Let us ignore for the moment the plain fact that the vast majority of what is shown on video and movie-theater screens is beyond the reach of federal regulators, and that the courts have historically favored free expression when it comes to adjudging The Arts. We live in a time when the national homicide rate seems to have no upper limit, when juvenile crudeness masquerades as comedy and when much of popular music conveys brutality, misogyny and rancor. Is there a connection here? To many of those attending last week’s hearings, the answer was obviously yes. “My mother didn’t allow our family to have a television because she said it contributed to mind rot,” Reno said. “I think too often America has become numb to violence because it just drowns in it, day in and day out.”
Though often disputed by those who run the entertainment industry, this contention is broadly supported by scholarly research and, more strikingly, by several recent real-world tragedies. One is the death of 2-year-old Jessica Matthews from Moraine, Ohio. According to her mother, little Jessica died when her older brother, aged 5, set the house on fire by playing with matches as shown on “Beavis and Butt-head.” The other tragedy was multiple–the deaths of Michael Shingledecker of Polk, Pa., and Marco Birkhimer of Bordentown, N.J. Each young man apparently acted out a scene he had seen in a film called “The Program” by lying down on the center line of a local highway as a test of courage: unlike the movie character, each was quickly run over and killed. Whatever one thinks of their common sense, no one can argue that these young men–age 18 and 24–could have been saved by some form of censorship aimed at protecting kids.
But Hollywood and the networks are conspicuously in retreat. MTV has moved “Beavis and Butt-head” from 7 p.m. to a late-evening time slot in the hope that children will no longer watch, and Walt Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, which made “The Program,” recalled 1,222 copies of the film and cut the highway scene. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told the committee, “all of us in the movie and broadcast industry” are “seriously fed up with the madness that…stalks our streets and infests our neighborhoods.” He promised to eliminate “excessive, gratuitous and glamorizing violence. " Howard Stringer, president of CBS, insisted “there is less violence than ever before” on network TV. And Winston H. Cox, chairman of Showtime, delivered the real message by suggesting that self-regulation by the entertainment industry means that “legislation will never be necessary.”
There are several ironies here. The first is that network programming has arguably never been tamer–and the second, as Stringer also pointed out, is that the advent of cable television has vastly complicated the regulators’ task. “The problem of television violence is a 500-channel problem, " Stringer said, referring to the coming expansion of the entertainment spectrum by fiber-optic cable. “The world is changing and the vast media world you worry about, quite accurately, is bigger than a handful of networks.” Nevertheless, the Commerce Committee is considering bills to force the industry to ban violence for child audiences, rate broadcast and cable programming according to its violence content and require parental-discretion warnings before violent television shows. (The networks are already doing that voluntarily.) The ultimate answer may be something called a V chip, which would automatically block any program rated V-for-violent when concerned parents chose.
Still, if the real question is whether such laws would reduce violence in U.S. society, the answer is hard to see. Despite research showing that the average child sees something like 8,000 television murders by the time he is 21–and despite weird cases like the two fatalities attributed to “The Program”–the link between entertainment and behavior is as complex as the human mind. If Congress really wants to reduce the homicide rate or quell violence in the inner city, it might try harder to protect society from the dangers of drugs and guns.
