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The Media Violence Myth
Page 4 of 5

II

The sociologist Howard Becker categorizes media violence zealots like Dave Grossman, Brandon Centerwall, former Vice President Dan Quayle and former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett as "moral entrepreneurs."25 Part of their hostility, Jib Fowles argues, is simple snobbery, although surveys reveal that the affluent and the highly-educated watch about as many hours of television every week as everybody else. A deeper reason for their hostility is fear of losing social control. Thinking about the role of modern mass communications in social control, Fowles realized that entertainment media have come to satisfy many of the needs that religion used to fulfill: giving people a common frame of reference, a common community with which to identify and a safe place within which to experience emotional release. "The mass media comprise a new social institution," he told me. "And not only is it new, but it seems to be eating into the traditional social institutions of religion, community, family and so on. All these institutions are shrinking with the exception of education and mass media. We're choosing to integrate ourselves in very different ways and largely through the mass media." It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the moral entrepreneurs - the guardians of the traditional institutions - have led the attack. Blaming the media for criminal violence is one campaign in an ongoing turf war.

Fowles was stuck by the contrast between the negativity of the moral entrepreneurs and the immense popularity of entertainment media. That popularity in itself argued against negative effects and in favor of positive effects. The media scholar wondered if any social science studies had turned up positive responses to watching television, including violent television. After a thorough search of the literature he found several which did. They were hard to find; though they were first-rate studies, they were seldom referenced because they disputed the reigning paradigm that television is bad for you.

In one thorough and careful field study, a highly respect psychologist named Seymour Feshbach had controlled the television viewing of some 400 boys in three private boarding schools and four boys' homes for six weeks, limiting half the boys to programs high in violent content and the other half to nonaggressive programs. Trained observers judged aggression levels in the boys before and after the controlled viewing period. "No behavioral differences were reported for the adolescents in the private schools," Fowles summarizes Feshbach's findings, "but among the poorer, semidelinquent youths, those who had been watching the more violent shows were calmer than their peers on the blander viewing diet." Feshbach concluded that "exposure to aggressive content on television seems to reduce or control the expression of aggression in aggressive boys from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds."26 When Fowles interviewed Feshbach about this impressive finding, Feshbach interpreted it to mean that fantasy served the cause of self-control. "Television fantasies," he told Fowles, "supplement a person's own imagination, and help him discharge pent-up aggression in the same way that dreams and other products of the imagination can do."27

Fowles also located a definitive refutation of Eron and Huesmann's supposed "criminal violence" finding. He calls the little-noticed study by sociologist Steven F. Messner of the State University of New York at Albany "broad-based and most remarkable."28 Messner set out to determine if "population aggregates with high levels of exposure to violent television content also exhibit high rates of criminal violence."29 He took his list of "violent" television shows from content analyses developed by the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), an antiviolence advocacy group which counts "violent acts per hour."

Messner next collected Nielsen ratings for the shows on the NCTV list, which estimated their audience size - their popularity - in a number of U.S. metropolitan areas. He then looked up F.B. I. crime rates for those areas for criminal homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. His final step was to match up crime rates in the metropolitan areas against the popularity of "violent" television shows in the same areas.

"The results are quite surprising," Messner wrote in his understated conclusion. "For each measure of violent crime, the estimate for the level of exposure to television violence is negative.. In other words, [metropolitan areas] in which large audiences are attracted to violent television programming tend to exhibit low rates of violent crime."30

Messner offered a simple explanation for his finding: When people are home watching television, they're not out committing violent crimes. And since they're home watching television, burglars can't rob their houses. He even checked his burglary prevention theory. Rates in areas where violent television was popular turned out to be lower not only for burglary but also for auto theft and larceny (simple theft) as well.

I contacted Messner to ask him how his study had been received by the media effects community. He described submitting it to a major sociology journal, where it collected mixed peer reviews and was ultimately rejected. One hostile reviewer criticized it as "a mechanical exercise in which the author routinely applies a packaged program to a set of data," adding scornfully, "After all, the ultimate goal is not to generate a pretty story and an apparently significant set of findings, but actually to find out something real about society."31 Do I hear Rowell Huesmann's sarcasm in this slashing anonymous assault? The study was ultimately published in the journal Social Problems. "As near as I can tell," Messner emailed me, "it never did generate much reaction, either positive or negative."32 He was happy to hear that Jib Fowles had singled it out for praise.

"This whole episode of studying television violence," Fowles concluded when we talked, "is going to be seen by history as a travesty. It's going to be used in classes as an example of how social science can just go totally awry."

Fowles found support for the idea that entertainment media serves for emotional release in the work of a predecessor media scholar, Gerhardt Wiebe, who was dean of Boston University's School of Public Communication.33 Wiebe proposed that the function of the entertainment media is to ease the stresses of socialization, defined as "the process by which an individual becomes a member of a given social group." Being socialized means being molded and changed - from a rebellious adolescent to a productive, conforming adult, from a self-directed private individual before and after work to a group-directed employee during working hours - and such transformation is stressful. Television and other entertainment media work to relieve that stress. "All kinds of Americans," Fowles writes in his 1992 book Why Viewers Watch, "in all states of mind, turn to the medium for the balm it provides. The most troubled are perhaps the most aided. For the segment of the population that has been crushed by the real world, and has had to be removed from it, television is clearly a boon. Anyone who has visited an institution where humans are confined knows that television exerts a calming, beneficent influence..The administrators of hospitals, prisons and asylums realize that their charges can be highly volatile or depressed, and that television is an efficient, nonchemical means for easing their torments."34

Wiebe defined three kinds of messages that media send. Directive messages come from authority figures and "command, exhort, instruct, persuade." Directive messages seldom get through, Wiebe observes; since the people at home control the remote, they tend to switch channels or downgrade directives into maintenance messages - the routine communications which support the knowledge and beliefs people already have. Thus programs on specialized subjects - Greece, say, or transvestite culture, or World War II - tend to draw audiences who already know about those subjects rather than the uninformed.

The primary function of the entertainment media, Wiebe proposes, is to supply restorative messages, which allow people to restore themselves "from the strain of adapting, the weariness of conforming." Restorative messages are "the adult counterpart of youthful protest and retaliation against authority figures" which appear "spontaneously, and apparently inevitably, as an antidote for the strictures of organized living." Restorative messages feature "crime, violence, disrespect for authority, sudden and unearned wealth, sexual indiscretion, freedom from social restraints." Their themes, Wiebe observes brilliantly, "seem to make up a composite reciprocal [that is, a negative counterset, an antidote] of the values stressed in adult socialization." Rock music, rap, movies like Natural Born Killers or Pulp Fiction, lurid music videos, video games and any number of "violent" television programs are evidence in support of Wiebe's insight.

Because the essence of restorative messages, as Wiebe argues, is "token retaliation against the establishment," censoring the protest and the violence and substituting what social scientists call "prosocial" programming will simply cause viewers to turn elsewhere for the restorative messages they crave. Wiebe's characterization of restorative programming as "token retaliation" makes it clear why establishment institutions and the moral entrepreneurs who speak for them are so quick to condemn entertainment media, particularly when rising juvenile delinquency rates, school shootings, teenage pregnancies and other problems panic them with fears that socialization might be breaking down: Uncomfortable already with the feeling that new social institutions are emerging to replace them, they're seized with the fear that the peasants might actually take the programs seriously and storm the barricades of their authority and privilege. One of their defensive maneuvers has been to employ social scientists to "prove" that entertainment media are dangerous. Sadly, to the perversion of their science, the social scientists have complied, although the First Amendment has limited the effectiveness of their assaults.

Media performances serve vicariously to intensify and then resolve tension, carrying away in the process all sorts of psychic detritus. They make it possible to put on a hero's armor, slay dragons and then hang up your armor and be yourself. Fowles calls the procedure "mental cleansing and redemption."35 At their most basic, entertainment media take the psychic garbage out.

The whole thrust of socialization across the past thousand years in Western culture has been toward reducing private violence in order to foster more effective social interaction in an increasingly complex and interdependent society. This movement, which historian Norbert Elias calls "the civilizing process," has advanced by internalizing the social prohibition against violence, and with that prohibition has come an advancing threshold of revulsion against violence. People who are seriously violent take pleasure in their violence. As people moved away from malevolence toward civility, the pleasure of doing violence was gradually displaced by the pleasure of seeing violence done - such as watching public executions and attending cockfights, bullfights and bare-knuckle boxing matches.

The pleasure of seeing violence done has in turn gradually been displaced by today's pleasure in seeing mock violence done in sports and in entertainment. Thus the increasing revulsion against bullfighting, hunting and boxing and the interdiction of public executions. More recently even mock violence has come under suspicion, especially as fare for children (who used to be taken to see public executions to show them why they shouldn't misbehave). So media violence has come to be tolerated more than endorsed. When real violence breaks out - the rise of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, the riots and assassinations of the 1960s, the rash of white-on-white school shootings in the later 1990s - revulsion at media violence intensifies, and the mandarins of psychology and sociology trot out their statistical charts.

But there is no good evidence that taking pleasure from seeing mock violence leads to violent behavior, and there is some evidence, as Jib Fowles found, that it leads away. Bottom line: To become violent, people have to have experience with real violence. Period. No amount of imitation violence can provide that experience. Period. At the same time, mock violence can and does satisfy the considerable need to experience strong emotion that people, including children, build up from hour to hour and day to day while functioning in the complex and frustrating interdependencies of modern civilization. So can comedy; so can serious drama; but young males especially (and even not-so-young males) evidently take special satisfaction in watching mock violence, whether dramatic or athletic. "Whatever the relation of this need may be to other, more elementary needs such as hunger, thirst, and sex," concludes Norbert Elias, ".one may well find that the neglect of paying attention to this need is one of the main gaps in present approaches to problems of mental health."36

A New Jersey teenager, Joe Stavitsky, responded to an attack on video games in Harper's magazine after Columbine with an eloquent letter in their defense. "As a 'geek,'" Stavitsky wrote, "I can tell you that none of us play video games to learn how (or why) to shoot people. For us, video games do not cause violence; they prevent it. We see games as a perfectly safe release from a physically violent reaction to the daily abuse leveled at us." Stavitsky, whose family emigrated from Leningrad when he was four to escape a communist dictatorship, concluded his letter with some pointed advice to the moral entrepreneurs. "The so-called experts should put away their pens," he advised, "and spend more time with their children or grandchildren, or better yet, adopt a child who has no home or family. Because there's only one sure way to prevent youth violence, and that is by taking care of youth." We do not take care of youth when we deny them entertainment which allows them to safely challenge the powerlessness they feel at not yet controlling their own lives and then to find symbolic resolution. Entertainment media are therapeutic, not toxic. That's what the evidence shows. Cyber bullets don't kill.

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