Write a paragraph (4 – 5 sentences) that summarizes the information that you hav

Question

Write a paragraph (4 – 5 sentences) that summarizes the information that you have learned about Television.  This summary should be in your own words, do not directly quote the source.

Write a thesis statement based on the information written in your summary.  Be sure to create a thesis statement that is clear, specific, and thought-provoking. Create a thesis statement that argues a controversial position.

READ THE ARTICLE BELOW:

No matter which media effects theory serves to explain whether and how television viewing affects society, the analysis centers on the nature of the content being consumed. Of all the images made available through television that have caused public outcry, advocacy group activity, government attention, industry self-regulation, and social science investigation, the portrayal of violence has received the lion's share of attention. At issue are the effects of cumulative exposure to these images on young and vulnerable consumers' attitudes, values, and behavior. Potential effects include the instigation of imitative aggressive acts, inspiration for the performance of novel acts of aggression, a decreased sensitivity to violence and a greater willingness to tolerate increasing levels of violence in society, and the effect on perceptions of the world's “meanness” and a resultant fear of violence in one's immediate community. This entry presents a brief overview of the primary issues associated with television violence. Recognizing the Issue With the development of each modern means of storytelling, there have been debates about its impact on society. A prominent theme in these debates has been a concern about the adverse influences of specific types of content on a young and vulnerable audience. In ancient Greece, for example, Plato's Republic declared that children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn't, and that it is of the utmost importance that the first stories they hear should produce the right moral effect. It was not until the advent of broadcasting, however, that the amount and intensity of debate and concern reached new heights. Although network television's nationwide reach and extended broadcast schedule did not begin until the late 1940s, and televised violence was not as graphic as it would become in later years, concerns about the social impact of television violence were raised almost immediately. As early as 1952, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings in response to television's unprecedented prevalence and popularity and concluded that the television broadcast industry was a “perpetrator and a deliverer” of violent content. This set into motion a sporadic stream of government hearings that at first attempted to determine the effects of the introduction of television into the home and then addressed questions specific to violent content. The Kefauver Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (1954) questioned the need for violent content in television entertainment. The Dodd Hearings (1961) called for academic and industry research to explore the possible ramifications of excessive consumption of television in general and a steady diet of violent content in particular. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency (1964) was particularly critical of the television networks and the extent to which violence and crime were portrayed on the nation's airwaves. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1968) concluded that there was a great deal of violence on television and that such content probably had an adverse effect on Page 350 | Top of Article children. Many of these hearings recommended federal regulation of the airwaves, but this raised concerns about violations to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The hearings also recommended that the television industry do self-monitoring research, which went largely ignored, and encouraged independent investigation by the academic community. Television and the Child: An Empirical Study of the Effect of Television on the Young (1958), by London School of Economics and Political Science scholars Hilde Himmelweit, Abraham Naftali Oppenheim, and Pamela Vince, and Television in the Lives of Our Children (1961), by Stanford University scholars Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, brought the issue of television's impact to the forefront of the academic community. These studies provided important benchmarks for understanding the potential effects of television, although this generation of children's television-viewing habits and practices were still under development. In particular, the studies examined the possibility that certain types of television content stimulated the formation of negative attitudes or induced antisocial behavior, and set the research agenda for social scientists for the next few decades. Newly assigned Federal Communications Commission chair Newton Minow put the industry on notice and reinforced this research agenda in his May 9, 1961, address to the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C. He claimed: When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspaper—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. An article in the October 22, 1963, issue of Look magazine, entitled “What TV Violence Can Do to Your Child,” featured Stanford behavioral psychologist Albert Bandura's groundbreaking work on children's potential for imitation. The article began: If parents could buy packaged psychological influences to administer in regular doses to their children, I doubt that many would deliberately select Western gun slingers, hopped-up psychopaths, deranged sadists, slap-stick buffoons and the like, unless they entertained rather peculiar ambitions for their growing offspring. Yet such examples of behavior are delivered in quantity, with no direct charge, to millions of households daily. (p. 46) This article singlehandedly made the television violence issue a vivid reality for the parents among the magazine's national readership and placed it on the forefront of public discourse. As the 1960s progressed, concern in the United States about violence in the streets of its cities and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) stimulated continuing interest in televised violence. In 1969, the U.S. surgeon general was given the task of exploring evidence of a link between television and subsequent aggression. The conclusions of the final report in 1972 were equivocal, although the report noted that television violence was a contributing factor to increases in violent crime and antisocial behavior. In 1982 the National Institute of Mental Health published a 10-year follow-up of the 1972 surgeon general's study. The two-volume report, collectively titled Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, stated that the consensus among most of the research community was that violence on television does lead to aggressive behavior by children and teenagers who watch the programs. Defining the Threat In 1967, in the immediate aftermath of early government hearings and public outcry about violence on the airwaves, George Gerbner and colleagues at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania sought to define and quantify the nature of televised violence. They founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project, which tracked and catalogued the content of television programs and surveyed viewers to record the relationship between this content and viewers' perceptions. Violence was defined as the overt expression of physical force against oneself or another, compelling action against one's will of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing. In order to be recorded as a violent act, that act must be plausible and credible—that is, no idle threats, verbal abuse, or comic gestures without credible violent consequences were counted. The violent acts may Page 351 | Top of Article be intentional or accidental, so violent accidents and acts of nature were included. The content analysis measured “prevalence” (the proportion of television hours or programs that contain violence), “rate” (the proportion of violent episodes per television hour or program), and “roles” (the percentage of victims, of violent characters or killers, and of killed characters in the population of television programming). Gerbner's annual “violence index” revealed that the percentage of programs containing violence and the rate of violent acts had remained a remarkably consistent staple in network television programming over several decades. On average, one hour of Saturday morning children's programming contained five times as many violent acts as did the equivalent amount of primetime television programming. The average child watching an average amount of television, suggested these reports, will see about 20,000 murders and 80,000 assaults in his or her formative years. The survey portion of this project suggested that heavy viewers of this content are much more fearful of the world around them than are lighter viewers. When questioned about their perceptions of risk, heavy viewers were much more likely to overestimate the chance that they will be the victims of crime in the ensuing six months, had taken greater precautions by changing the security of their homes or restricting their travels at night, and were generally more fearful of the world than were lighter viewers. Gerbner concluded that long-term exposure to television, in which frequent violence is virtually inescapable, tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world. Bradley Greenberg and his team of scholars at Michigan State University conducted their own extensive analysis of violent television content, beginning in the 1975, as part of project CASTLE (Children and Social Television Learning). The initiative was to examine a fuller range of antisocial behaviors associated with televised violence than that of the Gerbner research. Antisocial behavior was conceptualized as that which is psychologically or physically injurious to another person or persons whether intended or not, and whether successful or not. This included physical aggression, verbal aggression, theft, and deceit. Findings revealed that the prevalence of verbal aggression on television was consistent with the prevalence of physical aggression, and that Saturday morning programming geared for children was significantly more violent in both regards than that of adult-oriented primetime and late-night programming. Follow-up research found that heavy television-violence viewers were more likely to choose physical and verbal aggressive responses to solve hypothetical interpersonal conflict situations than were lighter television-violence viewers. Some Children Under Some Conditions One of the earliest research summary statements about the possible effects of television on youth—from the previously cited 1961 report by Schramm, Lyle, and Parker—indicated that not all children are similarly affected by television. In fact, the report's opening summary statement suggests that “for some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial.” This observation underscores the fact that children are a highly diverse group and that television violence, no matter how it is measured and no matter its prevalence, does not have a singular effect on all children. The National Institute of Mental Health's 10-year follow-up of the 1972 surgeon general's study made a similar claim, suggesting that the correlations between violence and aggression are positive, but “not all children become aggressive.” In fact, the history of television effects research can be divided into two distinctive phases. The first, the medium-orientation phase, assumed that television had overwhelming power and that audiences were particularly vulnerable to its influence. During this early stage of scientific inquiry, there was little if any consideration of developmental or individual differences that influence the power of the medium. During the ensuing interactive-orientation phase, the potential of media effects in general and the impact of violent content in particular were treated as an interaction between medium variables, such as content, and child variables, such as age, intelligence, media literacy, and factors associated with upbringing, including parental disciplinary style and household rules regarding television viewing. Although the body of research on the effects of viewing television violence is extensive and fairly coherent in demonstrating systematic patterns of influence, research is ongoing regarding the processes involved in the production of these effects or potential intervening variables. So, too, are efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to regulate television violence, particularly during times when children are likely to be viewing.

Explanation / Answer

Summary

Since the time television was invented and was introduced as a popular media platform its potential threats has been a serious issues of concern in the society. The violent and aggressive contents of television programs were believed to cause and increase violence among children and adolescents. There was a constant demand for restrictions on broadcasting keeping these threats in view. Research also confirmed the relation between television viewing and aggressive behavior. But, the major flaw that was committed was, these researches were not able to explain why television viewing of violent contents did not had equal impact on children who viewed them for equal hours. To find out the answers for this question, research needs to be directed to the intervening variables as family environment, parent-child relationship, financial conditions etc on the aggressive behavior of children. Though television viewing promote aggressive behavior in children and adolescents,it is necessary to understand the role of the intervening variables that promotes this behavior among them.

Thesis Statement

Study of intervening variables requires attention, to bring out the complete picture of negative impact of violent contents viewed by children on television

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