Posted on 08/24/2013 4:10:28 PM PDT by neverdem
EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie “Kick-Ass 2,” tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “in all good conscience I cannot support” the movie’s extensive and graphically violent scenes.
Mark Millar, a creator of the “Kick-Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.”
While Mr. Carrey’s point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers.
But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: “I’ve smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don’t have lung cancer. Therefore there’s no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.” So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence?
There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.
Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
TV violence in the past, didn’t glorify it, but did distinguish between good & bad.
Parents used to have some control as well. Adults should be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy, right and wrong.
They spend 200,000,000 on a two hour movie because they know it’ll manipulated people’s emotions: Laugh, cry, anger....Violence maybe. Only a fool would doubt the link between violent movies/ video games and real violence.
The news media is responsible for far, far more murder and mayhem in this nation than any violent movie fiction.
We would never say: media portrayals of flamboyant homosexuals leads to support for homosexuals...
We would never say: entertainment media portrayals of gang banging thugs with falsified police "rap sheets" leads to thuggish behavior among a certain segment of society...
Leftist political rhetoric sure does
News media today IS fiction.
Ok, the real question taken to generics would be this, does exposure to media representations lead to behavioral choices and/or changes?
Obviously Madison Avenue believes that the answer is yes as we have had advertiser supported media for almost forever.
Real world, real people and I never even applied for a government grant!
Yes, they can lead to those things when you have a society of dim-witted public school sheeple. Plus they are inundated with these images much much more than young people decades ago.
If they are surrounded by a gang-bang culture these shows and movies simply reinforce that. Kids who grew up in the suburbs and country don’t get the same message because they have counter and alternative messages from real life.
Isn't this the logic that liberals used to force "The Three Stooges", Loonytoons etc. off of broadcast TV>
This is why they banned Speedy Gonzales, they were afraid of hardworking hispanics!
:p
I think it's more accurate to say they spend $200M on a two hour movie because they're confident it will rake in $400M.
You mean things such as Django and The Butler, both fictionalized accounts calculated to stir up black hostility?
The people who benefit, btw, are mostly white (Hollywood) or politicians, such as Obama, to whom maintaining an angry black underclass is very important.
Kids are fed subjective reality and subjective morality in school all day long, its no wonder they can’t distinguish.
Look at the common core 3+4=11 example. If you can bullshit your way through, that’s good enough.
One rapper with a bio as a “former drug kingpin” was really an ex-cop (who wasn't an undercover narc). Eventually his cover was blown and he just laughed about it.
The culture that surrounds them is emulating a script provided to them by Russell Simmons and other liberal bigots who profiteer off the scam.
If humans can not be influenced by what they read and watch, why do business spend billions of dollars each year on advertisement.
I do not believe portraying violence per se is the problem (our literary and before that oral histories are full of violence).
The difference then and now there was a moral point to the violence. The good guys won and the bad guys lost. Today, the entertainment industry routinely allows the bad guys triumph over the good guys, or they present those who should be the good guys in our culture are presented in the worse possible light.
So do movies influence people, well asked the t shirt people after Clark Gable took off his shirt in it happened one night.
Mark Millar,a creator of the “Kick-Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.”
Or that Mein Kampf had anything to do with killing jews?
Estrella TV was recently added to my cable package. All Mexico - all the time. Can't stand 99% of it but I'm GLUED whenever Alarma TV news comes on. (And not just because of whatever hot babe is co-hosting.) Brutal stuff. A few days ago, they aired video of a few folks floating in a river after their faces were burned off. (Fast & Furious victims? Dunno.) Real life - wherever it happens.
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