The Media and Violence

In their article, "Media Violence: A Demonstrated Public Health Threat to Children," Huesmann and Moise attack Dr. Freedman as being "highly selective" in his reading of the research (1996, p. 188). They point to the "more than 50 field studies over the last 20 years" (p. 189) that have indicated that children who habitually watch more violent programs behave more aggressively in their everyday life (p. 189) and refute Freedman's assertions that there is "no statistically significant effect for either sex" (p. 190).

Huesmann and Moise also indicate that cultural differences may bring about slightly different results, but that in this case the results are surprisingly similar (p. 190). Exposure to media violence stimulates aggressive behavior in at least five ways: 1) imitation or observational learning; 2) desensitizing children to the effe

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nalyses that span anywhere from 15 to 30 years researching the effects of television violence on children. The weakness, however, lies in the fact that the assessment of risk is unclear as is the definition of violence and the frequency of violence. Violence could be physical or verbal, with or without physical, psychological, or emotional harm. It is also not clear how long the exposure needs to be, or how much violence needs to be viewed, or what the effect is of multiple exposures to violence. The strength of the Freedman article is in his admittal that it does seem plausible that TV violence causes aggression because children imitate and learn from what they see and observe. Many of the programs children watch do have characters that do not use violence until pushed to do so and weigh ethical considerations before attacking their enemy, the bad guy. He falters in his argument, however, when he discounts the correlation as small, "accounting for only 1% to 10% of individual difference" (p. 193). A variance of 1 to 10 percent is too big to be ignored and Moise and Huesmann indicate that it is more correctly set at 2 to 16 percent (p. 189). Ethical Considerations There needs to be a more realistic measurement of how aggr
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Approximate Word count = 1414
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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