The Media Violence Myth
By Richard Rhodes
Page 1 of 5

I

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, pale, lean and a little goofy in a bad suit, struts the stage of a high school auditorium somewhere in Arkansas, his home state. He's a man on a mission, a smalltown Jimmy Swaggart, swooping and pausing and chopping the air. He's already scared the fresh-faced kids in the audience half to death, and the more scared they look, the wider he grins. "Before children learn to read," he lobs in one of his rhetorical flash grenades, "they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. That means everything they see is real for them. When a three year old, a four year old, a five year old sees someone on TV being shot, raped, stabbed, murdered, for them it's real. It's real! You might just as well have your little three year old bring a friend into the house, befriend that friend, and then gut 'em and murder 'em right before their eyes" - some of the kids in the audience wince - "as have them watch the same thing on TV, watch someone being brutally murdered on television. For them it's all real. Television is traumatizing and brutalizing our children at this horrendously young age."1

A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with an M.Ed. in counseling, formerly an ROTC professor at the University of Arkansas, Grossman left the Army to dedicate himself to saving America from what he calls the "toxic waste" of "media violence" that is "being pumped into our nation and our children," the "electronic crack cocaine" of television and video games that he claims are "truly addictive." He's riding a bandwagon. Columbine turned it into a victory parade. Three days after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered thirteen of their schoolmates and then killed themselves, President Bill Clinton cited Grossman by name and endorsed Grossman's video-games-teach-kids-to-kill thesis in his weekly radio address. The Republicans have known since their log cabin days that the media are evil, but after Columbine, even Democrats like Connecticut's Joe Lieberman signed on. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Surgeon General and other prestigious institutions have all endorsed the theory that violent media make kids violent. It's a solid cultural consensus.

Grossman speaks to hundreds of organizations every year, from schools and colleges to Rotary Clubs, police departments and veterans' groups. He's an effective speaker and polemicist. "We live in the most violent era in peacetime human history," he sets up his audiences. If someone reminds him that the murder rate was eight times as high in medieval Europe as it is in modern America, that murder rates have been declining steadily in the Western world for the past five hundred years,2 he claims it's an illusion. "Medical technology saves ever more lives every year," he says. "If we had 1930s medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times what it is." He claims that people are trying to kill people ten times as often as they used to do back when there were no police and no common access to courts of law, but that modern emergency medicine is masking the increase.

Now and again, as Grossman recites his litany, his narcissism breaks through. He's from Jonesboro, the Arkansas town where eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson pulled their school fire alarm on March 24, 1998, and shot down fifteen schoolmates and a teacher as the victims exited the building into the schoolyard, killing five and wounding eleven. After the shootings, Grossman says, "the media were out interviewing everybody and his dog." Unable to resist a superlative, he adds: "We had the highest concentration of media per capita at any point in American history up to that time." He's already briefed his high-school audience about a study which he claims proves that when nations get television broadcasting, their murder rate doubles after a fifteen-year time lag (time for the little television-traumatized killers-in-training to reach adolescence). Why don't you know that? he challenges the kids. Because it isn't on television, he says: "If you ask the television industry about the link between violence on television and real-world violence, they'll lie."

With the media packed shoulder-to-shoulder in Jonesboro, Grossman thought that the mountain had finally come to Mohammed. But it wasn't to be. "They were interviewing everybody," he complains, "and here they've got this guy, this Grossman guy, who's this expert on violence, he wrote the book, he travels around the world training people. That would be a great interview, right? And I was on Canadian national TV, Australian national TV, I was on the BBC, newspapers and magazines around America were interviewing me." But not on U.S. national television. One of the major network news shows did seek him out, Grossman goes on. "'Wow,'" he claims they told him, "'here's a story we gotta get. We want to interview you.' I said, 'Great! I wanna be interviewed! But here's what it's all about: You've got to realize that every major medical and scientific body in the world has identified the fact that at least 50 percent of the responsibility for violent crime lies on your shoulders.'" Long pause. The kids are with him. They already know the punch line. "They said, 'Well, thank you very much. If it's okay with you, we'd really rather not.'"

It's easy to believe that violence is getting worse: We hear about it all the time. It's easy to believe that mock violence in media is influencing behavior: What other violence do suburban kids see? Without question, popular culture is a lot more raucous than it used to be. It's a wild pageant, and it scares the culture police. But however many national leaders and prestigious institutions endorse the theory, it's a fraud. There's no evidence that mock violence in media makes people violent, and there's some evidence that it makes people more peaceful.

To start with, take a look at Col. Dave's claim about improved medical technology saving potential homicides. Of 1.5 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 1998, 17,000 were murders. Of the remaining number, according to the FBI, only 20,331 resulted in major injuries (the rest produced minor physical injuries or none at all). So if all the assault victims with major injuries had also died - improbable even with 1930's medicine - the 1998 U.S. murder rate would only have been double what it was - that is, would have been about 13 per 100,000 population rather than 6.3. But even 13 is well below the 23 per 100,000 murder rate of 13th-century England, the 45 per 100,000 of 15th-century Sweden, the 47 per 100,000 of 15th-century Amsterdam. We don't live in "the most violent era in peacetime human history"; we live in one of the least violent eras in peacetime human history.

Jib Fowles, a slight, handsome media scholar at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, worked his way through the media effects literature carefully and thoroughly when he was researching a book on the subject, mischievously titled The Case for Television Violence, which was published last year. Although Grossman and others are fond of claiming that there have been more than 2,500 studies showing a connection between violent media and aggressive behavior (the number actually refers to the entire bibliography of a major government report on the subject), the independent literature reviews Fowles consulted identified only between one and two hundred studies, the majority of them laboratory studies. Very few studies have looked at media effects in the real world, and even fewer have followed the development of children exposed to violent media over a period of years.

In typical laboratory studies, researchers require a control group of children to watch a "neutral" segment of a television show while a test group watches a segment which includes what the researchers believe to be violent content - an actor or a cartoon character pretending to assault other actors or cartoon characters. Both segments are taken out of context, although sometimes the children watch entire shows. After this exposure, the researchers observe the children at play together or interacting with toys to see if they behave in ways the researchers consider aggressive. Aggression may mean merely verbal aggression, or rough play such as pushing and shoving, or hitting. Hitting is a rare outcome in these experiments; the usual outcome is verbal banter or rough play. Since the researchers, by the very act of showing the tapes, have implicitly endorsed the behavior they require the kids to watch, and further endorse the kids' response by standing around counting aggressive acts rather than expressing disapproval or intervening as a teacher or parent might do, the experimental arrangement is not exactly neutral.

Even so, the results of their laboratory experiments have been inconclusive. In some studies "aggression" increased following the "violent" television viewing; but in other studies the control kids who watched a neutral segment were more aggressive afterward. Sometimes kids acted up more after watching comedy. Boys usually acted up more than girls, but sometimes it was the other way around. "In the majority of cases," two investigators who reviewed a large number of laboratory studies found, "there was an increase in negative behaviors in the postviewing interval for both aggressive and non-aggressive television material."3 Contradictory results such as these prove, at best, no more than what everyone already knows: that watching movies or television can stir kids up. They certainly don't prove that watching television makes children violent. They don't prove anything about the real world, Fowles argues, because they're nothing like the real world.

The best-known real-world study of the effect of television viewing on violent behavior is probably the one a Seattle psychiatrist named Brandon Centerwall reported in 1989. It's the basis for Grossman's claim in his standard stump speech that "with very few exceptions, anywhere in the world that television appears, within fifteen years the murder rate doubles." As usual, Grossman exaggerates; Centerwall's study limited its findings to three countries. To see if television influences the murder rate, the psychiatrist took advantage of a natural experiment: the fact that television broadcasting began in the U.S. and Canada after 1945 but not in South Africa, where the Afrikaans majority government banned it until 1975.

Centerwall graphed the murder rates for whites in Canada and the U.S. from 1945 to 1974 against television-set ownership and compared them to the white murder rate in South Africa during the same period. "White homicide rates remained stable [in South Africa]," he reports, but "in two control populations, Canadian and U.S. white homicide rates doubled following the introduction of television."4 On the basis of this seemingly spectacular finding, Centerwall issued a call to arms in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992, spinning out his doubled murder rates into even more spectacular claims: "If, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults."5

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