athology in children. Wolfe continues elsewhere:
[T]elevision makes children materialistic and keeps them in adolescence longer. The only effect contrary to repressive values was that television slightly enhanced respect for other culture. When this study notes that "television may be used too easily as a pacifier (!) for young children," it unwittingly points out the role that television plays in guaranteeing that today's children will not have to be repressed through violence tomorrow (Wolfe, 1973, p. 147).
The history of the connection between children's aggressiveness and violence on TV appears to have begun in the wake of the political assassinations and social upheaval of the 1960s. It persists in the context of evidence that modern society is rife with violence that seems attributable to cues from popular culture, whether television, movies, or music. Cannon and Krasny (1993), as well as Chidney (1996), cite multiple reports of violent and grisly murders--from mass shootings in public places to torture murders--many of whose perpetrators explained their actions as being duplications of what had been viewed on television. In 1969, a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence included two chapters "concerned with TV violence and its effects" (Eysenck & Nias, 1978, p. 180). In 1972, the Surgeon General issued a report entitled Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence. The report was based on "twenty-three independent research projects and more than forty technical papers" (Cater & Strickland, 1976, p. 2). Controversy surrounded the report because of popular (i.e., not technical) press interpretations (Cater & Strickland, 1976, p. 2-4, et passim), infighting among various research groups, and disagreements over the issue within the various disciplines that set themselves the task of explaining the nexus of real-life aggression and television violence. However, each succeeding r...