Does Media Violence Adversely Affect Attitudes and Behavior?
Award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee explores this question in Kids and Guns, a special edition of the children’s news program Nick News. Ellerbee says: “Call me silly, but I don’t think we need 3000 studies to tell us TV is too violent. And while we may not yet fully understand the result of kids watching so much violence on TV or in the movies, we still need to talk about it more.” Ellerbee proceeds to “talk about it” with several children and adolescents, one of whom observes that media representations of violence seldom portray victims’ pain. Communications scholar George Gerbner calls this violence without consequences “happy violence,” a cheap industrial commodity designed to fill narrative gaps. In the Media Education Foundation video The Killing Screens, Gerbner explains how the media cultivates our perception of the world. He describes what he calls the Mean World Syndrome, where frequent consumption of violent media results in a perception of the world as dangerous, a beli
