Television is an inescapable part of modern culture. We depend on television for entertainment, news, education, culture, weather, sports and music. However, with the explosion of satellite and digital channels, we now have access to a plethora of both good quality and inappropriate TV content. According to a study funded by the cable television industry, fifth-seven percent of television programs contain “psychologically harmful” violence (3). The risk of viewing the most common depiction of televised violence include learning to behave violently, become more desensitized to the harmful consequences of violence and becoming more fearful of being attacked.
America has the largest crime rate in the world. Along with that crime rate is also the substantially high violence rate. Why? Why is violence becoming and everyday common happening in our society? When we flip on the television and tune into the news, the highlight of every show is somehow directly related or connected to violence. The children of America spend their time on many different activities. One of the most time consuming activities is watching television. Television plays a large role in the social and emotional development of children today. One good
Some people are working to end it, others are simply ignoring it, hoping that will somehow go away, and some people are trying to tell that what a child sees on TV will not affect him. We must work to eliminate the problem now. Watching cartoons on television may not make him grow up to be a cold-blooded murderer, but the total impact of witnessing repeated acts of violence may slowly cause our society to become more and more aggressive until there are too many killings to list on the news and watching one while you walk down the street is a common occurrence. We will never actually be able to tell what the ultimate impact of violence on television is until it actually happens, but will that be too late for us to recover from it? Only time will tell...
The danger with violence on television begins with imitation and experimentation. In the early 1960's, Albert Bandura of Stanford University was the first to present the theory that children not only learned from their parents through imitation but also through imitating television (2). This is an extreme case, but it is a case.
In conclusion, television violence is a major problem in our society.