Violence in the media

The media has exploited violent and unlawful acts entirely too much. Whether on television or the front page of the newspaper, stories of crimes and violence are broadcast in an almost glorified manner to our society, and more importantly our children. But where are the positive headlines that advertise the good actions taken by our world? Most of the time you will only find them in small print at the bottom of the page or at the end of a news broadcast. The media needs to focus more on the positive things that people do and less on who robbed a bank, killed forty people and then committed suicide. The bottom line is we need more of the right "positive reinforcement" in our media today.

What is the "right positive reinforcement"? Well first lets define positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement can be defined as rewarding a subject's action with something that the subject views positively. For example, if "Joe" loves to eat candy, then Joe will do whatever will get him the candy. If Joe gets all A's on his report card and thus is given candy in response to getting A's, then Joe's action of getting A's has been "positively reinforced" by giving him what he wanted, the candy. This is an ex

Violence in the media goes beyond what we see in the news and on the front page. In movies and cartoons violence has crept through and is shown in a less serious manner. For example the show "South Park", a cartoon directed at teenagers, shows one the characters die in every episode. This only teaches children that dying is not that serious. A child watching Saturday morning cartoons experiences twenty to twenty-five violent acts per hour. Combined with the fact that an average kid watches about twenty-three hours of television a week, studies show that by the time a child reaches eighteen years of age they will have viewed two-hundred thousand acts of violence on television alone. Even if the TV character has a so-called good reason for acting violently (as when a police officer is shown shooting down a criminal to protect others), this does not make young children less likely to imitate the aggressive act than when there is no good reason for the violence. All of this exposure can make a child confused about the serious consequences of violent acts. So when they see something such as the school shootings on the news, their judgement between real-life and Saturday morning cartoons can be impaired. They may only see and recognize that these people are getting to be on television and not realize the actual loss of life that occurred. Thus putting the two together, they may try and duplicate an event that they see and go after their "candy" as well.

The media defends itself by saying that they only give the public what they want. It is true that we are drawn to these horrific acts for some reason. Everytime I hear that there has been another school shooting I am the first to the television to check out the action. It is our human nature that draws us to very intense stories such as these. This is something that