We’ve all heard it before. Blame it on TV, or the movies. If a child bludgeons another child to death with a wrench or shoots a classmate, it is the violent TV programs that they watch which are to blame, not the parents or the supervisors who are supposed to be there to make sure their kids do the right thing. How far is it true that the media is responsible for trivialising death and violence, thus causing the children of America to go out on shooting rampages, or kids in Britain to murder innocent toddlers?
First let us look at the way the media portrays death. Death has always been a taboo subject. People do not usually sit around talking about death, especially to children. It may be for that reason that children do not really understand the concept of dying. We constantly see instances in cartoons where a character is killed, but in the next scene, that same character is alive and well again. The fact is that they do not actually die. Characters like Warner Bros. Wild E Coyote never die. They always get up after apparently perishing in a violent way. The South Park character, Kenny, dies a violent death in every single episode (with the exception of the Christmas Special), and that is supposed to be funny. Death is trivialised by the media, and in addition, parents avoid talking about death to their kids, for fear of scaring them, but unknowingly reinforcing the assumption that death is not something to be taken seriously. Death can be described as follows: “It (death) sells newspapers and insurance policies, invigorates the plots of our television programs, and – judging from our dependency on fossil fuels (84.5% of all U.S. energy consumption in 1995) – – even pow…
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…so complex, so contradictory that it is virtually impossible to rule out all other variables to simply measure this one factor.” (Death in the mass media). In other words, due to our different ideologies and perspectives, people react to things differently. Therefore, it is difficult to ascertain whether violent acts committed by youth are a direct result of the violence and death they see on TV and in the movies. Who knows, the media may even be helping people develop a healthier attitude towards death.
Works Cited
Death – An inquiry into man’s mortal weakness. “Death in the mass media” http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/mass.htm
Kearl, Michael. Kearl’s Guide to Sociological Thanatology. “Sociology of Death and Dying” http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/death.html
Romei, Stephen. “US recoils: Boy, 6, guns down classmate” The Australian 2 March 2000:10
Media Violence Against Women
Media Violence Against Women
In the United States, as well as throughout the majority of the world, people are bombarded with information on a daily basis. The majority of the information that it seen or heard is a direct result of someone aiming the information at the masses. Whether it is a company that would like us to buy it’s product, or a newspaper that would have us believe a certain “fact” that they are reporting, someone has decided how the information will be presented. This notion brings me to the issue of how our society perpetuates violence against women through the use of the media and television shows. I would argue that, because we are socialized on a daily basis to believe certain ideas, this same process contributes to the violence aimed toward women. This encompasses the concept that impressionable young men may remain unaware of the impact of this violence by the omission of certain facts from news articles. It is also important to see how the media contributes to the way in which the abused women see their role in the “creation” of this violence. Furthermore, I would reason that these media outlets create a certain type of apathy in our society that has caused many people to either blame the victim, or just turn their heads and consider domestic violence a “family” problem, thus ignoring the legal ramifications altogether. This area must be understood in order to determine how the distortion of the ideas that are being expressed, through the use of television and magazines, are directly related to the societal values being represented.
The first issue that I would like to analyze is how we as a society encourage violence against women. Images flow into our homes everyday th…
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…ved from our own lives. Only then can we decided whether these portrayals are in fact the truth, or just more rhetoric being feed to us from the patriarchal view point of modern media outlets.
Works Cited
Berns, Nancy. “My Problem and -How I Solved it: Domestic Violence in Women’s Magazines”. Sociology
Quarterly. 40 (Winter 1999) : 85-109
Carmody, Dianne Cyr. Entertaining Violence. New York 1998. “Mixed Messages: Images of Domestic Violence
on “Reality ” Television. Ed. Mark Fishman and Gray Cavander. Aldine De Gruyter
Lemmey, Dorothy. “Collective Silence for Collective Violence”. <1999 http//www.Feminista.com/
v1n12/lemmey.html : 1-6>
Roland, John. “Additional Amendments to the Constitution”.