From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ [I've removed several forwarding headers from this press release, none of which looked like they belonged to its originator. (You can refer to the contact information at the end of the message.) I honestly don't know what I think about this issue. I do know that it seems like a category error to say that television itself "does" anything. On the other hand, the people who produce and consume television are trying to do a whole complex set of sometimes conflicting things, and it stands to reason that something or other will come of it. Phil] "FRONTLINE" EXAMINES IMPACT OF TELEVISION ON SOCIETY IN "DOES TV KILL?" Before the average American child leaves elementary school, researchers estimate that he or she will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders on television. Has this steady diet of imaginary violence made America the world leader in real crime and violence? In "Does TV Kill?" airing on PBS Tuesday, January 10, 1995, 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings), FRONTLINE correspondent Al Austin journeys through what is known about television violence and its affects on people's lives. Using surveillance cameras in the homes of several families in Hudson, New York, the site of the first study to link TV viewing and aggressive behavior, Austin weighs what he observes about TV's effect on people against what the experts have found. Following three third graders, their families and some of the now-grown subjects of that pioneer study, the program uncovers some unexpected answers to questions about the impact of television. More than 30 years ago in Hudson, a scientist named Leonard Eron began a study of third-grade children hoping, to uncover a connection between aggressive behavior and child-rearing practices. Sprinkled through the questions Eron asked the children's parents were some friendly icebreakers, such as "How much television does the child watch? Which are his favorite programs?" "Much to our surprise," says Eron, "we found that the more violent the programs that kids watched at home, the more aggressive they were in school." Since then, nearly 3,000 studies have found a connection between television violence and real violence. Among them is a study by David Phillipps, a scientist at the University of California in San Diego, who suspected a link between highly publicized violence and copycat violence. Studying the aftermath of heavily publicized heavyweight prizefights, Phillipps found that daily U.S. murder rates increased for several days after the fights. "It also seems to be the case that the kind of person killed just after the prizefight is similar to the person beaten in the prizefight," Phillipps tells FRONTLINE. Those in the television industry -- its writers and programming executives -- say TV is not responsible for the increase in violence in American society -- that it is just a scapegoat. In congressional testimony defending television, CBS president Howard Stringer points toward a different cause of violence. "I come from a country ... that puts a lot of American movies on and has more graphic violence within its live drama on the BBC than anywhere else, and there is a lot less violence in the United Kingdom than there is here," says Stringer. "There are 200 million guns in America, and that has a lot to do with violence." Other industry professionals lay the blame elsewhere. "Parents and educators -- I know they want to point the finger at TV, and I think in a lot of ways, TV has to point the finger right back at them," says Mark Perry, a writer for the series "Law & Order." His colleague Rene Balcer agrees: "What are these kids doing watching eight hours of TV a day?" Austin's examination leads him to a town in Canada that until 1973 was the only town in North America that did not have TV. When Tannis MacBeth Williams, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, learned the isolated town, which she called "Notel," was about to receive television, she realized this might be the last opportunity to learn whether television changes people. Williams studied school-age children in Notel just before they had TV and then again two years later. "We found a significant and fairly dramatic increase in both physical and verbal aggression," says Williams. "Other people have sometimes reported our findings by saying that the level of verbal aggression and the level of physical aggression more than doubled." But at about the same time, a new interstate highway made the town more accessible to outside influences. This, the program notes, could explain some of the behavioral changes Williams observed. Through interviews and videotape from the hidden cameras, Austin looks to the Hudson families to provide some insight. FRONTLINE cameras are installed in the home of third-grader Paul Martin, whose mother won't allow him to play in the neighborhood for safety reasons. She says he watches three to four hours of TV per day. On several days when he was not in school, Paul began his day with "Power Rangers" first thing in the morning and continued viewing through the evening sitcoms. Is all this TV watching making him violent? Paul admits he has "a short fuse," but Austin finds him to be good-natured. Austin talks to Paul Abitabile, who was one of Eron's study subjects as a third-grader. He admits he watches a lot of television and says he was raised on violent programs. But, he says, it hasn't made him a violent person. While there is mounting evidence showing a correlation between TV violence and actual violence, Austin finds that none of it proves a cause and effect relationship. "There doesn't seem to be a single answer to the question, 'Does TV make people violent or antisocial?'" says Austin. "At most there seems to be a different answer for every person. No one has been able to prove why or how television affects some people and not others." At the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, Austin finds a different answer to the question of TV's impact on people. After more than 25 years of study, professor George Gerbner and his colleagues believe television violence is having a more profound effect on everybody -- adults as well as children. The amount of violence one sees in an hour of television has remained constant, Gerbner claims, only the form it takes and the number of channels offering it have changed. "What television seems to cultivate," says Gerbner, "is what we call 'the mean-world syndrome.' If you're growing up in a heavy-viewing home, for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world ... than your next door neighbor who ... watches less television. The major, most pervasive message of violence is that of insecurity and vulnerability and fear. It's obvious that we are gripped by a sense of fear, a sense of vulnerability, such as we have never known. We are afraid to go out on the street." Despite a downward trend in crime in Hudson, all of the Hudson families agree the world is a dangerous place and becoming more so. Most parents, like Paul Martin's mother, worry about dangers on the street and prefer their children stay home. But a new theory says children who watch a lot of television may develop a view of the world based on the television they watch rather than on their own experience. "Life for that kid is not going on inside the child," says Barry Sanders, who teaches the history of ideas at Claremont College in Pasadena, "but it's out there somewhere, in a box." Sanders has traced human progress from grunts to written words to books, and now, he believes to something new. "Television may be creating a new kind of human being. We are producing a generation of kids without imaginations, with an inability to conjure their own images. Because television is doing it for them. The best counter that a person has to images of violence or notions of violence out in the world, of disease, of despair, is being able to conjure images of a better world, of a different world, of a world that's filled with hope." Following the documentary portion of the program, a panel of experts who have studied the effects TV has on children will engage in a 15-minute discussion on what parents can do about their childrens' relationship with television. FRONTLINE is closed captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. "Does TV Kill?" is a co-production of Oregon Public Broadcasting and FRONTLINE. Producer: Michael McLeod. Correspondent: Al Austin. FRONTLINE is produced by a consortium of public television stations: WGBH Boston, WTVS Detroit, WPBT Miami, Thirteen/WNET New York and KCTS Seattle. Executive producer: David Fanning. Senior producer: Michael Sullivan. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided by public television viewers, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. # # # Terry Dugas Southwest Florida Public Television ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)