What To Do About TV Violence
Haag, Ernest van den
Ernest van den Haag What To Do About TV Violence
In the last ten years the crime rate rose 144 percent. Nobody knows exactly what role each of the many suspected causes plays. Family...
...Our Constitution prohibits any abridgment of freedom of speech or freedom of the press...
...It is quite enough if TV reports a riot and pictures its effects...
...Some violence is unavoidable if TV is to be realistic and, in principle, aesthetically true...
...The Founding Fathers were concerned with protecting political discussion and the communication of ideas and facts in general...
...So is the pictorial reporting for informational purposes of the violence of war or of crime, of things as they actually happen...
...it can refuse to renew licenses of stations which do not conform to its rather vague requirements...
...But let that go...
...Still, most people are restrained by its existence from doing what it prohibits, and only the most controversial cases come to trial...
...But TV also may stimulate the desire for violence, invite imitation, and serve as a model...
...The knowledge of violence as distinct from graphic depiction is not likely to lead to imitative violence...
...Not all violence should be banned...
...The rationale is simple...
...Whereupon the tortures—which I am reluctant even to describe—were repeated to accommodate the customers...
...The firstquantity—is most easily enforced...
...And while it is hard to control the influence of parents and friends, that of public communications, technically at least, can be controlled...
...rids one case where I prefer the intto.- tion to the real thing) -Yet '1.1.7 violence also reaches tar more people than ever could attend pudic tot ores, and it is ailtoo convincing and, however unintentionally, persuasive...
...I believe that there is a broad general consensus in their favor...
...TV violence is likely to play a double role...
...Only zealots will value totally unrestrained expression, wherever it may lead, more than the control of violence and crime...
...It seems to me that three kinds of formulas are available to control TV violence so defined...
...Grand guignol may be entertainment but scarcely art...
...This is hard to believe...
...and, with the reduction of criminogenic effects, by moral gains...
...However, TV channels are legally owned by the government...
...The other two require qualitative distinctions, which will always be controversial...
...We rarely can trace specific acts to specific shows or books, and the message often is implicit...
...The proposed rules would have a similar effect on TV shows...
...But this does not make them unenforceable...
...The violence of Shakespearean or Greek drama or of the Bible is legitimate...
...and propaganda does, and advertising...
...It is doubtful that they meant the Bill of Rights to protect westerns, gangster movies, pornography, or soap operas, or to prevent the government from limiting the broadcasting of violence...
...No, the display of violence is not new...
...Whatever artistic losses occur by not showing every gory detail are likely to be offset by aesthetic gains, once writers and directors cannot resort to cheap and sensational substitutes for art to get us involved...
...Suppose that the FCC were legally free to restrain TV violence...
...Family disintegration, parental permissiveness, social resentment all contribute...
...It indeed helps to discharge and, as Aristotle had it, purify us of what is enacted on stage or screen...
...But that merely means that the influence of TV is diffuse, and merges with many other influences, not that it has no influence...
...The amount of violence is left to the sponsors or stations involved...
...If we grant the incompetence of politically instituted authority to make aesthetic judgments, the case for government subsidies to art becomes weak: if the government cannot distinguish bad art from good, enough to ban at least some of the bad, how can it distinguish good from bad art, enough to subsidize some of the good...
...The violence sometimes produced at the actual instigation of TV newsmen during riots, or at their behest, could not be shown...
...And for some, depending on their own prior experiences and personalities, TV violence may play a major role, exemplifying manliness, or decisiveness, and Ernest van den Haag 's hitctit book :17: Punishing Criminals, leading them to carry out what they had a latent disposition to do...
...More than that can and should be avoided, for it may well increase the acceptability of violence...
...Once a broad consensus is reached on these principles, an institutional framework to enforce them can be created...
...At an eighteenth-century execution in the city of Bruges, when some criminals were being tortured to death and the executioner was about to administer the coup de grace (and it was a grace), some spectators protested that they had not been able to see because the scaffold was too high...
...Total quantity: Over a reasonable period—e.g., six months—no more than x percent of TV time should be given over to violence displayed whether in the news, in drama, or in any other form...
...What rules could we conceive then for an authority—governmental or other—to distinguish legitimate displays from dispensable displays of violence on TV...
...Context: Violence on TV should be shown only when it is an integral and in-dispensable part of the news, the information, or the drama presented, never otherwise...
...The criminal law too is controversial: defense and prosecution rarely agree on whether it has been violated...
...The very fact that the violence is shown for entertainment suggests that it gratifies a desire...
...If so, TV violence may actually help to control our latent inclinations to violent behavior...
...There is another side to this coin...
...So does the uncertainty of legal punishment—only one percent of all reported crimes (including crimes of violence) lead to prison terms now...
...Without quite definite rules, the decisions of the authority would be utterly capricious...
...Does it influence them...
...In drama violence may be discussed or inferred: little is gained by displaying it...
...but it is used, perhaps for this very reason, exclusively to make sure that the quantity of "public service" provided vs...
...The three restraints barely sketched here must be compounded...
...But perhaps some formulas are possible...
...poetry, or art, which are ;n The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 7 tended to address emotions, or to entertain, rather than purely to inform and address the intellect...
...Yet the desire is gratified vicariously and perhaps it is discharged harmlessly...
...Perhaps the legal obstacles could be overcome if, as someday may happen, the courts finally interpret the First Amend-Meat to refer to cognitive speech only--to information and descriptive commanictii:n of ideas or facts--and no longer to symbolic and pictorial expression, rush as drama...
...Up to the seventeenth century towns would purchase doomed criminals from one another so as to be able to offer the spectacle of execution to their citizens...
...Such reflective violence is unlikely to add to the violence that occurs in reality...
...Except to insist on public service programming and fairness, the Federal Communications Commission, wisely perhaps, has generally shied away from involving itself in program contents...
...There are at least two major difficulties for governmental attempts to control TV...
...In effect, that would mean that if there is more violence in the news then there must be less in drama...
...There is no legitimate purpose in filming the actual riot so that the actors become aware that they are acting for the cameras, and are inspired accordingly...
...Are they wasting their money...
...Begin by defining "violence" as theprocess of killing or intentionally inflicting injury on a sensate being...
...An immense amount of pretty gory violence is indeed shown on TV, and an immense amount of time is spent by many people, particularly the young, looking at it...
...If we assume then that TV has some influence on how people think, feel and, ultimately, act, and that the influence can be for the worse as well as for the better, we must confront the question: What should be done about TV violence...
...And unlike former displays, at least TV violence is feigned...
...Yet a constant diet of violent shows—and many people get just that—may make violence more acceptable as a way of dealing with problems...
...to some it is a prime suspect...
...Pictorial reporting that amounts to instigation is never needed...
...Surely a book such as the Bible has influenced people...
...Kind: Violence on should never be altogether explicitly or graphically depicted...
...TV is one of many suspects...
...But certainly not for all...
...Politicians appear on TV to put their point across...
...How would it select...
...Ernest van den Haag What To Do About TV Violence In the last ten years the crime rate rose 144 percent...
...The more graphically the process and the concomitant suffering are depicted and referred to, the greater the degree of violence shown...
...The power of the government over TV channels is great, even excessive...
...The attractiveness of this formula is that no aesthetic judgments would be needed to enforce it...
...commercial programming" is sufficient, and to enforce the "fairness" of licensees, their obligation to give both sides of controversial matters...
...It is needed neither for aesthetic nor for informational purposes...
...People will not run out and commit crimes merely because they have seen a crime shown on TV...
...Nobody in his right mind would want to entrust aesthetic distinctions to authority: authorities have never been known to be aesthetically competent...
...Now although TV is new, violence as a spectacle is not...
...One can deny this probability only by arguing that people are not influenced by what they see, hear, or read...
...The courts have interpreted the First Amendment to preclude any prior restraints on what is shown or said on TV...
...No doubt it does so for some people...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
