Do you care what TV does to your children?
Does violence on TV cause delinquency in children? Grumpy critic Milton Shulman knows best
Although there are a growing number of people who have come to recognise that TV has something significant to do with the shaping of our society, you will find very few of them amongst the higher echelons of TV itself.
Both in America and Britain there is an eagerness on the part of TV executives to play down the importance of the small screen, except of course in the field of selling goods
This desire to minimise the social impact of TV is perfectly natural. If it could be conclusively proved that the electronic box was a major factor in determining the altitudes, the values, and the aspirations of a nation then two awkward questions would have to be answered.
Is it right that a medium that has such influence should be primarily concerned with the provision of entertainment and the advertising of goods?
Disturbing
And an even more embarrassing question people might start asking is whether the men now running TV have the background, the authority, the understanding, or the intelligence to be in control of such a vital part of the stale apparatus.
Because it a disrupting and disturbing life on almost every level in America and Britain, and because it is largely indulged in by what might be described as the first “telly generation” — the age group from 17 to 22 — violence is the activity that has been most frequently linked with the consequences of TV.
There are other even more important trends that might be aggravated or stimulated or hastened or provoked by the programme content of TV.
The trivialisation of politics; the Army, the trade the demoralisation of demoralisation of institutions like the army, the trade unions, the law, the church, and contempt for authority; a healthy scepticism and a welcome permissiveness; a breaching of sexual taboos, an over simplification of complex issues which makes an electorate impatient with a political process that cannot solve them. How much is TV responsible?
Depending upon who you are, some of these trends will be welcomed and others deplored. But that they are helping to change society at an unprecedented rate can hardly be denied.
Because the impact of these changes is relatively long term and not easily pin-pointed, there is a vast depth of unconcern about these developments.
No method
On violence, however, there is an intuitive suspicion that TV might have something to do with it. Yet the men running TV have gone to considerable lengths to assure us that we are unduly alarmed about nothing
Giving evidence before a Federal Commission investigating the causes of violence in America, the heads of the networks unanimously and piously claimed that they would be only too happy to cooperate in finding out if TV was to blame but, alas, there was no “methodology” for accurately conducting such an investigation.
In other words, because there was no foolproof method for studying the relationship between the small screen and social violence, there was no point in doing anything at all
A similar smug, complacent approach to this problem was advanced by Lord Hill, the BBC’s chairman, in a recent speech to a conference of schoolmasters.
Adopting his most reassuring bedside manner, he dismissed our fears with the blandness of a family doctor prescribing a few aspirins for a high fever.
Some people, he said avuncularly, blamed TV for everything they disliked in the world whether it was permissive sex, “pop” violence or long hair. One can almost hear the accompanying throaty chuckle.
Fears
There was simply no concrete evidence that TV was to blame for violence. No schoolmaster would make such an error.
“It is largely an assertion without proof. After all, you come into contact with the human young every day, so you know that some will be up to no good whether they have been watching television the night before or not,” said Lord Hill.
After such an Olympian pooh-pooh from such an authority, who need pay any attention to the misgivings of TV critics or the instinctual fears of any reasonable man who had given the matter any thought?
Now only two months after Lord Hill’s soothing dose of syrup, along comes a disturbing report that fundamentally contradicts the Doctor’s self-satisfied euphoria.
There is evidence says the Television Research Committee in a report published last week, that delinquent children may use TV in quite a different manner than non-delinquent children, that the small screen affects them in a different way than it does more law-abiding children.
What is the Television Research Committee? It is a group of experts set up by the Home Secretary in 1963 to initiate research into the influence of TV with particular reference to the part it plays on the moral concepts and attitudes of young people.
It is financed by the Independent Television Authority who has provided it with £250,000 for five years’ work and it is based the the University of Leicester.
In its just-issued Second Progress Report it lists a number of experiments and investigations in which it has been engaged — all, unfortunately, very small scale and over too short a period of time — with its most important being its study of the viewing habits of adolescents placed on probation by the courts.
The delinquents studied were boys and girls between the ages of 10 to 20 in four Midland areas. For comparison purposes, two other control groups were studied — one of non-delinquents from the working class and the other of lower middle-class adolescents.
Aggressive
Although no startling or dramatic revelations came of this investigation, there were enough marked underlying differences between the delinquents and the non-delinquents and their approach to TV to inject a note of real concern in the usually antiseptic prose style of this type of report.
All groups viewed about the same amount of TV and watched the same kind of programmes. But delinquents significantly preferred the exciting and aggressive programmes and liked hero figures more than did the control groups.
More of the delinquents, too, didn’t think of TV as a means of relaxation which, argues the report, could mean that they use TV as a source of short term stimulation to an unusual degree.
Another important difference was the fact that delinquents talk less with their friends and family about what they see on TV than did the others.
This could be very significant when one considers that the argument used to deny the conditioning power of TV is that it is only one of the many environmental influences in a child’s life and that therefore its effect can be dissipated by social contact.
But if certain children bottle up their experiences through TV, don’t air them so that they can be contradicted or explained by adults, and if a high percentage of the these are delinquents, must we begin to question the complacent theory that the TV entertainment message that violence is fun makes no impact on children.
So important does the Television Research Committee consider these findings that they are to be published later in the year in the form of a book called Mass Media and Crime.
When Lord Hill has read it, I hope he lets us know in one of his speeches whether he is still so sure that there “is no concrete evidence that TV is to blame for violence.”
Of course, this investigation is only a pebble compared to the mountain of evidence that will eventually be needed before anything is absolutely proved about the link between TV and violence.
If society is really concerned about the electronic genie or monster it has in its midst then it will have to take more seriously the problem research into its effects.
