Boston Globe editorialist John Ellis wrote, “Ours is a culture that glorifies violence, profits from it, sells it with the most advanced technology known to mankind. Violence bounces off satellites in outer space and beams into every American home, every hour of every day, every month of every year.”
You have probably heard that the average preschool or elementary school child spends twelve hundred minutes per week watching television and only forty minutes talking with parents. The average teenager spends nine hundred hours in school per year and fifteen hundred hours watching television. These hours do not include the time kids may spend listening to heavy metal or “gangsta” rap, which glorifies killing cops and raping women, or playing computer games both violent and occultic, or watching violent movies on video or in theaters.
According to researchers, during prime time viewing hours, at least fifty people are killed, shot, maimed, or raped on broadcast and cable television. Eight out of ten television producers say there is a link between television violence and real-life violence.
Wrote Ellis, “In the 1980s, evangelical groups tried to lead boycotts against entertainment and media companies that produced and broadcast gratuitously violent fare. Their efforts met with some success at the grass roots and nothing but scorn from media elites. Hollywood’s contempt for public concern about the ceaseless stream of violent media was perfectly captured in a quote from Ted Field, co-founder of Interscope. ‘You can tell the people who want to stop us from releasing controversial rap music one thing,’ said Field: ‘Kiss my ‘[snip].’”
Is it any better thirteen years later?