The Coming Fight Over TV Violence

gollum123 writes "Time reports the guardians of decency are warning about new trouble, with a capital T, which rhymes with V, which stands for violence. The Parents Television Council (PTC), the group at the vanguard of the TV-sex wars, has lately focused on prime-time blood: power-tool torture on 24, serial killing on Criminal Minds, vivisection on Heroes. And the FCC has prepared a draft report suggesting that Congress authorize it to regulate broadcast violence, as it now does obscenity, and possibly force cable companies to let subscribers opt out of paying for channels that run brutal content. In short, torture is the new sex. Jack Bauer is the new Janet Jackson."

Comments

Not really "news"

[C0R1D4N]

The PTC has been going after violence for years. Usually it's against pro-wrestling (specifically Smackdown on UPN) and they've been rather unsuccessful. They even lost a lawsuit to the WWF a few years ago for lying to advertisers.

Re:Not really "news"

[Potor]

Yeah, but what I find scary here is that a month or so back, the pentagon had asked 24 to cut down on torture, ostensibly to discourage its practice by the military.

Of course, it's silly to imply that 24 has a place in the chain of command (as if Jack Bauer gives orders for real-life military torture). It's also scary that they could possibly think 24 has more sway than direct orders. Thus, I believe they want it off the show not to discourage torture, but because 24 puts current military practices in a bad light. Bush etc. have already ordered torture (although they refuse to call it such - and to think Clinton's "is" definition was once considered significant).

Now we have a concerned group of citizens doing this PR work for the army. If the people don't see it, they're safer/happier/etc.

Re:Not really "news"

[Yvanhoe]

Well suppose you were a solider, trained in soldier stuff. Obviously, there have been no classes on torture in your training. Now you have this guy who is a friend of a terrorist and your officer asked you to interrogate him. What would you do ? I guess some people just turn to their buddy who says "I dunno, we could do what they did in 24 last week...". Note that I agree with you that this is scary, but I really think that some soldiers can be influenced by that.

Re:Not really "news"

[chuckymonkey]

Let me explain to you how the system really works. Having been one of said easily influenced soldiers I have intimate knowledge of this. You're out on a patrol, you come upon a guy who is setting up a roadside bomb. Now more than likely this isn't really the guy you want as he's just some poor sod that a real bad guy paid to have do this. The bad guy that paid him isn't really even the really bad dude, he's just some farmer that got mixed up with the wrong crowd. You know this, so you catch the guy setting up the bomb, cuff him and take him back to your patrol base. When you reach the patrol base you have to fill out a very extensive form detailing everything that was said and done to the guy. When I say detail I mean it too. After that the guy you captured is taken to a holding area where he's given food and water and basically anything he needs even though what he was doing could have killed you or your best friend. Next time a convoy comes around which is usually a few hours they take this guy to the main base where all the interrogators hang out. These guys spend up to two years in school learing how to interrogate without using torture. They know how to mind fsck you, and they're really good at it. These guys never have to do anything that harms you because they're better than lawyer at playing word games and will generally know within the first few minutes whether you're worth keeping or not. The problems like Abu Ghraib arise because you have people that guard these guys and take it upon themselves to try and find out information. Which I don't have to say is illegal and the real interrogators will have your ass if they find out about it. That's the main point of failure. Now after the interrogator has talked with the guy for a while, if he's worth keeping they will, if not they'll give him a job working on public works projects in the city. That's how the system really works, and maybe people should actually do their research before spouting off with something that you have no clue about and put good people in a bad light.

Re:Not really "news"

[Dun Malg]

In the military there IS a class during basic training on the Geneva Conventions, but it's hard to retain information when you're on a 6 hour sleep schedule and just did 2 hours of physical fitness right after waking up. I had trouble staying awake for that class (as did everyone else), but I managed to remember one of the primary points: no fucking torturing. Anyone claiming that they "didn't know" they weren't allowed to torture prisoners is full of it. They knew. They just thought the situation warranted breaking the rules and thought they could get away with it. Besides, they don't just tell Joe Infantry "go interrogate that prisoner", because Joe isn't even trained to ask the right questions. "Interrogator" is its own job classification (97E), and you can bet your sweet bottom that they had a little more instruction on prisoner handling than the 2 hour GC lecture in basic training. It's not a failure of training, it's a failure of command and oversight.

The author had it right when he said...

[UnixGrunt]

"But if politicians simply respected the audience's choices, stopped posturing against theoretical violence and fictional bad guys, they would have to focus on, say, the thornier problems of stopping actual bloodshed in the real world."

'nuff said

Re:The author had it right when he said...

[b4stard]

... focus on, say, the thornier problems of stopping actual bloodshed in the real world ...

First of all, I agree with you on this. Real world issues should be given a lot more attention than a stupid nipple slip that hurt nobody.

That being said, the real world and what's shown on the telly is not disconnected and independent. In particular, I've been thinking lately of how 24, and Jack Bauer, started to normalize the usage of torture and bring into the consciousness of the viewers that, perhaps, torture is actually OK in some cases. When you've started to accept torture against certain terrorists, typically in scenarios very very far from those of the real world (known terrorist got the code to stop the bomb in the kindergarten and there's no other way omg!), then the step of accepting it against general terror-suspects isn't too far, and eventually, people in general are going to accept the kind of stuff that's been going on in various US secret prisons, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and so forth. Slippery slope you know. Eventually, torture against your local drug dealer is gonna seem kindof acceptable. And then what? Maybe Al Gore is a terrorist drug dealer, humm?

Surely this is good thing

[Xhris]

I have always been amazed that swearing, nudity and sex is heavily regulated on TV and violence is not. Surely showing someone killing or whatever is much worse than a bit a boob being shown.

Re:Surely this is good thing

[jellomizer]

I think the issue why sex is more regulated then violence is the fact that sexual instinct is in most of us. While the extreme violence is only in people who have problems. It is easy to explain to kids why violence is bad, you see a guy doing violence then he is the bad guy. For Sex it is something natural so the person committing sex is not really a bad guy but it is something they don't want their children to emulate. Telling a kid to Never do something vs. Do it when you are ready or after some goal. Then there is living in a culture where parents told other kids on different goals, some are lax and say it is OK to have Sex when you are ready. Other say when you are an adult, others say when you truly love some one... So we have a cultural problem with Sex to many divergent views and it is confusing to try to teach kids. With less Sex in the media helps reduce the level of confusion on the topic (one less place to show contradicting views). Having a child being taught to be too open minded is a dangerous thing.

Re:Surely this is good thing

[harryman100]

Much of your arguement would make sense, if the bad guys were the only one's using violence. However, how frequently do you see the good guy just stand there and take it? The good guy is often responsible for just as much violence as the bad guy. How does a child tell between good violence and bad violence? Why can't the child apply similar rules to spot the difference between "good sex" and "bad sex"?

I think the issue appears to be more that violence has been a public part of our culture for a very long time. Both violence and sex have existed longer than humans have. However, violence has always been more acceptable publicly. Violence is as much an instinct as sex is - as long as there have been members of the opposite sex, there have been fights over who gets to mate with them!

Violence is always about being nasty to someone - you can't have violence without hurting someone, which provides a moral dilemma about when violence is suitable. Sex however, is normally about being nice to someone. This isn't so much a dilemma, as an education issue - providing both (or more) parties understand what they are doing. The chances of hurting anyone are minimal.

Why is it that you see children as better able to solve the moral dilemma surrounding violence, than understand the basics of responsible sex?

Re:Surely this is good thing

[Admiral Ag]

I don't really understand this. Sex is something that people don't want their children to emulate?

I can see why some forms of sex might be controversial, but is there anyone who really disagrees that two married people having really good sex is a good thing? I can't think of any sane person who does (although I'd go further and say that any two people who like each other makes it OK), yet society seems quite happy to have scenes of graphic and extreme (and in many cases sexually perverted) violence play out on screen, but people go mental if it is even suggested that you show a scene of Mr and Mrs Happily Married having a good old-fashioned fuck. If you don't want negative images of explicit sex on TV shown to children, then that is fine by me, except that a large majority seem to think that any images of sex are negative.

The argument that you don't want children to do it is silly. Most children would like to drive a car, and watch all sorts of cool cars being driven on TV all the time. Yet they know that they are not allowed to drive a car until they are older. The same goes with sex. Like all men, I could think of little else when I was 13, but I knew that going all the way at that age was likely to cause all sorts of trouble that I didn't want to be in.

Our society is full of repressed puritans who are so scared of their own sexual desires that they feel the need to repress everyone else with a socially enforced psychological chastity belt.

And it doesn't work. Every young fellow knows that the girls who put out the most and in the most enjoyable and abandoned fashion tended to be drawn from the daughters of the strictly religious.

And pretty much every kid has seen porn, so it's not as if they don't know already. Treating healthy sex as a subject of shame and guilt just confuses young people. For one thing, if you are going to protect them against real perverts, you really need to point out what kinds of sex are acceptable, and which are not.

Re:Surely this is good thing

[tverbeek]

The fact that the submitter referred to "violence" and "obscenity" (the latter term applying specifically to sexual content) demonstrates a fundamental problem in how we think about these matters. Putting a bullet in someone's mouth is more obscene than putting a penis or a foul word in it. I'm not calling for censorship and I think any regulation needs to be carefully crafted to avoid that, but the notion that sex and language are more harmful to viewers than violence is misguided.

Re:Surely this is good thing

[owlnation]

Yes, absolutely right.

Something that I've never understood, is the nature of swear words.

For example "fuck, dick, wank" etc are considered unacceptable words to use, are censored, and children who use them are usually chastised. We all do these things or possess a part of the body that's referred to. We enjoy them, and to not enjoy them is widely accepted as dysfunctional.

However, such words as "murder, kill, maim, torture" etc. have no censorship, have no disapproval in polite conversation, and children can cheerfully use them frivolously in the playground to express themselves. However, to actually do any of these things is horrific and would rightly get you a long term in jail.

Just never made any sense to me at all. It surely desensitizes us to violence, and creates repression in the sexual sphere. It's lose, lose.

Re:Surely this is good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. And there's one more thing that is bad about this: The degradation of porn. In 1970s, it was much more pleasant, pleasurable, soulful, open, healthy. It was done, in a large part, by people who thought they were doing something not entirely bad; maybe even outright good: liberation, education. They were sincere and not cynical about what they did. They really enjoyed it.

Now look at the modern porn, the result of the conservative reaction of the last decades. It didn't diminish in numbers - oh no. Instead it just became lots more violent, mechanical, apersonal. Zero body contact except in genital area. Zero feelings except simulated rage. Wooden faces of actors who know that what they are doing is absolutely nasty and just want to show us HOW nasty it is. The word "nasty" itself is the most common in port vocabulary today; words like "love" or "nice" are avoided. Those who do porn today are certainly NOT enjoying it.

And sadly, that kind of porn IS detrimental to children, much as violence is. It is a perfect straw man for social conservatives fighting to outlaw porn and make it forever connected with violence in our minds. What they fail to understand is that THIS kind of porn is a direct result of their social conservatism.

It does not HAVE to be like that. We must change it back.

Not a new battle

[edwardpickman]

I remember back in the 70s the Three Stooges were banned from TV in a lot of areas due to violent content. The original Baretta show died when it was on top because the standard was one violent act per half hour and Robert Blake refused to limit the shows based on the standard, definate hindsight irony. Europe tends to be far more sensitive to violence and far less sensitive to sex. The US has been the opposite traditionally but of late both tend to be red flags.

You allready got that fucking V-chip in your TV

[scenestar]

Just turn it on and let me enjoy my shows plz kthnxbai

jack bauer

[markov_chain]

Just let Jack Bauer torture some legislators into voting no.

Simple Solution--

[Anonymous Coward]

I propose a novel way to end the exposure of minors to television sex/violence:

The adult(s) in the household should slink their obese rear end off the couch, reach for the remote on the end table, and press the power/channel change button, thus eliminating objectionable programming being displayed on the TV monitor.

This will negate the need for more government censorship over the airwaves.

Re:Simple Solution--

[harryman100]

What you fail to see, is that most regulation is not about limiting what can be shown on TV, it's about limiting when. It provides a period of the day when parents know that certain things will not be shown. This allows the parent to give their child freedom without having to monitor too closely.

When I was quite a young child, my parents let me and my sister walk down to the local shop on most Saturday mornings, to buy some sweets. They knew the area well enough to know that the danger was limited. However, they gave us the freedom to do this. If they did not know the area well, then it would have been irresponsible at that age to allow us to do that. TV regulation, means that the parents can do the same thing with the TV - they know that before a certain time, they can give their children the freedom to watch TV alone.

Being a good parent, is not about constantly watching over what your child is doing. It's about making sure that they are unlikely to end up in a situation where the risk is high. And making sure that when they do end up in a risky situation, they know what to do.

More sense than sex

[denoir]

This is not quite as absurd as the censorship on sex and nudity in the US. I've often been amazed at the absurdity of for example CSI where they show a mutilated tortured female body but place meticulous care on covering up breasts and genitalia. There's something very twisted with that approach.

I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.

Re:More sense than sex

[Dr. Cody]

They're doing this out of courtesy. Imagine you're a porn-starved 13 year old watching CSI when they show the mutilated, tortured female body's naughty bits.

That is going to be some awkward mastrubation.

Re:More sense than sex

[TempeTerra]

Speaking of which, and not to contradict you, does anyone think that mutilated corpses on CSI aren't sexualised just like the rest of TV? When was the last time the chick on the slab was a dumpy 38 year old woman?

Uh.

[mikkelm]

If you're a bad parent, and you have an idiot kid, they're invariably going to grow up to be idiots.

If you're a bad parent, and you have a good kid, they'll know better than to kill someone because they saw it on TV.

If you're a good parent, and you have an idiot kid, you'll be able to regulate their exposure to violence. If you're concerned about TV violence, just don't let them have one in their room.

If you're a good parent, and you have a good kid, you'll be just fine.

The one thing those four have in common is that if the parent cares, the parent can act on their own. These parents need to stop regulating the world to make up for their lack of parenting. If anything, they need to regulate themselves. People shouldn't be allowed to have children if they're too stupid to handle them.

And now you know they'll never quit

[HangingChad]

The Parents Television Council (PTC), the group at the vanguard of the TV-sex wars,

Whether it's sex education, abortion rights or teaching evolution in schools, the religious right won't ever quit. If they win in one area, they'll just start pushing their religious agenda in a different arena, and they'll keep it up until the government is enforcing religious principles. The American Taliban.

Pick your side because there's no compromise position they'll respect.

Trouble, with a capital T

[Lambticc]

Reminds me of when the pool hall was being built, we good River City folk had to band together and get that stopped.

Dangerous for soceity

[lancejjj]

I was driving down my suburban street the other day when the car in front of me veered off the road. A gun battle ensued, and three cars caught fire (undoubtedly due to all the bullets flying). Then a gasoline truck happened to be driving by, and Kaboom!

Happily, my totally hot girlfriend and I made it out of there and to the orphanage, where we help feed very cute poor kids who are "trapped by the system". Disappointingly, the criminals were released due to a technicality.

The funny part: the same thing happened last month.

Just about all television programing sucks, with sparse few exceptions here and there. The easiest way to attract viewers to such a lousy program is to show a powerdrill going into a guy's brain, or a lady with revealing outfits, or the old car blowing up after a fender-bender.

If you can't attract viewers with quality, attract them with something that they'll remember: boobs, blood, and bombs.

If network TV continues to fail, it certainly won't be due to censorship - it will be due to the networks' inability to address their piss-poor programming.

Skeptics, roll your eyes now...

[WIAKywbfatw]

I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of blaming any medium for the ills of society, but it's hard not to draw the conclusion that the message that some of our media sends us is less than unhealthy.

Commercial interests invariably mean that content creaters and broadcasters are almost always tunnel-visioned into producing content that is ever more graphic, explicit and/or biased. The result is a medium that too easily can either desensitise its audience or misrepresent facts. You'd have to be blind to miss that that's a serious problem.

Take just two examples: the fictional drama 24 and actual television news.

Firstly, 24. There's no doubt that 24 is one of the most popular US shows of the decade, and that Jack Bauer is a generational role model - a tough guy who'll do anything and everything in his power to do his job and protect his country - but it's almost impossible to imagine what 24 would have looked like even 10 or 20 years ago.

Compare the violence in 24 to that of, say, 1990s episodes of NYPD Blue or 1980s episodes of Miami Vice. It's like comparing chalk and cheese.

Then look at some of the dangerous messages that 24 sends us: torture is quick, torture is effective, and torture is fine when it's carried out for patriotic reasons. Whether you believe the last of these statements is down to your own moral compass (I can tell you that I certainly do not), but any expert will tell you that the first two are wishful thinking.

In fact, the show's messages on torture are so dangerous that "the US military has appealed to the producers of 24 to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they are having both on troops in the field and America's reputation abroad." If even the US military can join the dots between Bauer's fictional planting a powerdrill into bad guys to get his info and the reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, illegal killings, etc, then you know it's time to be worried.

But, hey, if you're a TV executive and it keeps the viewers glued to your channel and your ads, then it's all OK, right?

Secondly, television news. We live in a world of instant global news, and it's a good thing. Or it would be, if the news that we got wasn't so watered down and/or distorted. Wars are bloody and brutal things, but you wouldn't know it from the actual footage that you see on your evening news reports, which (on the few occasions that they do show footage from war zones) invariably show clean, precise military operations, which paint a picture that's rosier than a flower show.

The realities of war - the death, the destruction, the senseless waste of it all - are kept hidden away, because if you showed that stuff people would soon get turned off... and change the channel. And if you're a TV executive putting out news that's so real that it makes people so uncomfortable that they'll watch whatever the competition has to offer then you've lost your ratings war, which is the only war that counts when it comes to selling those ads.

So, clean-cut, folksy, sham news is good, and hard-hitting, real, tell-it-how-it-really-is news is bad. The ridiculous subliminal message that war is no big deal that this sends is so messed up: if you showed the naked truth then more people would really start to take an interest, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the issues that will possibly shape their children's lifetimes.

Of course, you'll always have people who'll deny everything. President Nixon believed that Nick Út's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the Napalm attack on Trang Bang was staged, despite there also being overwhelming supporting evidence, including television footage, that it was the simple truth. (A US President so out of touch with reality: who would have thought it possible?)

But without being shown the truth, how can

absurd

[tacokill]

Your suggestion is absurd. For any substantial interrogation, there are "professionals" who do the interrogating. I don't know who they are or who they are with but I am certain the US Military/DOD has the foresight to look into the subject a train-up a few people to be experts in extracting useful information. I highly doubt they are influenced by 24. If anything, its the other way around.

Some private who finds a guy on the field and starts torturing him because his CO saw something cool on 24 and told him to -- is a crime. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:absurd

[misanthrope101]

If you read a bit about how the interrogation has been happening, you might not be so optimistic. Seymore Hersch's book Chain of Command details it quite nicely. Also, the central defense of the GIs accused/convicted in these cases is that they weren't properly trained, ergo their bosses weren't responsible, and so on. Also, the Taguba report explicitly mentions that torture was taking place.

Reports of torture have come from all the US-run "terrorist" prisons, so we are talking about a universal pattern, not a couple of bad apples. Overall, I think you're being too optimistic about the US government.

Depending on which version you believe, you get to choose between different kinds of bad. Either senior people authorized torture, or junior, untrained people were encouraged to "get results" and a blind eye was turned as to methods.

So, rather than the parent being "absurd" (which means "logically impossible", rather than "factually untrue", by the way) it seems that you are either naive or uninformed. It really is bad. Governments do torture. People don't handle power well, and if you hide them away in a secret place, remove oversight, and pat them on the back for being a bit rough, they will in short order torture people to death. It's not about being American, Iraqi, or any indictment of the Bush Doctrine--it's just human nature. Read about the Zimbardo prison experiment, or Milgram's experiments, the book Ordinary Men, and so on. People can be savage if you put them in a situation where it's condoned and rewarded. That inner moral compass isn't as reliable as we like to think. If we had more cynics and less optimists when it comes to human nature, we would recognize that power corrupts and minimize the situations in which torture is likely to occur. Your optimism is exactly what we need less of.

too much risk

[tacokill]

If there is too much risk in your child watching television, then I suggest, you utilize the two buttons on the television. One of them turns it off. And the other one changes the channel. You should just assume that EVERYTHING shown on TV is "bad", and therefore, too risky.

TV is not like walking down the street in your neighborhood. Television is a 100% voluntary action you and your kids engage in. You do not need it to survive and in fact, many people don't even own a television. Guess what? They still raise kids and they still survive quite nicely.

The idea that you should impart restrictions on what society can show on TV so your kid can "safely" watch TV, is ludicrous. You should not expect society to accommodate you so the TV can be your babysitter. If you think TV - as is, as well as whatever it becomes - is too risky for your child to view, then you should not participate. Just turn it off and assume that if you turn it back on, your child will burst into flames.

See how that works? You are happy because you have avoided risk. And we are happy because we get to see stuff blow up. If you do it the other way around, nobody is happy but you.

ITS THE COMMERCIALS STUPID!!

[furry_wookie]

As a parent, frankly I don't care what is shown during prime-time hours...hell I would like some boobies on Scrubs or something myself once in a while....

BUT, the fact that they show CLIPS OF PRIMETIME stuff in their commercials during the DAY is driving me freaking nuts...I can't even sit down to watch a basketball game with my young son without the network putting clips full of sex, violence, guns etc in their commericals during the program.

ITS A JOKE.... The fact that a program can be rated as TV-G but hey can cut to a commercial rated TV-MA because they are totally unregulated is the single biggest thing that makes the rating system a waste. My TIVO still displays TV-G and on the screen is people shooting each other and naked people rolling around on a couch.

They need to make the COMMERCIALS have to also comply with the rating for that time period. If you can make THAT HAPPEN, then I say we can have a free-for-all after 9pm as far as I care.

24 does appeal to those who crave authorotarianism

[FatSean]

People who feel powerless cling to icons like Jack Bauer. They can't affect changes in their own life, but they like to watch Jack break laws in his role as a US civil servant. They can't get ahead in life, but if they could become a 'secret agent' they would have authority for once, and would be able to abuse that authority to their own ends...just like Jack. Just like corrupt police forces. Hmm.