Year Six of the War on Terror: TV Violence, Selfishness and Insults Have
Skyrocketed
By Margot
Pepper
Violence, selfishness and
insults have skyrocketed on national television since the first year of the war
on terror, my second grade students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley,
California found. Results in Venice are likely to be similar.
For the last decade, I’ve had
students analyze television preceding National TV-off week organized by the
TV-Turnoff Network. The mostly seven-year-old students are asked to collect all
the data themselves, since their teacher has never owned a television. An
average total of 35 children’s television shows, both in Spanish and
English, are studied for a period of seven days.
The first day of the study, as
homework, students record how many times they see hitting, hurting or killing on
half-hour segments of the shows they regularly watch, viewed from beginning to
end.
The second day, they are to focus on
acts of selfishness; the third day, on instances of put-downs and the fourth
day, on the number of times a typical class rule is broken.
Finally, in class, each of four groups
of students compiles the data produced by the homework, focusing on one of the
four variables in the study.
But this
year, when I pulled out old samples of graphs compiled by a class in April of
2002 as models, the contrasts between the graphs produced five years ago and
this April shocked my students.
“In a half hour of ‘Jackie
Chan’ in 2002 you would see hitting 10 times at most,” wrote gifted
7-year old Flynn Michael Legg. “In 2007, shows of ‘Jackie
Chan’ had 34 hitting scenes.” For the 2001/2002 season—year
one of President George Bush’s ‘war on terror’ – nearly
one fourth of the television shows my students watched had one or no acts of
violence at all in one half-hour. Now of the shows they randomly watch, only
“That’s So Raven” continues to have no violence, and all other
shows have at least three instances of hitting or violence in one half-hour.
Today, nearly half of shows randomly viewed by my students contain hitting or
more violent acts 7 to 34 times each half hour.
The maximum number of gratuitous
put-downs or insults has nearly doubled since 2002, going from 10 in
“That’s So Raven” to 18 in “Dumb and Dumber;” over
one put-down every two minutes. In “Sponge Bob Square Pants,” Flynn
pointed out, one would hear at most two put downs in 2002. Today it’s 16.
No shows had more than 10 put-downs in 2002. Now three shows have more
put-downs: “Sponge Bob”: 16; “Dumb and Dumber”: 18; and
“Letty La Fea”: 13. Very few shows have no insults any more.
All the shows my students watched this
year showed people or characters being selfish at least once in each half hour.
In 2002, only three shows had more than three acts of selfishness in a half
hour. Now, 10 did. Half of the shows showed 5 to 9 instances of selfishness each
half hour.
Students also found that in
April 2002, only one show depicted the violation of ordinary class rules (no
hitting, put downs, swearing etc.) 12 or more times. In April 2007, the number
of such programs rose to six. In 2001, the maximum times class rules were broken
on a given half-hour show was 17 on one show. In 2007 the number of such shows
has quadrupled with the maximum number of rules broken on a given show doubling
or reaching over 34.
These differences
compelled us to substantiate our findings with internet research. Indeed,
children in the “yellow group” found that according to a 2007 study
by the Parent’s Television Council (PTC) called “Dying to
Entertain,” since 1998, violence on ABC network has quadrupled (309%
increase.) In 1998 the station had about one act of violence per hour (.93). By
2007, it was almost four or (3.8) on average. CBS, according to the PTC study,
had the highest percentage of deaths during 2005-06, with over 66% of violent
scenes depicting death after 8 pm <www.parentstv.org>.
Students in the “blue
group” reading the same PTC study noted that now violence has shifted to
being more central to the story with more graphic autopsy scenes or torture
scenes. The study remarks that the 2005-6 season beginning in the fall was one
of the most violent ever recorded by the
PTC.
Precocious seven-year-old Maeve
Gallagher reported in her essay that “The green group found kids will have
seen “200,000 violent acts on television by age 18…and 16,000
murders,” according to Real Vision, a project of the TV-Turnoff Network.
“Videos and TV are teaching kids to like killing, according to a 1999
Senate Judiciary Committee Report entitled ‘Children, Violence and the
Media,’” Maeve cited. The Senate report also found that 10 percent
of crimes committed are caused by violence seen on television.
The findings by students in the red
group convinced the rest of the class to limit their viewing of television,
turning it off completely during the TV-Turnoff Network’s TV-off
week--something they were reluctant to do when our unit of television study
began. What they discovered, largely thanks to the TV-Turnoff Network’s
website <www.tvturnoff.org> is that there are more televisions (2.73) in
the average home than people (2.55.)—(USA Today)
The average home has a television on 8
hours a day, more than 10 years ago, asserts Nielsen (2006.) Children who watch
6 or more hours a day perform worse on reading tests than do those who watch 1
hour a day or don’t play video games, reports the Center for Screentime
Awareness <www.screentime.org>. And by the time they finish high school,
children will have spent more hours watching TV than in school.
“I suspect the increase in
television violents [sic] has something to do with the war on terror,”
Andres Ventura hypothesized in his essay summing up his conclusions to the
study. “By scaring kids and parents and pushing violence, people are more
likely to vote for war. The TV makes you dumb because if you see a lot it makes
you forget things. It makes parents dumb too. It makes them forget how things
were when they were
kids.”
“If you watch too
much TV when you are an adult, you lose the kid that is inside you.”
– Maeve Gallagher
agreed.
“Watching television
replaces your imagination with television thinking and there’s not much
space left after that,” Daniel Hernandez-Deras, commented a few years
ago.
One of the most shocking facts my
students found was that according to The TV-Turnoff Network’s Real Vision
project, parents spend only 38.5 minutes a day with their children in meaningful
conversation. And more than half of 4-6 years olds (54%) would rather watch TV
than spend time with their
parents.
This finding inspired
Alejandro González unique conclusion: “I think Jorge [sic] Bush wants
to make people more scared. We know Jorge Bush likes war. And… TV makes
you like more war. What’s scary is kids spend more time seeing TV than
being with their dad. Since our study, I turn off the TV more and go play with
my dad. Maybe the president used to watch more TV than being with his
dad.”
Margot Pepper is a former
Venetian and a contributor to the Beachhead. Her memoir, Through the Wall: A
Year in Havana, was reviewed in our August 2005 issue.
www.Venice-Beachhead.org
Posted: Mon - October 1, 2007 at 08:10 PM