Labeling Violence for What It Is

The new fall television season is upon us. And with it for the first time comes the advent of network warning "labels" on violent entertainment programming. These warnings will be carried before a violent show, during commercial breaks, and be part of the advance promotional advertising for a show. The program warnings institute on the airwaves a system akin to the movie industry's ratings code and record industry's "explicit lyrics" sticker.

This "voluntary" initiative from the broadcast industry came as the result of the "Simon Act" passed in 1988 and named for its author and chief sponsor, Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.). That's the guy with the bow tie who tried to run for president calling himself a New Deal liberal, not Paul Simon the fifty-something singer-songwriter who's married to that fresh and talented young Edie Brickell.

The Simon Act gave the Big Three TV networks, and Fox, a five-year exemption from federal anti-trust statutes so that they could get together and conspire to restrain the on-screen trade in decapitations, severed limbs, and other atrocities. As the senator's press releases tell it, the story of the Simon Act, and the resulting program warnings, began one dark and stormy night when the traveling senator checked into a hotel room, loosened his bow tie, and flipped on the tube for the news, only to behold a film of a man being cut in half by a chain saw. Simon came back to Washington and told his staff to get cracking.

Since the law was passed, Simon has held a series of oversight hearings to hold the network's feet to the fire on the question of TV violence. This year's round of hearings, part of which came during the exceptionally bloody and depraved programming of the May TV ratings "sweeps" period, garnered enormous publicity, all of it negative for the networks. Now they are running for cover.

Whatever one may think of the warning label as an anti-violence tool--and there are reasonable arguments against it--the TV violence issue does serve as an excellent, if rare, example of successful media politics played out on the left side of the American political spectrum.

Both of the congressional front-people on TV violence, Simon and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on the House side, have their progressive credentials firmly in order. But they have looked beyond the traditional liberal knee-jerk anti-censorship reaction to seize some progressive moral high ground on an issue of perceived importance in the real daily lives of ordinary people. This sort of creative cultural politics should be the wave of the future for the American Left flank, if there is in fact to be a Left future.

THE TV VIOLENCE reformers at this point have the numbers on their side. As a recent issue of The Congressional Quarterly noted, "The link between small-screen violence and flesh-and-blood violence is perhaps the most examined of sociological questions."

After more than 3,000 studies over a period of 40 years, an academic consensus has emerged behind a measurable causal link between heavy viewing of violent television shows and real-life violent behavior. As the American Psychological Association recently declared, "The accumulated research clearly demonstrates a correlation....Heavy viewers [of violent shows] behave more aggressively than light viewers."

In recent years, as the academic documentation has mounted, the networks have started sounding lamer and lamer with their rote insistence that the link between tube violence and real-life mayhem has "not been proven" and that "more research" is needed. That's what the tobacco industry still says about smoking and lung cancer, too.

Still there is no denying that there is also simple-mindedness aplenty among the crusaders against TV violence. For instance one watchdog survey of TV violence found that the most "violent" program on the air during one recent month was the 25th anniversary program of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Presumably the slapstick, Stooge-like manner in which some of the show's skit characters cuff and cane one another was the cause.

The First Amendment probably does need to be protected from well-meaning souls who can't tell slapstick comedy from soul-numbing brutality. Frighteningly, to choose an example close to my heart, they may bloodlist The Simpsons solely because of the parodic violence of the show's cartoon-within-a-cartoon, "The Itchy and Scratchy Show."

Such anti-violence monitors will also have trouble spotting the cases in which dramatized violence serves to provoke a morally cleansing, and even redemptive, catharsis. They'll probably miss the point even if Aristotle himself, who explained this all millennia ago, should stroll back across the River Styx to update The Poetics.

One prominent anti-violence crusader, Thomas Radecki, used to rate rock videos with a "pro-social" vs. "anti-social" scale that actually docked a clip for promoting rebellious attitudes toward authority. Roll over, Elvis.

But rock and roll will survive a thousand Radeckis. All of the dramatic, and intermittently violent, shows capable of setting off a moral catharsis (I'll Fly Away, Homicide: Life on the Street, etc.) are getting cancelled anyway. At this point the warning label seems a small aesthetic price to pay to begin taming the jungle of murder and rape docudramas and real-life cop propaganda that prime time has become.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.