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Example research essay topic: Portrayal Of Violence Violent Behavior - 1,502 words

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Media Report Is The Society And Youth Violent Because Of The Media? It is guns, it is poverty, it is overcrowding, and it is the uniquely American problem of a culture that is infatuated with violence (Prothrow-Stith). Research interest in the relationship of the mass media to social violence has been elevated for most of this century. Over the twentieth century, the issue of the media as a source of violence has moved into and out of the public consciousness in predictable ten- to twenty-year cycles. If a consensus has emerged from the research and public interest, it is that the sources of violence are complex and tied to our most basic nature as well as the social world we have created and that the media's particular relationship to social violence is extremely complicated.

Social violence is embedded in historical, social forces and phenomena, while the media are components of a larger information system that creates and distributes knowledge about the world. The media and social violence must both be approached as parts of phenomena that have numerous interconnections and paths of influence between them. Too narrow a perspective on youth violence or the medias role in its generation oversimplifies both the problem and the solutions we pursue. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current concern about media, youth, and violence. This difficulty in deciphering the medias role is due to the fact that the relationship of media to violence is complex, and the medias influence can be both direct and indirect. Research on their relationship (reported, for example, in George Comstock's 1980 study Television in America) has revealed that media effects that appear when large groups are examined are not predictable at the individual subject level.

The media are also related to social violence in ways not usually considered in the public debate, such as their effects on public policies and general social attitudes toward violence. Adding to the complexity of the medias relationship, there are many other sources of violence that either interact with the media or work alone to produce violence. These sources range from individual biology to characteristics of our history and culture. The importance of non media factors such as neighborhood and family conditions, individual psychological and genetic traits, and our social structure, race relations, and economic conditions for the generation of violence are commonly acknowledged and analyzed, as in Jeffrey Goldsteins 1986 study Aggression and Crimes of Violence. The role of the mass media is confounded with these other sources, and its significance is often either lost or exaggerated. The two most popular extreme notions that have lately dominated the public debate are: Media are the primary cause of violence in society.

Media have no, or a very limited, effect on social violence. The former view of the media as the source of primary effects is often advanced along with draconian policy demands such as extensive government intervention or direct censorship of the media. The counterargument to this position is supported by a number of points. The most basic is that we were a violent nation before we had mass media, and there is no evidence that the removal of violent media would make us nonviolent (Graham). Some research into copy-cat crime additionally provides no evidence of a criminalization effect from the media as a cause (Milgram).

The media alone cannot turn a law-abiding individual into a criminal one nor a nonviolent youth into a violent one. In sum, individual and national violence cannot be blamed primarily on the media, and violence-reducing policies directed only at the media will have little effect. The latter argument that the media have limited to no effect on levels of social violence is structured both in posture and approach to the tobacco industry's response to research linking smoking to lung cancer and it rings just as hollow. The arguments basic approach is to expound inherent weaknesses in the various methodologies of the media-violence research and to trumpet the lack of evidence of strong, direct effects, while ignoring the persistent pattern of positive findings.

Proponents of the nil effect point out that laboratory experiments are biased toward finding an effect. To isolate the effect of a single factor, in this case the media, and observe a rare social behavior, namely violence, experiments must exaggerate the link between media and aggression and create a setting that will elicit violent behavior. They therefore argue that all laboratory research on the issue is irrelevant. No effects proponents lastly argue that while society reinforces some behaviors shown in the media such as that found in commercials, it does not condone or reinforce violence and, therefore, a violence-enhancing effect should not be expected (a view discussed in Smoking Out the Critics, a 1984 Society article [ 21: 36 - 40 ] by A. Wurtzel and G.

Lometti). The key to media effects occurring in any particular instance, then, are the intermediate, interactive factors. In terms of the media, there are numerous interactive factors that have been identified as conducive to generating aggressive effects. Among the many delineated in the research, a sample includes: reward or lack of punishment for the perpetrator, portrayal of violence as justified, portrayal of the consequences of violence in a way that does not stir distaste, portrayal of violence without critical commentary, the presence of live peer models of violence, and the presence of sanctioning adults (all discussed in Comstock's Television in America). Only unambiguous linking of violent behavior with undesirable consequences or motives by the media appears capable of inhibiting subsequent aggression in groups of viewers. Media violence correlates as strongly with and is as causally related to the magnitude of violent behavior as any other social behavioral variable that has been studied.

This reflects both the medias impact and our lack of knowledge about the etiology of violence. Because of the many individual and social factors that come into play in producing any social behavior, one should not expect to find more than a modest direct relationship between the media and violence. In summation, despite the fact that the media are among many factors, they should not be ignored, regardless of the level of their direct impact. Because social violence is a pressing problem, even those factors that only modestly contribute to it are important. Small effects of the media accumulate and appear to have significant long-term social effects. 9 The research strongly indicates that we are a more violent society because of our mass media. Exactly how and to what extent the media cause long-term changes in violent behavior remains unknown, but the fact that it plays an important, but not independent, role is generally conceded.

Perhaps the most significant social effect of media violence is, however, not the direct generation of social violence but its impact on our criminal justice policy. The fear and loathing we feel toward criminals - youthful, violent, or not - is tied to our media-generated image of criminality. The media portray criminals as typically anomalistic, vicious predators. This media image translates into a more violent society by influencing the way we react to all crime in America. We imprison at a much greater rate and make reentry into law-abiding society, even for our nonviolent offenders, more difficult than other advanced (and, not coincidentally, less violent) nations. The predator-criminal image results in policy based on the worst-case criminal and a constant ratcheting up of punishments for all offenders.

In its cumulative effect, the media both provide violent models for our youth to emulate and justify a myopic, harshly punitive public reaction to all offenders. In conclusion, our youth will be violent as long as our culture is violent. The local social conditions in which they are raised and the larger cultural and economic environments that they will enter generate great numbers of violently predisposed individuals. As we have experienced, violently predisposed youth, particularly among our poor, will fully develop their potential and come to prey upon us. Faced with frightful predators, we subsequently and justly punish them, but the use of punishment alone will not solve the problem. The role that the media play in the above scenario versus their potential role in de glorifying violence and showing our youth that armed aggression is not an American cultural right, will determine the medias ultimate relationship to youthful violence in society.

Works used: 1. Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, November 26, 1991. 2. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Girl, eds. , Violence in America (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979). 3.

S. Milgram and R. Scotland, Television and Antisocial Behavior Field Experiments (New York: Academic Press, 1973) and A. Schmid and J.

de Graaf, Violence as Communication (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1982). 4. Smoking Out the Critics, a 1984 Society article [ 21: 36 - 40 ] by A. Wurtzel and G. Lometti 5. R.

Rosenthal (1986), "Media Violence, Anti-Social Behavior, and the Social Consequences of Small Effects, " Journal of Social Issues 42: 141 - 54.


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Research essay sample on Portrayal Of Violence Violent Behavior

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