PTC attacks violence on TV

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Kids watching TVThe Parents Television Council did a check and found that almost half of the television shows it watched during a survey contained some form of violence, and that nearly a third of them had gun violence. And about a third of the scenes with violence had a gun in them.


PTC said it monitored 392 programs; 193 had violence, and 121 had gun violence. Of the 193 programs with violence, there were 394 scenes with violence, 305 of which involved guns.

“We decided to put the industry’s claims to an empirical test,” said PTC’s Tim Winter. “The Parents Television Council recorded and analyzed every program on primetime broadcast television for a one-month period following the meeting with the Vice President, from January 11th through February 11th, in order to monitor just how ‘responsibly’ the industry was behaving, and to assess how effective a parent’s ‘tools’ really are. The results of our research demonstrate that Hollywood continues to be deaf to the cries for ending a media culture awash in blood. Within hours of walking out of the White House meeting, the broadcast television networks had turned on a fire hose of graphic violence, saturating living rooms across the nation with guns and gore.”

CBS was the worst offender, said Winter. “Every network aired programs that contained violence and gun violence, but CBS, CW and Fox had the highest percentage of programs with gun violence at 54%, 48% and 29%, respectively. Those three networks also aired the highest number of scenes containing violence and gun violence.”

RBR-TVBR observation: From what we have read, there has been no study that definitively ties program content to events such as took place in Newtown CT.
Yes, a tragedy happened, and after that, television programming continued on pretty much as usual. But it is very difficult to pin the blame on television for the very reason that the program content can be called normal – obviously, most of the time – despite this type of programming, such events do not occur.

Can we conclude this week, for example, that exposure to violent content makes people less likely to engage in violence in real life? Why not? It makes as much sense as does PTC’s conclusion.

 

3 COMMENTS

  1. The PTC made no claim that TV violence “caused” anything – only that in January, the industry itself pledged to be responsible and to be “part of the discussion” on violence. What’s clear from the data is that the industry has continued “business as usual” in terms of violent content.

  2. Can we conclude this week, for example, that exposure to violent content makes people less likely to engage in violence in real life? Why not? It makes as much sense as does PTC’s conclusion.

    It actually makes more sense than the PTC’s alleged conclusion, considering that FBI statistics show that violent crime has fallen steadily over the last 20 years as fake “violent” media has become more and more prevalent.

    Secondly, the PTC paid Vince McMahon and WWE $3.5 million and founder Brent Bozell publicly apologized to McMahon to settle WWE’s defamation lawsuit against the PTC over lies the PTC spread about WWE programming and over the infamous Lionel Tate case, so the veracity of any report and statement the PTC makes regarding TV, video games, movies, etc. should be immediately called into question.

    As far as the PTC’s report goes, 1) CBS has more procedural dramas(CSI, CSI:NY, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Blue Bloods, Hawaii Five-0) than any of the other networks, so of course CBS would have the highest rate of fake gun “violence”, and 2) The CW only has 10 hours of programming to work with so their percentage is skewed higher than the other networks.

    Dan Isett(the above poster), Tim Winter and the rest of the self-righteous, McCarthyist, ignorant fools at the PTC can whine all they want about “business as usual”. The US Supreme Court correctly ruled in June 2011 that fake “violent” media is protected free speech and can not be considered “obscene” to anyone by anyone. The only thing the PTC can do regarding is to go pound sand.

    Besides that, where’s the PTC’s complaints about the tabloid trash mainstream news media(Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, etc.) basically glorifying the mass murderers everytime they report on the massacres, especially when those networks put on every so-called “expert” that slithers out of their hole in the ground to blame everything but the shooter themselves?

  3. I rarely watch much network television programming other than a few select news programs and perhaps a basketball game or two during March Madness. This past week, in one of those rare moments, I was checking what was on one evening and came across a program, the name of which I can’t even remember. What I do clearly remember was an extremely violent scene, wherein a woman is speared through the abdomen with an underwater spear, the end of which protrudes though the back of the restaurant seat in which she is sitting. It was disgustingly violent, and though I’ve worked as a police officer as well as in hospital emergency rooms during my lifetime, this shocking and gratuitous piece of worthless television violence made me sit straight up in my chair.

    If this is the type of matter being served to the public on a regular basis, there’s no question, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood, that you need to take some responsibility for the desensitization of the culture that can and does indeed lead to the desanctification of human life. Another interesting bit of evidence of your hypocrisy and irresponsibility is the YouTube video that came out after Newtown, in which images of Hollywood’s finest tell us that we must “demand a plan,” interspersed with scenes of bloody gun violence from their own films interspersed between their ‘demands.’

    Hollywood and video game producers need to start acting more responsibly, by learning to tell better stories that don’t require the protrayal of gratuitous violence. The RBR-TVBR observation is irresponsible and dismissive, not to mention pathetic.

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