Few are the issues, these days, that escape the quagmire of controversy. Our society seems to be swiftly unraveling at the seams, while people grope helplessly for an ex­planation that would shed light on the problems, allow for a resolution to the madness, and give life a chance at TV sitcom “Normality’ as described by former vice president Dan Quayle: A society built on family values where we love and cherish one another, respect our elders, are kind to strangers and those less fortu­nate, and have a 50’s sense of morality. Not one populated by single-parent fami­lies, with 13-year olds who get drunk, have sex, do drugs, and kill one another; where planes are hi-jacked, justice is not served, riots break out in the streets, businesses are destroyed, and women and children die of starvation.

Societal disintegration has been attributed to everything from the women’s liberation movement to rock and roll, pov­erty, the industrial revolution, war, and the UN.

The latest topic for collective soul searching is violence in the media. It’s everywhere. In art, film, books, maga­zines, newspapers, TV programs, and the news.

Congress will be passing a bill next month limiting the amount of vio­lence allowed on television and request­ing that programs be rated for their degree of violence. President Clinton addressed a group of Hollywood movers and shakers in December in an attempt to lure them to his side in the campaign for TV programs that would educate and enlighten our youth with messages of inspiration, rather than the usual fare of violence, fear, and de­struction that Hollywood has been dishing out.

One area overlooked in the cam­paign to reduce society’s exposure to vio­lence has been the news. Whether local or national, in magazine or talk-show for­mat, this area of the media has been spared. In the meantime, news coverage has be­come more and more graphic in its expo­sure of violence while criticism over its effect on the viewing audience, and on those being covered, is growing louder.

When television first started, it had no competition. We had newspapers and radios, but they could not afford us with the kind of intimacy that television did. The three networks had full and total control over their viewers. The medium was exclusive because it was shot on film, and, therefore, expensive. And then, there was video! The explosion of video and the many other technologies that it spawned from satellites, ENG trucks, and afford­able equipment to cable, turned the mar­ket on its head. Stations mushroomed, instead of just the networks, we had inde­pendents and, soon thereafter, cable.

In a very short period of time, the cable industry splintered the market into hundreds of mini-markets, targeting spe­cialized audiences with specialized inter­ests and, in effect, shrinking the networks’ viewing audience. At first, the networks felt that if all else failed, they still had a monopoly over the news. But then, in 1981, Ted Turner hatched his brainchild, CNN, the Cable News Network. News programming and the networks have yet to recover. To fulfill its promise of 24-hour news coverage, CNN had to feed its viewers continuous, exciting footage, or die.. It found itself successful, in fact, excellent at delivering what has come to be the most controversial of all, program­ming of television news, the “Live from Location’ shots. If there was a war, CNN was there. A hostage situation, a hijack­ing, a coup, a baby in a well, a riot, an election, a peace treaty, a speech, a shoot­ing, a beating, a bombing, a police raid, a drug bust, a welcoming, a farewell em­brace, a fire, a hurricane, a flood, CNN was there, “live and on location.”

If CNN could do it, the argument went, then all other stations could, and had to do it, too. That’s what started to happen; however, that is not where it stopped. Things began snowballing, they devel­oped a life of their own. To capture viewing audiences from each other, sta­tions had to be more sensational, more gruesome, more bloody, more gripping, and more daring. If their cameras missed capturing the action live, due to unfore­seen limitations, they staged their own recreations. If they could milk the event for more, it became next month’s “Movie of the Week,” the “story behind the head­line.”

Should critics of this burgeoning genre take them to task and dare to raise the question that their coverage of unrav­eling events could, at times, endanger people’s lives, a chorus of First Amend­ment promoters would rush to defend the sanctity of the people’s right to know. And, they do; however, is it always the correct decision to reveal the whole truth, regardless of the consequences?  

“Live on location” news has yielded a most disturbing result, perhaps the lightening rod of all arguments against violence on television: A study conducted by social researchers found that children had trouble distinguishing what was real from what was staged. When shown war footage and TV program footage, inde­pendent of their context, children were unable to make the distinction. The line between fact and fiction had become blurred. The fear arose that if children

became desensitized to violence, they might commit it themselves. With a mad­man shooting a president to impress a film star because he saw it in a movie and assertions that children are claiming to be drawn to Satanism, and police brutality by certain lyrics in contemporary songs, the cry for regulation of content has become louder and more righteous by critics who assess that exposure to violence in the media increases the propensity toward vio­lence.

Is the case of the protesters legit­imate? Does violence incite violence? Does covering criminal acts glorify the criminals and their crimes? Have our news and entertainment directors become too lazy to produce a creative and substan­tive piece on important issues such as illiteracy, unemployment, health and policy—the roots of our society’s problems and would rather rely on footage of vio­lence because it is a lot easier to produce? Is watching violence the only ‘adrenaline rush’ we get in days filled with long hours at work, cranky bosses, bad marriages, and demanding kids? Has it become our only cheap outlet for all the frustration and rage we feel? Have we become a blood-thirsty and dehumanized society be­cause we watch violence in the media?

The chain of blame in this issue is tangled, with every level of the media production process passing the buck: News stations should be the ones to set guide­lines; programmers should set guidelines on what is acceptable and what isn’t; ad­vertisers, not station managers, nor the police, nor the FBI, nor the army, nor even Congress! However, every time anybody tries to regulate TV, we, the people, are up in arms. We are adults, we can regulate ourselves. If we do not want to watch a program we can switch channels, refuse to buy the newspaper, pass up the movie.

But what about the kids? We can not be with them all the time. We cannot always regulate what they watch. Some advocate sanitizing programming before 9 p.m. But, what about teenagers? What about the local news? There is al­ways a counter-argument for every argu­ment.

So, how does one answer the ques­tion, does violence on TV influence us? Moderation, as always, is the best policy, followed by more critical and selective viewing that can evaluate the pros and cons on the scale of the larger picture.

Remember that Hollywood and news programming do respond to market and viewing habits. Turn off the TV. Spend time with each other. Relearn the art of conversation. If children are loved, respected, and not neglected, they might not turn into hardened criminals. Children emulate what they see around them. If there is tension in the home, they pick it up. If there is hate, anger, frustration, they sense it. If they are ignored, they seek attention grabbing situations. If good ex­amples are not being set at home and in school, then televisionjust feeds that emp­tiness, but it does not brainwash them. That, their environment may already have taken care of.

Further, it is not just physical vio­lence on TV that one has to worry about, it is the violence that comes from bigotry and hate, from misinformation and ma­nipulation, from telling a story from a narrow-minded perspective. Violence isn’t bad. It is the people who use it gratuitously and out of context that are.

Also, it is not just violence that has to be reconsidered, but the audience s viewing habits. Their attention span. Their thirst for something new every week. Their expectancy for the news to be part and parcel of the entertainment. Their belief that the tube is purely to entertain because, the truth be told, that is what it has become.

Television has become a medium to self-perpetuate all other mediums. It is its own and other communication module’s public relations machine. And that is what needs to be changed.

Television has to understand its power and use it well. It has become a loud and obnoxious parasite guest that feeds at our minds everyday, and we have gotten so used to it, we are unable to fleece it out and trash it.

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