A debate on media is the leading cause of violence
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The issue of media violence just doesn't go away. The debate raged when the Reagan administration deregulated children's television in the United States, and was revisited after the Montreal massacre on December 6, 1989. And the rash of high school shootings in North America and Europe at the end of the century has fuelled the debate anew.
Many pundits argue that media violence is at least partly to blame for the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Taber, Alberta and Erfurt, Germany. Ex-army psychologist Dave Grossman, a leading American activist, points the finger squarely at movies and video games. He argues that Hollywood films have desensitized kids to the consequences of violence, and video games have taught them how to handle a gun. But others, like psychiatrist Serge Tisseron, maintain, "just because a film has a murder scene doesn't mean people are going to commit the act... That overstates the power of the image and under-estimates the role of parents."
It is important to recognize that the discussion is not a purely scientific one. Social scientists have been unable to establish clearly that media violence causes real-life aggression. As early as 1985, Anthony Smith noted that the demand for "evidence" was driven more by the intensity of the debate than the desire to find definitive answers: "Social science has gotten itself into something of a scrape in the matter of television, especially in the area of violence; none of the various sides of the argument about violence will permit social science to depart the field." (For a review of the scientific literature, see Research on the Effects of Media Violence in the menu below.)