy what is more or less the best that children's TV has to offer, the price I must pay is exposure to the very worst the medium can dish up – an assault of playtime weaponry in the name of good, clean capitalist fun.
This is not to suggest that 4-year-olds watching commercials for violent action figures inevitably grow up to murder their classmates. But in the wake of Littleton, the spotlight is once again aimed at the effects of media violence – a constructive consequence of an otherwise irredeemable calamity. Does the unrelenting cavalcade of carnage in films, television and video games somehow incite, in cause-effect fashion, violent behavior by those who watch and play?
According to Mediascope, a public policy group that monitors research on media violence and other social issues affecting children, there is general consensus among scientists and public health experts that watching television and film violence has three potentially harmful effects: viewers learn aggressive behavior, become desensitized to real-world violence and increase their mistrust of others because of an intensifying fear of being victimized by violence.
The picture is murkier for fantasy violence video games like the deathcapades implicated in the lives of the Littleton miscreants. We assume it must have a desensitizing effect – surely you become accustomed to violent death after you’ve perpetrated a few thousand virtual homicides. A former military psychologist received a lot of media attention post-Littleton with the observation that violent video games are like simulations used by the military to help impressionable young recruits get used to killing people. However, the research evidence is still limited (and mixed) on the effects of these games on real-world violent behavior.
In a way, the focus on whether media violence causes real-world violence is a distraction. You don’t need research studies to figure out that watching violence over and over feeds a taste for it, and this is the truly disturbing outcome. Knowing that a thousand people want to line up down at the 27-plex to watch bloodshed as entertainment, I’m frankly not all that worried that one of them will pull a gun on me somewhere down the road. What I am troubled by is that hordes will spend entertainment dollars and hours watching bullying, periodic maiming, occasional torture and frequent death. These are my neighbors, my community?
This is not a call for censorship, rating systems, religious crusades or v-chips. As I watch my child watch advertisers promote violent toys during a delightful educational program, my impulse is not to write to my Congressman or send the kid to parochial school.
The people I want access to are the ones who run the toy company, who run the network, who devise marketing strategy, who make and sell ads. To them I say: Put down your balance sheets, come by my house for breakfast and watch my child watch the drivel you insist on putting before him. I’m sure you’re all nice people who are kind to animals and all that, but could you tell me in a coherent sentence how what you do adds even a scintilla of value to community or society?
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