Home » Writing & Publishing » Media Literacy » Focus on Media Violence

Focus on Media Violence

© Kim Imdieke

An 18-year-old boy locks himself in his room, mesmerized for hours by the corpse-filled video game Doom while shock-rocker Marilyn Manson screams obscenities from the stereo. Shelved nearby are a video collection including the graphically violent film Natural Born Killers and a diary replicating the unrestrainted expressions of hate and death published on the boy's personal website. Should this boy's media preferences be cause for alarm?

The question is not new, but the April 20 massacre of 12 students and a teacher by fellow Columbine High students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold has added urgency to the search for answers. The Littleton, Colorado teenagers reportedly immersed themselves in the same media described above, even producing and starring in their own murderous video before gunning down their classmates and apparently taking their own lives. In the aftermath of the killing spree, a Denver radio station cancelled a Marilyn Manson concert, Hillary Clinton denounced the media's role in America's "culture of violence," and the President exhorted Hollywood to shoulder resposibility at a strategy session on youth violence.

"We cannot pretend that there is no impact on our culture and our children that is adverse if there is too much violence coming out of what they see and experience," Clinton told reporters after the session. Yet media representatives defend the entertainment industry, denying any direct link between violent media and violent behavior.

Does Media Violence Adversely Affect Attitudes and Behavior?

Award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee explores this question in Kids and Guns, a special edition of the children's news program Nick News. Ellerbee says: "Call me silly, but I don't think we need 3000 studies to tell us TV is too violent. And while we may not yet fully understand the result of kids watching so much violence on TV or in the movies, we still need to talk about it more."

Ellerbee proceeds to "talk about it" with several children and adolescents, one of whom observes that media representations of violence seldom portray victims' pain. Communications scholar George Gerbner calls this violence without consequences "happy violence," a cheap industrial commodity designed to fill narrative gaps.

In the Media Education Foundation video The Killing Screens, Gerbner explains how the media cultivates our perception of the world. He describes what he calls the Mean World Syndrome, where frequent consumption of violent media results in a perception of the world as dangerous, a belief that violence is a normal mode of behavior. Especially for those with few options for mainstream participation, Gerbner says, the Mean World Syndrome enhances a sense of violence as an appropriate response to problems.