Media Representations of Violence Are Often Distorted - Dissertation Example

Introduction Violence is defined as any act that causes fear or actual bodily or mental harm on another person, New Oxford English Dictionary (ed 2007). Subsequently, violence comes in many forms including assault, rape, threats, torture, acts of war, aggression, defilement, child abuse, forced labour, confinement, abduction and murder. The media includes radio, television, the press, video, video games and even film. More often than not, given the nature of its activities, it finds itself displaying various forms of violence, Cantor J, (2000). There is a scientific consensus after thirty years of research that viewing of entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive behaviour, attitudes and values among people, especially children (Joint statement American Medical Association et al, 2000, July 26). Quite on the contrary, media practitioners themselves insist that their profession is a victim of maligning in the blame game of a society replete with violence by nature, Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson (2001). These two arguments form the basis of discussion in this paper. The question is whether we should continue viewing the media as the escalators of societal violence or look for the scapegoat elsewhere. Violence In The Media Television is the most widely blamed media when it comes to the issue of broadcasting violence. Television newscasts show all sorts of violence including terror attacks, war, violent talk, riots and graphic pictures of the victims of violence. Television programming is worse since it includes vividly enacted fist-cuffs, gunfights, car-chases, bomb explosions and sexual exploitation, Zuckerman D (2001). Research statistics from more than 1000 studies carried out since the 1950s, on the effects of violence on television and in movies, paint a grim picture indeed. One of their conclusions is that by the time a child is eighteen years old, he will witness on television 200,000 acts of violence and 40,000 murders with average viewing time Huston et al, 1992). Another study shows that children aged 8-18 spend 6 hours of their total time awake before television. This accounts for 44.5 hors a week. The only other activity they carry out more than this is sleeping, Kaiser Foundation (2005). However, there is an even more potent media. This is the interactive type in which individuals take part in an illusion of participating in the actual violence and creation of mayhem. These are the violent video games or play-stations. People, especially children and the youth, who participate in these games, experience the illusion, thrill, adrenaline, instinct and swift reflexes of actual violence, without any real threat to themselves. This creates the belief that violence is fun in which nobody really gets hurt. However, when they use what they learn in reality someone does get hurt very badly, not least of all themselves, Gentile, D. A. & Anderson, C. A. (2003). Interactive games like this are more likely, than television programmes which are passively watched, to instill a culture of violence in their audience. Radio has been used, especially in less developed societies where television is not commonplace, to create far reaching violent propaganda. A case in point is the radio RTML in Rwanda that played a primary role in inciting the minority but well armed Hutu tribesmen against their Tutsi countrymen. By constantly referring to the Tutsis as cockroaches and a threat to Hutu security and progress, the Hutu controlled media contributed in mobilizing the militant members of their community to massacre close to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, UNHCR (1995). Over the years, newspapers and magazines have played their part in fanning mass violence in society. Though their role has been increasingly subordinate to that of Television in recent times, they still have one thing that TV and radio will never have: staying power. A two year old magazine or a ten year old one can still be read today and is just as entertaining. Official policy in most newspaper publishing houses is that news sells and violence is the most dramatic news, Clutterbuck, R. (1981). Stories in the press just like on TV give emphasis to violent content to attract readers. Advertisement content also portrays catchy phrases such as "the toughest", "the invincible", "no nonsense" and "unbeatable" which have an underlying message of violence and dominance. In brief, there is an overt representation of violence in the print media just like in the other forms. Print media has gained more rather than less ground. In a world in which it is increasingly possible to reach a global audience through electronic superhighways and linguistic translations; and rapidly increasing literacy levels; they reach an even larger audience. Effects Of Violence Carried In The Media The majority of the studies held since the 1950s conclude that children who watch significant amounts of television and movie violence are more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviour, attitudes and values (Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 1999) In fact, most of the complaints about violence in the media are primarily concerned with its impact on children. Young children are more likely to be affected by such picturesque violence since they are more easily impressionable, find it more difficult to differentiate between fantasy and reality, cannot easily discern the motives of violence and learn by observing and imitating, Bushman (2001). Due to the foregoing, children are more likely to be affected by violence in the media than other people. The likely effects are as follows. First, they are likely to increase antisocial and aggressive behaviour, Gunter, B., Harrison, J. & Wykes, M. (2003). Secondly, they may view the world as violent and mean thus live in fear of being victims of violence. Thirdly, children will desire to see more violence in entertainment and in real life and will view violence as an acceptable way to settle conflicts. Finally, they are likely to carry violent traits into adult life, (Congressional Public Health Summit, 2000) When children learn to associate aggressive behaviour with rewards, they are more likely than not to become aggressive. The violent characters they watch on TV are heroes who get rewarded for their acts. Even though the characters are portrayed as good individuals out to get rid of some threat or other to society, the means they use to achieve these goals does not escape the audience, and for the younger more impressionable ones, it has a lasting effect. When such individuals are rewarded with social approval, like the enduring motif of marrying the beautiful princess at the end of the show, children get readily carried along. Such children develop a deep longing to get the same kind of social approval and see violence as the only way out, Heusmann (1998). Children are not experienced enough to relate violent acts with the reason for which they are carried out. They simply want to imitate the violence even when the circumstances under which they are acting do not warrant such an act. In a study carried out in Canada children were found to have become more aggressive two years after TV was introduced to their town. During the same study, it was discovered that many housewives increasingly used TV as a babysitter thus inadvertently increasing the viewing hours of their children. Yet, it is not just children who are affected by media violence. Adults are affected too. Even though the media is extensively used to moderate state tyranny and promote human rights issues, its relationship to democratic ideals is contradictory. It plays a repressive role itself in facilitating and legitimizing inequality, hostility and hierarchy through advertisement and political propaganda that promotes consumerist lifestyles that are only available to the extreme minority, Zhao and Hackett, (2005). Consumerism of course thrives at the expense of environmental conservation efforts. Moreover, by its very structure, the media excludes the global majority from participation in public discussions, Burton, G. (2005). In addition, the media readily takes sides in any conflict portraying one side or other as the aggressor while castigating the other. This helps to form prejudices that may result in aggression against a certain group. While Al-Jazeera, on the one hand belabours the point of the causes of terrorism in the Middle East, CNN belabours the effects in the west. In this way the two news networks succeed in stirring different emotions while reporting on the same issue. It is all a matter of the news angle. Over the years, the media has been used as a messenger for state terror. The US mainstream media concentrated less on the Bush administrations unproved allegations of the existence of nuclear weapons in Iraq and directed their attention to the equally implausible claim that the Al Qaeda network had organizational cells in Iraq. In this way the media covertly supported the raid of Iraq and deposing of Saddam Hussein. After the catastrophic war that followed begun, the media resorted to belated questioning the basis on which it was fought, Jewkes, Y. (2004). Certainly, the destruction of the twin towers was already embedded cinematically in the imagination of New Yorkers long before it happened, through a profit driven film and TV industry. This, together with a TV journalism that insists on screening fires, crime, collisions and murder, has enhanced what communication scholar George Gebner referred to as a degrading, inhumane and toxic cultural environment threatened with explosion at any time, Morgan (2002). This culture makes people live in fear of a potential attacks and to generally distrust the world. In this way governments take advantage to advocate for more funds to security complexes, arms trade, aggressive foreign policy and international domination, Jewkes, Y. (2004). Terrorist organizations are born and natured out of the prevailing hatred of such foreign policy in the targeted nations. Aware of this ingrained culture, the Al Qaeda network took full advantage of it in planning their attacks. They knew that after the first plane hit the towers, the drama created would fixate the whole nation and world to the screen in time for the second attack. And that is exactly how it went down, giving them the desired publicity that shocked the world but excited their potential recruits in the Middle East, (Ibid). Another aspect of the media that promotes violence among the youth especially is the use of music with violent lyrics. Music forms a major part of electronic media entertainment. There are entertainment channels that concentrate solely on playing music. Some of the music, like in the American rap tradition, Jamaican reggae and South African Zulu music; have an underlying message of protest, disorder, deviance and defiance easily picked up by the youth. Thompson, K. (1998). The media has gone further to portray the singers as folk heroes and given their views lots of air-time. Musicians who advocate for street gang survival, violent robbery and arson in public institutions, as well as those who partake of drugs in public, are often portrayed as successful social individuals worth being imitated. The youth actively imitate them in an effort to live lifestyles similar to theirs. In many cases, such musicians are themselves in their teens and twenties lacking the requisite maturity and experience to interpret real life situations in an informed way. Their age makes the youth identify with them even more and take their views as authentic and unquestionable, Anderson C et al (2003) Sports is another related avenue through which the media conveys scenarios of violence to the youth. The enduring image of popular soccer player Zinedinne Zidane head-butting an opponent during the 2006 Fifa World Cup in Germany was quite impressive to many of his fans. There is also the car chase involving baseball folk hero O J Simpson escaping from the police which was televised live on several American channels with his fans actively cheering him on. Such scenes only encourage young people to solve problems violently in active imitation of these heroes. Youths and children tend to look up to their role models as being infallible and perfect. They therefore do not see any fault whatsoever in the way they behave, and believe that whatever they do is the right thing under any circumstances, Zuckerman D (2001). Counter Arguments By The Media The entertainment industry has been accused of hiring consultants and researchers to help deny overwhelming scientific evidence that they influence people to violence. Nevertheless, some of their arguments have proved plausible supported with tangible scientific findings. Some of these arguments are considered below. One obvious fact they put across is that the media did not create violence in the first place. Not many researchers can claim that the only cause of aggression is the media. On the contrary, many researchers have noted that the pathway to aggression is largely genetic. This argument is further strengthened by the finding that serious aggressive behaviour only occurs in a convergence of predisposing and precipitating factors. The predisposing factors include genetical orientation, while, one of the precipitating factors is, in legal terms, a motive driving the criminal or violent act. Apart from the motive, factors such as the personality types involved may result in certain individuals participating violently, while others under the same circumstances will not, Huesmann (1998). The entertainment industry also points out those complaints about the harmful effects of their trade are nothing new. Plato complained over the effects of plays on the youth. All the same, they argue, that does not prove the plausibility of such complaints. They argue that media violence research effect sizes are very low and do not give a representative picture. Though this argument has been challenged, it points out that just like in smoking-cancer research, the effect sizes involved have been grossly exaggerated, Bushman (2001). The social learning theory developed by Albert Bandura guided much of the research in the 1960s, on the effects of the then new medium of television. This theory suggests that one way by which human beings learn is the process of modeling. Modeling is based on the assumption that a human being will develop behaviour similar to that of the person he considers a role model and therefore habitually imitates. This theory goes hand in hand with that of neurophysiological assessment which propagates hypotheses on aggression. Both theories state that media violence exposure, on the short-term, increases arousal, primes aggressive concepts ideas and cognitions and leads one to automatically imitate. The ability to inhibit the tendency of imitation gradually decreases with increased exposure. In the long term, it leads to elaboration of aggressive tendencies, beliefs and interpretational schemas; aggressive beliefs about the world and social life also develop fully, while the individual becomes desensitized to violent stimuli. But this theory too has its critics who point out that most of the effects demonstrated by the researchers are inconsistent and unconvincingly small. According to another theory by McQuaila, violence from the media is encoded in the cognitive part of a viewer's brain, and all subsequent viewing of violence activates aggressive thoughts, ideas and behaviour. In another experiment, scientists, Boyatzis, Matillo and Nesbit investigated children's reaction to TV series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to prove that children become more aggressive in their styles of play it. They used 52 children of ages 5 to 11 who were divided randomly into two groups. Both groups were observed before and after one group was exposed to an episode of the program, while they played. It was observed that those who had watched the program exhibited more aggressive behaviour on the playground. The ratio of violent acts of those who had watched to those who had not was 7:1. Critics of this experiment point out that it failed to distinguish between simple aggressive and the definite intent to harm others. They said that there is a difference between threatening others at play and participating in real violence. Nevertheless, even they could not dismiss the fact that violence is employed in play as a preparation for self defense in later life. As such, the children filed the violence somewhere in the brain for use at a later date. Still, the critics argued that the research, like many others, did not exactly give evidence of a direct relation between media and violence. Another regularly employed argument by the defenders of the media is that most of the research experiments carried out do not adhere to any scientific standards or standardized criteria. This makes some of the findings disputable. Only about two hundred studies carried out have undergone peer reviews appearing in reputable scientific journals. One of the paradoxes that exist is the fact that of these experiments, only half finds a link between media and subsequent aggression while the other half don't. Taken further, this argument points out that it is quite illogical that, whereas almost everyone living in the same street may watch violent scenes on the same TV programs, only a few of them ever participate in violence. Of the other numerous studies, critics point out that there are methodological flaws. One such flaw is the failure to employ standardized, reliable and valid measurements of aggression and media violence exposure, Freedman (2002). Albeit psychological variables are tricky to measure, it is generally accepted that measurement techniques be standardized. Where there are no standard measurements, there always exists the danger of authors manipulating the outcome to support their conclusions. Another flaw is the tendency to ignore certain results in favour of those which support the intended argument. An example in point is the experimental portion of Anderson and Dill which measures aggression four different ways using video games in a Competitive Reaction Time Test. The test uses various explosions to judge the reaction time of individuals. The idea is that the more aggressive ones react faster than those who aren't. In the end, he only finds significance for one out of the four ways of measuring. Critics argue that had Bonferroni correction statistical adjustment been applied, then even his fourth set of results would have been insignificant. This selective reporting differs from the "file drawer" effect in journals ignore articles with negative findings. In this case the researcher finds mixed results but only selects to report on those that support his position totally ignoring other findings. The third flaw is the failure to account for third variable. These variables are genetics, personality and exposure to family violence at home. This may at times explain why some people either expose themselves to violent movies and programmes or become violent themselves. The fourth flaw is the constant failure to define aggression. The validity of the experimental measures of aggression has been questioned, more on the ground that the "aggression" in them is not clearly defined, for example in the case where aggressive play is lumped together with general aggression. Conclusion Despite the many plausible arguments by the media, the undeniable fact is that, their alleged weaknesses notwithstanding, the more than 1000 research experiments on the effects of media violence on behaviour cannot all be dismissed as baseless. Observations made by the leading public health institutions in the United States cannot all be without foundation. Violence in the media, media propaganda and covert rewarding of violent behaviour, do directly contribute to public violence. Children are the most affected by this phenomenon Hill, A. (1997). References Burton, G. (2005) Media and society: critical perspectives. Berkshire: Open University Press. Bushman Brad J. and Craig A. 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