The myth of media violence

After being eviscerated by Pulitzer-winning journalist Richard Rhodes in his prodigious online article "The Media Violence Myth," even the researcher largely responsible for the exaggerated sense of social consensus on the issue has partially and reluctantly backtracked. In 1986, University of Michigan psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann presented the Senate Judiciary Committee with a dramatic bar graph purporting to show that boys who watched violent TV at age 8 were exceptionally likely to have been convicted of serious crimes by age 30.

The ripple effect of this presentation was tremendous; more than any other single event, it fueled the impression among critics of violent media that they had a scientific case. Huesmann did not admit for many years, until cornered by Rhodes, that the total number of boys he had identified in a Columbia County, N.Y., study who had watched violent TV and then became violent criminals was three. A trio of thugs in the boondocks had watched shoot'em-ups as 8-year-olds, and it somehow became a significant statistical finding.

In their lengthy and confusing response to Rhodes' article, Huesmann and his colleague Leonard Eron defend their view that media violence is harmful, arguing that several other studies support theirs. (This is perfectly true. As Fowles' book rigorously demonstrates, the problem with media-violence research as a field is that it reveals no consistent pattern of results, and people on any side of the issue can cherry-pick the studies they like and ignore the others.) In a mixture of brazen overstatement and social-science weasel words, they proclaim that the case "implicating media violence as a risk factor for violent behavior" is as strong as the link between smoking and cancer.

Then comes the bombshell. Near the end of their defense, but before a bizarre personal attack on Rhodes (for being a harsh critic of books he doesn't like, and for taking testosterone supplements), Huesmann and Eron write: "Nowhere have we ever indicated that media violence is the only or even a major cause of violence among youth." I had to read this three times to grasp it: These guys, whose quasi-bogus research subjected us all to a thousand preachy Oprah shows and Joe Lieberman speeches, now say that media violence is not a major cause of real-life youth violence. Instead, it's a marginal "risk factor," responsible for no more than 10 percent of the crime rate. (By contrast, Dave Grossman, the retired Marine colonel who is one of the nation's leading anti-media evangelists, claims that media violence is responsible for at least half of all violent crime.)

We've also heard from criminologists, lawyers and literary scholars as the tide of counterarguments has swelled. The latest of these last is Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College in New York whose new book, "Savage Pastimes," provides an eye-opening survey of gruesome entertainment throughout the history of Western civilization. Schechter's main point concerns what scholars call the "periodicity" of campaigns like Sen. Clinton's latest screed. Every time a technological shift occurs (such as from books to movies, radio to TV, movies to video games), he argues, it produces a new medium for gruesome entertainment aimed at adolescent audiences, and produces a renewed outrage among the self-appointed guardians of civilization.

One remarkable example, not cited by Schecter: In 1948, there was an enormous uproar in Canada over a meaningless killing committed by two boys, ages 13 and 11. Pretending to be highwaymen, they hid near a road with a stolen rifle and shot at a passing car, killing a passenger. When it was revealed that they were avid readers of crime comic books, the anti-comics movement swelled. This story bears an uncanny similarity to a recent case, examined in Salon, in which two boys ages 15 and 13 stole their father's rifle, hid near a highway and shot at a passing car, killing a passenger. The youths defended themselves on the grounds that playing "Grand Theft Auto" made them do it.

The Jeremiahs who condemn violent entertainment, whether crime comics or "Grand Theft Auto," also invariably lament the passage of a golden age, generally contemporaneous with their own childhoods, when entertainment was healthful and wholesome, suitable for infants and grannies alike. I don't mean to impugn Granny, who may have a healthy appetite for phony bloodshed, but these moral guardians' sunny views of the past either reflect fuzzy memories or whopping hypocrisy.

Schechter offers an amusing catalog of the outrageous bloodshed and mayhem found in popular entertainment since time immemorial, from the classics (as he observes, the onstage blinding of Gloucester in "King Lear" -- "out, vile jelly" -- is one of the most traumatic acts of violence in any medium) to the pornographic sadism of Grand-Guignol theater, the lurid sensationalism of turn-of-the-century "penny papers" and the ugly misogyny of Mickey Spillane's best-selling pulp novels. Undoubtedly Hillary Clinton would prefer that today's kids read books instead of playing "GTA," and Schechter might suggest "Seth Jones: or, The Captives of the Frontier," a wilderness adventure that was one of the best-selling kids' books of the 19th century. In one scene, the hero comes upon the corpse of a man who has been tied to a tree by Indians and burned to death:

"Every vestige of the flesh was burned off to the knees, and the bones, white and glistening, dangled to the crisp and blackened members above! The hands, tied behind, had passed through the fire unscathed, but every other part of the body was literally roasted!" Seth is greatly relieved, however, to discover that the victim was not a white man. As Schechter says, it's impossible to imagine anyone publishing this as kiddie lit today, both for its gore quotient and its casual racism.

In another dime novel of the period, a rattling Western adventure called "Deadwood Dick on Deck," Schechter reports that more than 100 people are killed in the first two chapters, a figure that fans of "Resident Evil" and "Doom" can only view with awe and veneration. Then there's the gruesome "comic" yarn Schechter digs up from 1839, in which that authentic American hero, Davy Crockett, engages in a "scentiforous fight" with an individual referred to as "a pesky great bull nigger" (and also as "Blackey," "Mr. Nig" and "snow-ball"). Crockett ends the battle by gouging out one of his adversary's eyes, feeling "the bottom of the socket with end of my thum."

Next Page: Are movies and TV more corrupting than books? Maybe, maybe not

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