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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.