TV’s Violent Appeal

Within just a few short years, TV has become immensely popular. In fact, “more Americans have television than have refrigerators or indoor plumbing.” It is beginning to catch on in even the poorer nations. Ethiopia, for example, reportedly has only 27,000 TV sets for its population of 35 million. Yet this has not stopped Ethiopia from announcing the start of color TV service! What, then, is the almost universal appeal of TV?

A report by the Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee called TV a “sound-and-light show appealing to the [dominant] senses of vision and hearing.” As a result, “it draws attention like a magnet. Infants as young as 6 months gaze at it; little children sit in front of it for hours at a time.” Why, in one poll of teenage youths, 53 percent admitted to watching shows they didn’t even like! For some reason, TV seems to have an almost hypnotic effect upon some.

Nevertheless, TV networks naturally want you to watch their programs. And they have found that there is one surefire way to keep an audience glued to their sets: Feature violence​—and lots of it. People just can’t seem to get enough of car crashes, explosions, stabbings, shootings and karate kicks. According to one estimate, a young person in the United States will witness 18,000 people being killed on TV by the time he is 14 years old, not to mention fistfights and acts of vandalism. But can one take in a steady diet of this and not be harmed?

“Overwhelming” Evidence

Just a few years ago, British researcher William Belson and his team took a close look at 1,565 British teenage boys. To no one’s surprise they found that boys who thrived on violent TV shows were more likely to “engage in violence of a serious kind.” They also concluded that TV violence could incite “swearing and the use of bad language, aggressiveness in sport or play, threatening to use violence on another boy, writing slogans on walls, [and] breaking windows.” The National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) likewise concluded that there is “overwhelming” evidence that televised violence begets violence.a

‘But I’ve watched some of those shows with shooting and car chases,’ you might say. ‘That doesn’t mean I think it’s all right to hurt somebody.’ But one of the most disturbing discoveries in Belson’s study was that exposure to TV violence did not “change boys’ conscious attitudes toward” violence. Apparently the steady diet of violence chipped away at their subconscious inhibitions against violence.

The Bible says at Psalm 11:5: “Jehovah himself examines the righteous one as well as the wicked one, and anyone loving violence His soul certainly hates.” Does your taste in TV programs show you to be a lover of peace or of violence?b​—Matthew 5:9.

Can TV Drive You to Drink?

Have you ever noticed how often your favorite TV actor or actress reaches for an alcoholic drink? Yet for all this drinking, few are portrayed as suffering the dizziness, hallucinations and degradation that the Bible says accompanies overdrinking.​—Proverbs 23:29-35.

Dr. Thomas Radecki, a psychiatrist who chairs the National Coalition on Television Violence, says: “TV advertising and program use of alcohol is playing a major role in the increasing abuse of alcohol. The average child will see alcohol consumed 75,000 times on TV before he is of legal drinking age.” Could merely viewing all this indulgence in alcohol affect you? Dr. Radecki reminds us that “alcohol abuse, and violence are the two most rapidly rising causes of death in the U.S.”