Discuss how violent material on screen might - a) Do harm and b) Do good.

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Edward Croyden

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Discuss how violent material on screen might

a) Do harm

b) Do good

The media operate relatively freely in countries like Britain, compared to those under more repressive regimes such as China.  Nevertheless, there are a plethora of laws and regulations which act as constraints on media production.  Television and radio are subject to the strongest controls of any media, for technological and political reasons.  The BBC's licence is renewed every ten years, and the license fee set by the government, which also appoints the board of governors.  Their role is to ensure that the BBC fulfils its obligations as laid down by the law, and if necessary to intervene if individual programmes are deemed to exceed the BBC's remit.

        Violence on screen today is over rated; people seem to blame it for a lot of the things that go on today.  But in my opinion people need to take other things into account.

For example, during a child's life you can't discount the role of such things as violent video games, the social values of parents and peers, or general living conditions.

If you eat something that you have not tried before and immediately get sick, you will probably assume there's a direct relationship between the two events.

And if at some later date you forget about your first experience and eat the same thing again—and immediately get sick again, you can be fairly sure that whatever you ate makes you sick.   This link is fairly obvious, just clear cause and effect.

Unfortunately, the cause and effect in many other areas of life are not as readily apparent.  A few decades ago you would see doctors in TV commercials endorsing a particular brand of cigarettes.   Today the evidence is clear: smoking is the number one cause of premature death and preventable heath problems.   Although in the interest of profits cigarette manufacturers suppressed evidence for some time linking smoking and health problems, eventually the cause-effect relationship became obvious to anyone who wanted investigate the facts.

Unlike the cause and effect in the example of your eating something and immediately getting sick, the effects of cigarette smoking aren't immediately apparent. It's only years later that many smokers develop lung cancer, heart problems, emphysema, impotency problems, etc.   In the same way people are now recognising a relationship between violence in the media and social problems.

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It's well known that TV violence holds an attraction for most viewers and this attraction translates into ratings and profits. Because of this, many in the media have been reluctant to admit that media violence is in any way responsible for violence in our society.

If it weren't for the ratings and profits involved, producers would undoubtedly be much more willing to acknowledge the harm in TV and film violence and do something about it.

There are many problems in linking media violence with violence in society. First, as some people have suggested, only a small percent of those ...

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