What's all this about violins on television?

Yes, that should be violence, if you remember SNL's "Emily Litella." Do screen time and violent content yield violent people?

Screens are everywhere. And so is content. Image created by Microsoft Co-Pilot. from a prompt.

You are well aware of the shooting of an insurance company chief executive, Brian Thompson, on December 4 and the capture of the alleged perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, five days later. In the surveillance videos, after the shooting. Mangioni appeared to calmly walk to an e-bike and pedal away. Five days later, he was spotted routinely eating a burger and fries at a McDonalds 280 miles from New York. Did he really expect to get away with this assassination?

Several days after the Thompson shooting, I was watching an episode in the recent Netflix series, “Black Doves,” in which a main character walks to a diner in a booth in a restaurant, puts a bullet through his skull, calmly walks out, gets into the car, and drives off.

I’m not suggesting cause and effect. Just the congruence.

Violence on television has long been studied

Violence on television and its effect on behavior has been a fertile field for researchers for decades. In 1969, the Surgeon General’s Office proclaimed TV violence a public health problem. The U.S. Government funded a million dollars in research to determine definitive evidence on its effects. What were the findings? Undeterminate:

According to the 23 commissioned studies and the report that summarized them—it depends. Television might influence some kids, but other factors—parental attitudes, personality, and community violence—also seemed to play a crucial role in aggressive behavior. In sum, the report stated, “Television is only one of the many factors which in time may precede aggressive behavior. It is exceedingly difficult to disentangle from other elements of an individual’s life history.”

Today, the violence of 1960s and 70s television is exponentially more significant in both scale and scope. In scale due to the gruesomeness and explicitness of the action. And in scope as the result of the vast expansion of content with the adoption of streaming services vying for a fractionalized audience. Last September, when I asked, “Are we in the midst of a new Golden Age of television?” I noted that in the early 1960s, there was a total of 73 hours per week of original prime-time quality programming spread among the three broadcast networks. Contrast that with the 600 hours of original scripted series across the broadcast, cable, and streaming landscape. Not all may be rated as violence content, but much of it is.

For starters, just take the number of bodies left behind in such recent adventures as the aforementioned “Black Doves” or in the older “24” series from 2001 through 2014.

In the nine seasons aired of “24”, the main character, Kifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, killed 304 primarily bad guys. In the recent six episodes of “Black Doves,” nine featured characters plus numerous henchmen (e.g., in the credits as “Gunman #1) are shot and likely dead. In a scene in episode three, a main character shoots four bad guys, attired head to toe in black, of course, in daylight in what would seem to be a residential area of London. No sirens of police or ambulances ensued. Presumably, all the dead bodies in an apartment and on the fire escape are left there.

I know, I know. This is entertainment. It’s Hollywood (or London). However, there’s some evidence that there may be a cumulative effect on some minds that suggests that it’s reasonable to expect that one could walk away from crime, let alone a murder.

…and video games

By the 1990s, TV viewing was outpaced by concerns of video game violence. You may recall that it was the decade of the advent of school shootings culminating with the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The Columbine shooters were known to be avid fans of the shooter game Doom. This incident, accurately or not, cemented the notion that violent video games and youth violence were linked.

Once again, however, the empirical evidence is, at best, mixed. Studies have found the relationship between video game playing and violent behavior is inconsistent. Indeed, some evidence suggests violent video game use correlates with decreased crime. Some studies have found that the release of popular games is actually associated with (again, correlated with) immediate declines in crime, perhaps the result of potential perps working out their criminal fantasies in these fmake-believe worlds. I can’t say.

Do we need to be reminded correlation is not causation?

The drawback to much of the research in this area is correlation, which is far from causation. The former, you undoubtedly recall from Stat 101, is a relationship where action A relates to action B—but one event doesn't necessarily cause the other event. Causation is more specific, confirming that one event results from the occurrence of the other event. A classic example of a meaningless correlation is noticing that when the pilot announces that she is turning on the fasten seat belt sign while at cruising altitude, turbulence follows shortly. After several occurrences, there could be a correlation between seat belt signs being turned on and turbulence. Turning on the sign does not cause turbulence.

People exposed to frequent violent videos, movies, or games may correlate to the same people being associated with violent behavior, but there may be other causes. For example, peer-reviewed research found that children who are already at risk may be more likely to choose to play violent video games. These other risk factors, as opposed to the games, cause aggressive and violent behavior. Multiple research efforts support the conclusion that family and social variables are more influential factors.

This all said, although there are more components to violent behavior than watching too much television, overdosing on shoot ’em-up video games, or even the most recent iteration of sources of blame, social media, that does not mean that these media are benign.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has gone on record as being on the side of the media content being a substantial, if not a sole, contributor to violence.

Television can be a powerful influence in developing value systems and shaping behavior. Unfortunately, much of today's television programming is violent. Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:

• become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence

• begin to accept violence as a way to solve problems

• imitate the violence they observe on television; and

• identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers

Not just TV or games: it’s “screen time”

A company called Chanty reports that ”on average, a person spends a total of 6 hours looking at a screen each day. Out of this, 2.5 hours are said to be spent on social media, 3 hours on work-related activities, and 30 minutes are spent on other desktop apps or general activities.” I cannot vouch for how they got these numbers. Chanty also sells an application to help users limit their screen time.

However, it seems intuitively realistic. In its most current survey, The Center for Disease Control found that one-half of teenagers ages 12–17 had 4 hours or more of daily screen time.

The editors of The Lancet edition for the Americas come to a similar conclusion based on meta-analyses of scores of studies and reports.

Exposure to violent content can decrease empathy and cause increased aggressive thoughts, anger, and aggressive behaviour…. Time spent watching screen violence has also been directly associated with increased bullying and cyberbullying in both boys and girls. In addition, aggressive behaviour during childhood appears to be an important predictor of violent behaviour in older adolescents and young adults.¹

Attempts and difficulty regulating screen violence

The First Amendment erects substantial barriers to government regulating content of any sort. Sexually-related content limits—in particular, pornography (you know it when you see it)—have withstood some court challenges. The Federal Communications Commission, which grants licenses to broadcast stations (NOT the networks like CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox), is charged with considering the “public convenience, interest, and necessity” in awarding and renewing licenses. But in practice, that is a broad standard. Violence is far more complicated. And, in any event, it does not apply to cable networks (e.g., Bravo, FX, HBO) and not streamers like Hulu or Netflix.

In the 1970s, legislative pressure encouraged the TV networks to institute “family viewing hours” during prime time. Efforts either resulted in little change or were thrown out by the courts. In 1990, Congress enacted the Television Violence Act, which simply suspended antitrust laws for broadcasters and cable networks to “collude” on plans to reduce or label violence in their programming. Where we are today suggests how effective that was.

The Computer Decency Act was embedded in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It prohibited the use of an interactive computer service to willfully transmit, send, or display any violent content or indecent or obscene material to minors. It included measures to create a system of rating video programming for violent, sexual, or other indecent content. However, in Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court held the Act unconstitutional.

Congress tried the Child Online Protection Act in 1998, restricting access by minors to any violent content. Again, the Supreme Court, in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, held it to be unconstitutional as a violation of the protection of free speech.

What’s a government—or parent—to do?

First, let’s stipulate that the overwhelming proportion of humankind can be exposed to all this programming and separate fiction from reality. We know right from wrong. It’s this reality that supports the validity of the research that finds that factors in addition to screen violence are in the mix.

Beyond that, and it should go without saying—but we always need to say it—parents are obligated to be aware of and control, to the extent possible, what and how much their children are consuming. It gets more complicated as they get older. Individual screens on phones and computers make this more cumbersome than when we were kids and even for our own children (if your kids are now adults). Nothing will be 100%. But any control must start in the home, with individuals.

Education programs in schools and communities that promote media literacy and critical thinking about the content consumed can be layered to reflect societal values, which at least gives lip service to eschewing excessive violent depiction.

Clearly, the role of government policy-makers is limited. However, they can continue to reflect the interest of their constituents with measures that nibble at the edges, such as promoting content rating systems that are accurate and enforced and providing clear guidance to consumers about the level of violence in media.

Let's agree that violent programming doesn’t make most of us violent. Therefore, we must pay close attention to those among us—in the family, school, workplace, and community—who seem more susceptible to its influence. After every mass shooting, there is a chorus of concern for more counseling or therapy for those with mental health or behavioral issues. In the interest of individual rights, we have gone from mass institutionalization of the chronically and severely mentally unstable to allowing these individuals to deteriorate until they eventually cause real harm to themselves or others. It’s a small number. But I propose that we can do a better job of identifying who among us is a risk to cause harm and get them help, even if they refuse.²

Finally, we can encourage media companies to produce and promote content that emphasizes positive, non-violent themes and behaviors. That sounds very “kumbaya,” and it is. Ultimately, however, content producers give us what gets the most eye-ball viewing, the most clicks, and the subscriptions paid for.

As I sometimes end with, if it were easily solved, it would have been done.

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Thanks to our regular readers. Wishing all a new year of good thoughts, good health, and good fortune.

1. Screen violence seems to be a more comprehensive term than identifying specific delivery technologies or industries like television of video games. It would include any content delivered by whatever means to any screen, whether attached to a computer, TV, phone, tablet, or whatever else comes along.

2. The paradox, of course, is “the dog that doesn’t bark” conundrum. The perpetrator of a mass shooting in Maine last year, killing 18, had been flagged as being at risk of engaging in such violence. Yet he was not brought in for treatment which would likely have averted this tragedy. We have a hard time knowing when something that was done definitely prevented something that didn’t in fact occur.