International Herald Tribune, U.S.A.        Monday, May 10, 1999

A Media-Violence Link?

Washington Seeks Answers After Massacre

New York - In response to the Colorado school shooting, President Bill Clinton is to meet with entertainment industry executives and others at the White House on Monday to discuss youth violence. And on Capitol Hill, Congress is considering a bill that would require the surgeon general to conduct a comprehensive study of the effects of media violence on American youths.

But most academic researchers say they believe that the evidence is already at the president's and the surgeon general's fingertips. Hundreds of studies done at the nation's top universities in the last three decades have come to the same conclusion: that there is at least some demonstrable link between watching violent acts in movies or television shows and acting aggressively in life.

Proving such links irrefutably is almost impossible, and many studies have been criticized for methodological or other flaws. But the entire range of studies, taken as a whole, has convinced most social scientists that there is a link.

"The evidence is overwhelming," said Jeffrey McIntyre, legislative and federal affairs officer for the American Psychological Association. "To argue against it is like arguing against gravity."

The surgeon general's office has already done two comprehensive overviews of existing studies, the first published in 1972, and the second a 1982 update. Both called television violence a contributing factor to increases in violent crime and antisocial behavior.

The research does not demonstrate that watching violent acts in films or television shows directly and immediately causes people to commit violent acts. Rather, the scholarly evidence cited by Mr. McIntyre either demonstrates cumulative effects of violent entertainment or establishes it as a "risk factor" that contributes to increasing a person's aggressiveness.

A few scholars object to this research, saying the links do not prove cause and effect and are therefore relatively unimportant.

"There's no question there's a correlational link, that children who watch television violence tend to be more aggressive," said Jonathan Freedman, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. "It's a very small correlation, but it's there."

But Mr. Freedman said correlative links could come from many factors, including the likelihood that children who watch a lot of violent television shows are often children who are least supervised by responsible adults. "My reading of the research is it's pathetic in terms of showing the link to be causal," he said.

Still, from 1990 to 1996, major reviews of scientific studies on the subject were conducted by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health.

"All of them said that television violence contributes to real-world violence," said Dale Kunkel, a professor of communications at the University of California at Los Angeles, who also led a three-year study (1996-98), financed by the National Cable Television Association, documenting the amount of television violence and its contexts.

One of the most academically reputable researchers, Rowell Huesmann of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, told a Senate hearing recently:

"Not every child who watches a lot of violence or plays a lot of violent games will grow up to be violent. Other forces must converge, as they did recently in Colorado. But just as every cigarette increases the chance that someday you will get lung cancer, every exposure to violence increases the chances that some day a child will behave more violently than they otherwise would."

Network executives have been reluctant to talk about the subject, either fearing to appear insensitive in the wake of the Colorado shooting on April 20 or fearing high-profile political attacks on the day of the White House meeting.

But network and movie studio executives, as well as producers and writers, have repeatedly bristled at the academic findings, arguing that the link found is far too small to warrant the attention paid to them. The executives also accuse social scientists of looking for easy solutions - censoring or restricting entertainment media - to avoid confronting more difficult solutions, like reducing poverty, improving child-rearing skills and child care services, or restricting the availability of guns.