Now Look What You Made Me Do: Violence and Media Accountability

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Now look what you made me do: violence and media accountability

Abstract: This paper applies postmodern theory to the puzzle of media violence: why there seems to be so much of it and why all efforts at control appear ineffective. At the same time, the international perspective throws a different light on the U.S. field: what seems obvious in Washington can appear questionable in London, and vice versa.A new reading of Lacan, Badiou, Barthes and Baudrillard, as well as a return to the postmodern Freud, suggests the media is not as much in control of itself as it believes, and that even its obvious failings respond to a deeper need of the consumer.

Introduction: whose violence?

“Everyone says there’s too much violence on TV but secretly they want more.” – J. G. Ballard

Any number of financially and critically successful films and television dramas in the U.S. have ensured a warm public reception by tapping, cynically, myopically or from obvious commercial motives, into the easily aroused general feeling that the media – and particularly newspapers – should be held socially accountable for their treatment of public issues. Identifiable villains include -- to name two of the most famous -- the press agent in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and the reporter in Absence of Malice (1981). Other films, such as Citizen Kane (1941), Network (1976) or Broadcast News (1987), draw much of their emotional force from the frisson to audiences of seeing an irresponsible use of the power inherent in operating a media business. Without the audience’s predicted sense of shock, the plots would not make sense.

Hollywood films go notoriously for drama rather than credibility (Maltby 1995 344). As Richard Maltby points out, the incoherence enables viewers to escape the constraints of reality and for a time to enjoy the phantasmagorical operations of dreamwork (outlined by Freud in Traumdeutung/The Interpretation of Dreams). Nevertheless, two long-term university teachers have found these films plausible enough to present them for discussion in their courses on media ethics (Good and Dillon 2002).

Societies themselves, particularly those with dubious claims to democracy, regularly hold journalists responsible for voicing uncomfortable truths. The New-York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that worldwide at least 792 journalists were killed on duty between 1 January 1992 and 8 July 2009, 71.8% were murdered and 86.5% of them were local correspondents. The perpetrators escaped with complete impunity in 88.7% of the killings (CPJ 2009). Jacobo Timerman in Argentina lived to tell his tale of “the dirty war” – not least that different branches of the military were in dispute over who should control and kill prisoners (1982). By contrast, Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, was shot dead in 2006 after years of courageous reporting from Chechnya (see

Responsibility and the facts

Democratic societies operating (ostensibly) under the rule of law tend to be more conflicted about how far journalistic responsibility extends.

-- Is it OK to hang the Nazi rabble-rouser Julius Streicher, as the Nuremberg judges ordered after the end of the Second World War, but not to take action against Fox News for giving uncensured coverage to supporters of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin who shouted “Kill him!” at the mention of soon to be President (and campaign rival) Barack Obama?

-- Is it fair to criticize the Qatar-based television station Al Jazeera, for its screen blindness to Palestinian terrorism while highlighting Israeli atrocities – but not take action against the New York Times for going along with the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

-- Are we content to see the imprisonment for life of the Rwanda radio journalists who repeatedly told Hutus to consider all Tutsis as their enemies in 1994, while allowing the man convicted of killing over 200 people aboard Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to be released under an agreement that seemed designed to improve business relations between the U.K. and Libya?

Unfortunately, none of the assertions above bears close scrutiny. Even at the Nuremberg trials, other Nazi leaders kept their distance from Streicher as too stupid and brutish to deserve a place in the top echelon, as if their anti-Semitism was at a more intellectual level than his – and they included Herman Goering, the architect of Hitler’s racist exterminations, while Streicher was condemned and hanged for his publishing activity.

The “kill him” story about Palin supporters emanated from one journalist, and the U.S. Secret Service was unable to find any evidence for such an outburst, though cries of “liar” and “off with his head” were heard when Presidential candidate John McCain spoke of Obama’s proposed policies (and described the Democrat as an honorable, decent opponent). The Fox News and wizzbang websites document the public record on this story.

Al-Jazeera bases its English language broadcasts on BBC standards of balance (many staff come from the British public broadcaster). The Palestinian National Authority shut down the office in West Bank for its vigorous reporting. Al-Jazeera’s facility for visitor comments on its website publishes the gamut of opinions about its performance. Not a bad record for any broadcaster.

By contrast, when the New York Times apologized on 26 May 2004 for its mistakes on misreporting, it said only that editing “was not as rigorous as it should have been.” The terminology could have been interpreted as a move by the Democratic proprietors to undermine Republic arguments for prosecuting the war in Iraq.

As for Ethe Rwanda radio journalists, the most thorough sociological examination of the 1994 massacres, by Scott Straus, concluded: “My evidence does not suggest that radio propaganda in and ofS itself caused most individuals to commit violence. Most men chose to participate in the killing after face-to-face mobilization and in a real situation of war and crisis. The evidence suggests that radio broadcasts had effects on particular perpetrator populations, in particular local elites and the most aggressive killers. But media effects alone did not drive most participation in the genocide” (Straus 2008:13).

With regard to Lockerbie, few U.K. stories of the release of the convicted bomber mentioned the long-standing controversy over the man’s trial and conviction. A United Nations official observer had described the proceedings as “a spectacular miscarriage of justice” and in 2005 the prosecutor cast doubts on the reliability of the key witness (all documented and sourced on Wikipedia if the journalists had wanted to raise the issue). Instead, the broadcasters concentrated on the differences among victims’ families about whether the man should be released.

The essential question here is not the inadequacies of the reporting but the plausibility of the tendentious phrasing; how many of these statements could pass without raising our suspicions as to their accuracy?

A 1998 survey by the Freedom Forum found that 88 per cent of those polled believe reporters use unethical or illegal means to obtain their stories. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found in another 1998 poll that 80 per cent of the population think that journalists sensationalize stories to sell more papers (Good and Dillon (2002:xii). But the examples just given, recording an elementary failure to distinguish between debatable ‘facts’ and reliable information, surely require something more as explanation than the commercial motivation of venal news organizations.

The never-ending story of media violence

“Television is the single most significant factor contributing to violence in America.” –Ted Turner, President, Turner Broadcasting System.

The same cloud of puzzlement hangs over the issue of violence in the media and its effects, as well as its accountability. Despite numerous surveys pointing out the shortcomings of research results that point either way, the question returns incessantly, couched in whatever theoretical framework happens to be currently in fashion. Thus, in 1994 David Buckingham recorded: “At a conservative estimate, there have probably been over seven thousand accounts of research in the field [of television’s impact on children, particularly violence] published since the introduction of television in the 1950s” (103). But he underlined: “The levels of statistical significance are often low, for example, and the correlations disappear when all the potential variables are accounted for” (106).

In 2001 the American Academy of Pediatrics put the total at more than 3,500 research studies, “all but 18” showing a positive relationship between media violence and violent behavior (FCC 2007:3). The 2001 assessment was strikingly similar to one given elsewhere in 1994 (three thousand), which had been challenged by a researcher who found only 250 “directly related to violence in the media” (ibid).

The differences seem to have been over what constitutes a “study” (ibid). Certainly, there seems to be some misreading of what sociologists mean when they describe a result as “significant”. Michael Males has pointed out that this does not mean the finding is important – only that it is “not likely to happen just by chance” (FCC 2007:10). But the central concern must be the effects recorded.

The British cultural studies scholar Martin Barker declared in 2001: “The expression 'media violence' has to be one of the most commonly repeated, and one of the most ill-informed, of all time. […] Seventy years of research into this supposed topic have produced nothing worthy of note“ (2001:42,43). No scientific work since then has established itself firmly with scholars, as distinct from law-makers, to render this judgment obsolete.

A course book on Media and Violence that attempted to provide and even-handed discussion of the situation for the U.K.’s Open University said it was unwilling to dismiss all studies claiming negative effects of media violence but the authors had to conclude that research into essential questions related to audience reception was still needed. And they bewailed a “dearth of studies” on how, for example, men and women separately react to film violence, which they judged as overwhelmingly and increasingly misogynistic (Carter and Weaver 2003:64).

At the same time, the field is replete with statistics that seem to assert important ‘truths’:

-- “By the time the average American child graduates from elementary school, he or she will have seen about 8,000 murders and about 100,000 other assorted acts of violence (e.g. assaults, rapes) on network television” (Bushman and Huesmann 2001:227).

-- “By age 18, an American child will have seen upwards of 15,000 simulated murders and about 200,000 acts of violence” (FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein, in FCC 2007:31).

-- The key National Television Violence Study vol 3. (1998) recorded that on U.S. network and cable television about one-third of violent interactions were portrayed as justified, and more than one-half produced no visible harmful effects, while good guys tended not to be punished for their violence (Gunter et al. 2003: 5).

-- After reviewing 271 studies, Paik and Comstock declared in 1994: “Approximately ten per cent of the variability in later criminal behavior can be attributed to television violence” (cited by Carter and Wheeler 2003:6).

Whether this extraordinarily precise assertion is true or not, it seems a very small result from the reported ubiquity of media violence in viewers’ lives. The best interpretation a U.S. survey could put on the decades of research was: “Although no reputable media scholar holds that media violence is the largest reason for violence in society, most accept that media violence is a small, but significant contributor to aggressive behavior” (Perse 2001:202).

In fact, in 2006, a U.S. study found that TV viewers over-estimated the risk of youth violence while believing wrongly that punishment was more effective than rehabilitation in reducing such crime (Goidel et al. 2006). White viewers also believed that sentencing was race neutral, while African-Americans held the realistic belief that they were much more likely to receive a harsher sentence than whites for the same offence.

It is also a standard finding of TV research that the more time people spend watching television the more likely they are to believe that violence is common and that people are at risk (Perse 2001:218). But the problems of assessing TV effects are not just those of carrying out enough research.

The British sociologist David Buckingham observed: “U.S. researchers have been keen to conclude that violence on television is a cause of aggression. Although they have often been rather equivocal about exactly how significant a cause it is ,[…] researchers in the UK and in other English-speaking countries have often reached very different conclusions (1994:107). He added: “Even when reviewing the same studies, for example, British social psychologists have generally been much more skeptical than their American counterparts. What appears to underlie these different evaluations of the research are fundamental disagreements about what is to count as evidence, and indeed what is to count as a valid and meaningful research question” (ibid).

The third-person effect

Given the methodological difficulties and doubtful premises of many of these studies, there seems no benefit to be gained from examining the claims in detail, since their differences rarely make them comparable, but it may be useful to point to some of the issues involved.

Perhaps the first point is that most of the direct research used to bolster arguments, for or against media effects, dates back before 2001, even that cited by the Federal Communication Commission in 2007, and this historic detail tends to be buried in the generalizations or a footnote.

Second, the effects of media violence on children have been “the most prominent preoccupation in this field,” as Buckingham notes (108).

The third is that “the dominant assumption in public debates is that children’s relationship with the medium is a fundamentally negative and damaging element in their lives” (104).

Some of this concern may be due what is known as the ‘third-person effect.’ People surveyed tend to see potential harm in media violence for others than themselves. The effect “has emerged as a particularly sensitive predictor of support for strict censorship of media,” reported Barrie Gunter and his team (2003:7).

The problems of ‘hard science’

It is not a damning criticism of the research that it can speak of both “desensitization” and “arousal” effects from media violence, though search for a single causal explanation of everything that is offensive in the behavior of the young is obviously wrong-headed. Attempts to give the research a ‘hard science’ edge have also only served to highlight the difficulties of tackling the issues.

For example, the British psychologist and persistent critic of Freudian method, Hans Eyesenck, attempted in the 1970s to give a physical scientific response the question of “desensitization” through media violence. Among the elementary distortions to which his report fell victim is his use of the term itself. In a survey of research he uses “skin conductance” (galvanic skin responses , recording increases in skin moisture) as an objective measure of sensitivity (Eysenck and Nias, 1978:281). Declines in galvanic skin response through repeated exposure to media violence were treated as “desensitization” to real violence. Children who watched either a “violent” Peter Gunn TV episode or a “neutral” Green Acres program then recognized fewer pictures as violent if they had seen Peter Gunn. In another experiment, children who watched a violent scene from Hopalong Cassidy were slower to call in adults when they saw a staged (videotaped) escalation of aggression between two children in another room. Eyesenck does not explain why girls were slower to call in help in all cases (253). One obvious explanation for ‘desensitization’, that children watching media violence can learn to ‘frame’ their viewing so that it is less arousing, is not considered.

Eyesenck’s use of “desensitization”—via the media or watching comparatively mild aggressive behavior – is quite different from the desensitization practiced on Nazi Einsatzgruppen (killing squads) reported by Richard Rhodes. Basing his explanation on the violent-socialization theory of the American criminologist Lonnie Athens, he identifies four distinct stages in the Nazi desensitization process: (1)[physical] brutalization; (2) belligerency; (3) violent performances; (4) virulency” (Rhodes 2002:21,22).

Even less of a schematic scenario was needed for experiment Philip Zimbardo to turn Stanford students into brutal jailors and prisoner victims in less than one week (2007). Zimbardo’s reflections on his 1971 study that became known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment” put the blame on psychologists rather than media for failing to appreciate how much social and cultural factors define situations and legitimatize behavior”. (x/xi). Zimbardo later tried unsuccessfully to obtain clemency for a guard found guilty of abuses at the Abu Ghraib interrogation center in Iraq. Of course, his conclusion does not rule out media effects, but implies that the media, if they come into the picture, are largely channeling society’s “economic, religious, historic and cultural” standards.