Violence has always played a role in entertainment essay

Violence has always played a role in entertainment. Virtually since the dawn of television, parents, teachers, legislators, and mental health professionals have been concerned about the content of television programs and its impact, particularly on children. The resulting Surgeon General’s report and a follow-up report in 1982 by the National Institute of Mental Health identify these major effects of seeing violence on television: • Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others. Children may be more fearful of the world around them. • Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others. Other research indicates that media violence has not just increased in quantity; it has also become much more graphic, much more sexual, and much more sadistic. Explicit pictures of slow-motion bullets exploding from people’s chests, and dead bodies surrounded by pools of blood, are now commonplace fare. Millions of viewers worldwide, many of them children, watch female World Wrestling Entertainment wrestlers try to tear out each other’s hair and rip off each other’s clothing.

And one of the top-selling video games in the world, Grand Theft Auto, is programmed so players can beat prostitutes to death with baseball bats after having sex with them. Concerns about media violence have grown as television and movies have acquired a global audience. Busy parents who want to protect their children from media violence have a difficult task before them. The CMPA found that violence appears on all major television networks and cable stations, making it impossible for channel surfers to avoid it. Nightly news coverage has become another concern. In spite of falling crime rates across North America, disturbing images of violent crime continue to dominate news broadcasting. As news shows compete with other media for audiences, many news producers have come to rely on the maxim: “ If it bleeds, it leads. Violence and death, they say, keep the viewer numbers up.

Good news doesn’t. As well, movie ratings are becoming less and less trustworthy in terms of giving parents real guidance on shows with unsuitable content. PG-13 movies tend to make more money than R-rated films, and as a result, the industry is experiencing a “ ratings creep”: shows that the Motion Picture Association of America would once have rated R are now being rated as PG-13, in order to increase box-office profits and rental sales.

In movie theatres, there is some control over who watches what. But at home, there’s little to stop children from watching a restricted movie on one of the many emerging specialty channels. Kids may also have access to adult video games at the local video store. The only way to stop the effect of what media violence is having on children is for parents to control what their children watch on television, and also supervise the games they play and sites that they browse.