Scaring Up A Simple Crisis

When a Senate panel decided to browbeat television executives about television violence this summer, most in the media pooh-poohed the proceedings as a political show. Calling the veiled threats mere posturing, the media declared that once the Senators involved had blown their rhetorical horns for the C-SPAN cameras, the issue would fade away.

Unfortunately, it hasn't. November is upon us, and politicians are still getting political mileage from TV-bashing.

The arguments against the dubious proposition that television violence is an important cause of real violence in America are legion, and fairly obvious. Somali children gleefully fire grenades at clan rivals, while Bosnians and Serbs rape and kill each other, all without encouragement from television. Homo homini lupus--"man is a wolf to man"--was Plautus' lament long before NYPD Blue.

And if most viewers were truly slaves to imitation of TV, rather than committing acts of random violence, they probably would subscribe to the sentimental altruism and simpleminded moralism of most TV "good guys."

More important to consider is how this marginal issue has pushed its way into the spotlight as yet another American crisis-of-the-month. Even local politicians are jumping on the bandwagon--yesterday night Fanueil Hall witnessed a "town meeting on TV violence and its impact on kids."

At the national level, this summer's anti-violence crusader Sen. Paul Simon has gained a powerful ally in Attorney General Janet Reno. Reno, embattled by an unbroken string of well-publicized law enforcement failures, has recognized what the bow-tied Mr. Potatohead of Capitol Hill has shrewdly seen all along: TV violence, unlike real violence, is an inherently solvable, if completely delusory, "problem."

Pressuring television executives worried about regulation to make a few cuts is far easier than getting guns off the street or instilling morality in the population; no one really knows how to accomplish the latter goals.

It is ironic that Janet Reno should now set her sights on purging television of violence. Isn't this the woman who brought the nation the televised immolation of the Waco cultists? The third-most qualified woman in America did not see fit to pursue an investigation of the Crown Heights pogrom. Perhaps it is because Reno has been so unsuccessful at combating real violence that she must confine herself to taking on the fictitious sort.

But even on television, it is the real violence that is the most disturbing. A lynch-mob of police officers pummel Rodney King; a hoodlum smashes Reginald Denny's head with a brick. The ceaselessly repeated footage of these incidents is far worse than anything Hollywood could ever dream up.

The broadcast of these disturbing images do promote violence. Not, as the psychobabblers claim, because they foster "desensitization," but because in all these cases the perpetrators have hardly been punished. Why should people internalize morality and restrain themselves from violence when society refuses to stigmatize such behavior as dangerous, criminal and deserving of punishment? At least on primetime, the bad guys usually get caught.

Interestingly enough, the issue of violence on the news is largely ignored by all but a few activists. (One prominent activist is Barbara Walters, who clearly does not feel that the news need burden us with the vagaries of war or crime so long as a star or Kennedy is around to be interviewed.) This in part betrays the intellectualist biases of the anti-television crusaders. CNN is undoubtedly the most violent network on television, yet its proprietor Ted Turner can, without any irony at all, testify before a Senate Panel about the ills of TV violence.

Reno, Simon, and company are worried sick about what exposure to violent images will do to the masses who watch TV for entertainment. For some reason, they do not think that their well-educated and well-heeled peers are at risk from watching violent informational programming.

But perhaps the most powerful reason they have for remaining silent about violence in news programming is that the solutions they have advocated for entertainment, if applied to news programming, would be shown up for what they amount to: paternalistic censorship. Changing the truth is obviously inimical to a free society: changing the content of fiction is a less clear, but just as menacing, threat.

Reno and Simon have been helped in their Comstockian crusade by a degenerate gene pool and a population unwilling to accept responsibility. A few young children set fires; a few older children decide to lie down in the road for kicks. Their parents, instead of blaming either their own defective child-rearing, or their children's congenital dunderheadedness decide to blame Beavis and Butt-head and Disney.

The chill has begun. The entertainment community isn't taking any chances as Disney cut the offending scene and MTV excised any references to fire. Perhaps NBC News should show some solidarity and cut out coverage of the California wildfires, lest any children get the wrong idea.

For self-proclaimed experts, it is amazing how poorly the anti-violence crusaders understand television. Beavis and Butt-head is not the harbinger of some sociological sea-change. The antics of a pair of dolts is a popular American genre as old as Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and these vaudevillians hardly brought down the Union.

Senator Earnest Hollings railed against an episode of CBS' "Love and War" which featured a violent fight scene; he didn't realize that the show was intended as a job at Congressional concern with TV violence. The Senators seem hopelessly befuddled by the idiom of the medium that they yearn to regulate.

Amidst all this sound and fury, what they fail to recognize is that blaming television shows for anti-social behavior undermines any notion of moral responsibility. If we accept that television or the movies can overwhelm free will, how can we hold anyone responsible for anything? More importantly, how can we cling to the sanctity of free expression, if free expression can effectively enslave those exposed to it?

TV is a mirror, not a mind-control device Entertainment programming is a reflection of what we like; news programming is a reflection of what we do. If we are to judge from the jubilant gesticulations of Damian Williams as he crushed Reginald Denny's skull, some people find violence uniquely satisfying and do not hesitate to do violent things. This is what must be changed. When we don't like the image we see in the mirror, we may be tempted to smash it; that only hides the problem. We have to change ourselves.

Benjamin J. Heller '94 is pleased to see that the fuss over television violence has lasted long enough for him to write another piece about it.