Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

And yet there are other negative consequences of watching television; consequences that
are far more damaging …
*Watching Television LEADS TO VIOLENT BEHAVIOR …
To date there have been over 4000 studies done on the effects of television on its viewers,
and they consistently show that media violence contributes to aggressive behavior,
nightmares, and fear of being harmed. Watching violent TV programs has also been
linked with having less empathy toward others.
Between 1952 and 1992 the average number of violent acts per viewing hour steadily
rose from 6.2 to 32. In 1993, the most violent prime-time shows exhibited as many as 60
acts of violence per hour. Today, by the time the average child in America reaches the
age of 18, he or she will have witnessed well over 200,000 violent acts on television.
Given that homicide is an adult activity, and that television has its most powerful effect
on our impressionable youth, the initial “television-generation” would have had to age 10
to 15 years before they would have been old enough to affect the homicide rate. Not
surprisingly, a University of Washington research team indeed found that ten to fifteen
years after television arrived in the United States and Canada, homicide rates in both
countries suddenly jumped by 92% and 93%, respectively. In contrast, in South Africa,
where television had yet to arrive, rates remained consistently low throughout this period.
A follow-up study conducted after television’s arrival in South Africa found that
homicide rates there followed the North American pattern, jumping 130% fourteen years
after television’s introduction.
Researchers from the University of Illinois subsequently discovered that the amount of
television children watched at eight years old was the single most powerful predictor of
violent behavior at age thirty — more than poverty, grades, a single-parent home, or even
exposure to real violence. A follow-up investigation then studied more than a thousand
children in Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, and Poland over a three-year
period. This international sampling produced identical results: exposure to television in
childhood was the single greatest determinant of aggressive behavior in adults. To date,
more than a thousand investigations have documented a causal link between television
viewing and violent behavior, and no study has yet contradicted that finding.
Extrapolating on this research, the Journal of the American Medical Association noted
that if television technology had never been developed, today there would be 10,000
fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer
violent assaults.
To sum it all up in a nutshell: watching television makes you aggressive.
117