Juvenile Violence and the TV Generation

Juvenile Violence and the TV Generation
More and more children are growing up in homes where they are left alone with the television. Parents are working more, there is an increase in single parent homes, and there are more children watching more TV than ever. What are the potential effects on an adolescent mind, when they will see more than 200,000 acts of TV violence by the time they graduate from high school? In his essay “Stop Blaming Kids and TV,” Mike Males theorizes it has little influence.
Conservatives led by Dan Quayle and organizations like the Carnegie Corporation are strong supporters of the statement that TV “brainwashes” adolescent minds and commercials influence kids to smoke, shoot up, and kill. In John Murray’s article “Impact of Televised Violence,” he states there is a definite “relationship between the number of hours of television viewed and adolescent self-reports of involvement in aggressive or antisocial behavior” (Murray 3). He goes furth...