The Violence and Media.

The relationship between media representations and real acts of violence is one of the most contentious and hotly debated issues today. Recent surveys reveal an extensive presence of violence in modern media. Furthermore, many children and youth spend an inordinate amount of time consuming violent media. Violent incidents are highest in children's programming, with an average of twenty to twenty-five acts per hour.

Violence has always played a role in entertainment. But there's a growing consensus that, in recent years, something about media violence has changed. Researches indicate that media violence has not just increased in quantity; it has also become much more graphic, much more sexual, and much more sadistic. Explicit pictures of slow-motion bullets exploding from people's chests, and dead bodies surrounded by pools of blood, are now commonplace fare. Millions of viewers worldwide, many of them children, watch female World Wrestling Entertainment wrestlers try to tear out each other's hair and rip off each other's clothing. And one of the top-selling video games in the world, Grand Theft Auto, is programmed so players can beat prostitutes to death with baseball bats after having sex with them. The notion of violence as a means of problem solving is reinforced by entertainment in which both villains and heroes resort to violence on a continual basis. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), which has studied violence in television, movies and music videos for a decade, reports that nearly half of all violence is committed by the "good guys." Less than 10 per cent of the TV shows, movies and music videos that were analyzed contextualized the violence or explored its human consequences. The violence was simply presented as justifiable, natural and inevitable -- the most obvious way to solve the problem. Virtual violence is also readily available on the World Wide Web. Children and young people can download violent lyrics, and visit Web sites that feature violent images and video clips. Much of the violence is also sexual in nature.

One of the primary lessons of media education is that media productions are not "windows on reality," whatever their producers might like us to believe. They're deliberate constructions, the result of a series of choices. It's an eye opener for young people to realize that the main reason for the proliferation of media violence is money. Films chock-a-block with action and violence are easier to sell abroad because they "translate" with less difficulty and jump over cultural barriers.