Media Violence In The Media

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According to Craig A. Anderson and Leonard Berkowitz (2003, pg 81), for more than five decades, Americans have been concerned about the constant portrayal of violence in the mass media and the harm that these portrayals might do to youth. Reflecting to this concern, several major researches have been carried out to examine on the association between immature media users’ exposure to television violence and their aggressive behavior.
On July 26, year 2000, six medical and public-health professional organizations had disseminated a Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children. This statement acclaimed that “entertainment violence can lead to the upsurges in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, notably in children.” The body of research on TV violence continues to grow. In addition, important changes are arising in the landscape of entertainment-media use, and some of it has aroused new areas of research. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors, which include media violence, which, individually and together, may play a part in these outcomes in childhood.
Most studies of the effects of media violence have examined passive visual media (dramatic television and movies, television news, and music videos), that is, media that viewers observe only. A substantial of laboratory and field experiments over the past half-century have been set up to examine whether the exposure to violent behavior on film or television tends to increase the aggressive behavior of a particular teenager in the short term. The consistent finding from such experiments is that youths who watch violent scenes subsequently display more aggressive behavior, aggressive thought, or aggressive emotions than those who do not watch...

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...d them earlier. It was found out that the men who had watched the violent sex film had punished the woman more intensely that the others who had watched either the neutral film or the nonviolent sex movie.
Typically, randomized experiments have reveal that exposure to media violence can cause immediate increases in aggressive thoughts and tolerance for aggression in both children and teenagers. For example, in a study with young children (Drabman & Thomas, 1974, 1975; Thomas & Drabman, 1975), a brief violent video film clip were shown to the group of youngsters, it was then found out that they were slower to call an adult to intervene when they saw two younger children fighting compared to the peers who had watched neutral film. This shows that the single violent clip appeared to make the children more tolerant of aggression, at least for only a temporarily period.

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