Violence on television
Andree Wright and Kate Aisbett
ISBN 0 642 14831 7 ISSN 1032-7894
Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, October 1989
Abstract
The National Committee on Violence and the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal have collaborated to
produce this paper on the relationship between television programming and violence. An incident
where video violence is alleged to have motivated a Brisbane killer, and the resultant television news
coverage of his actions, serves to highlight some of the major issues. The authors discuss the
Television Program Standards, the ABT's Inquiry into Television Violence, research into community
attitudes to violence on television, and measures that need to be taken to address community
concerns.

From the Washington Post

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Later in the interview, Dominick noted Stewart is Jewish, which he said is "a minority as much as you are."

"Very powerless people," Sanchez laughed. "He's such a minority, I mean, you know... Please, what are you kidding? ... I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they -- the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah." In the audio, which was circulated online Friday, Sanchez's sarcasm was evident.

During the Sirius interview, Sanchez told Dominick he was discussing Stewart because he was sick and tired of "The Daily Show" host's repeated needling.

In case you've missed Stewart's "reports" on Sanchez: On March 2, for example, "The Daily Show" ran clips of Sanchez anchoring his scheduled portion of CNN's coverage of the Chilean earthquake, and fears about an imminent tsunami. In the clips, Sanchez is seen mistaking the Galapagos Islands for Hawaii, and asking an expert to explain to him what 9 meters means "in English." Stewart called CNN "the most trusted name in over-caffeinated control freaks," and Sanchez's photo was shown above the identifier that read "The Uninformant!"

"I just realized something," Stewart jabbed. "Rick Sanchez delivers the news like a guy at a party who's doing a lot of coke and traps you in a corner and explains really intensely how an ant is the strongest animal on earth."

A rep for Stewart's "The Daily Show" issued a "no comment" when contacted late Friday afternoon.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/tvblog/2010/10/cnn-fires-rick-sanchez-after-r.html?hpid=artslot

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Cuba has condemned the release of a new video game in which United States special forces try to kill a young Fidel Castro.

State-run media said the game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, attempted to legitimise murder and assassination in the name of entertainment.

The Cubadebate website said it would also turn American children into sociopaths.

It is expected to be one of the biggest selling video games of the year

The BBC correspondent in Havana, Michael Voss, says Cubadebate takes a dig at all the failed real life attempts to kill Cuba's former president.

The website says that the US government is trying to achieve through virtual reality what it had not been able to do in real life during Mr Castro's 50 years in power.

The Cubans say there were more than 600 attempts on his life, ranging from poison pens to exploding cigars.

In the end, it was ill health which forced Mr Castro to relinquish the presidency. Now 84 years old, he is still head of Cuba's Communist Party.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11731120

The eyesight of children under six could be harmed by 3D games played on Nintendo's forthcoming handheld console, the company warns.

The games giant posted the health warning on the website devoted to the 3DS handheld.

It said specialists had warned of possible damage that could be caused by 3D games which present different images to the right and left eye.

Younger children should only play 2D versions of 3DS games, said Nintendo.

Parental control

The 3DS, the successor to the hugely popular DS handheld, goes on sale in late February in Japan and in Europe and the US in March.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12100925

see story at top and comments below it.

Australian gamers will not be able to buy the latest instalment of the popular Mortal Kombat series after it was refused classification by the Australian Government.

The Classification Board says the video game contains excessive levels of violence and is unsuitable for a minor to see or play.

Mortal Kombat 9 contains more than 60 death scenes, with graphic images of decapitations, dismemberment and spraying blood.

Organiser of gaming festival Armageddon Expo, Bill Geradts, says many consumers are unhappy with the decision.

"There's a lot of disappointed fans out there who feel it is an unfair action on behalf of the Government Classification Board," he said.

"As adults they feel the decision should be their own to make as to whether a game is too violent.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/26/3149628.htm

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday struck down on First Amendment grounds a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children. The 7-to-2 decision was the latest in a series of rulings protecting free speech, joining ones on funeral protests, videos showing cruelty to animals and political speech by corporations.

In a second decision Monday, the last day of the term, the court also struck down an Arizona campaign finance law as a violation of the First Amendment.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for five justices in the majority in the video games decision, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, No. 08-1448, said video games were subject to full First Amendment protection.

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Depictions of violence, Justice Scalia added, have never been subject to government regulation. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” he wrote, recounting the gory plots of “Snow White,” “Cinderella” and “Hansel and Gretel.” High school reading lists and Saturday morning cartoons, too, he said, are riddled with violence.

The California law would have imposed $1,000 fines on stores that sold violent video games to anyone under 18.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28scotus.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

May I appear old-fashioned here and say "there is violence and there is VIOLENCE..."

Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the two dissenters in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, pointed out the court's double standard. "What sense does it make," he asked, "to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?"

What sense, indeed. Breyer went further: "What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman — bound, gagged, tortured, and killed — is also topless?"

Violent computer games are having a damaging effect on children of primary school age, teachers have warned.

Some are staying up beyond midnight playing games in their bedrooms unsupervised by parents, according to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).

The union will debate a motion at its conference next week calling on ministers to investigate the possible introduction of new legal curbs to protect young children from the harmful effects of computer games.

"I think that what we are talking about, first of all, is the amount of time children spend locked in their room," said Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the ATL.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/children-being-damaged-by-violent-computer-games-teachers-warn-7586395.html

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Big Bang Theories: Violence on Screen

As violence permeates what we see on movie, TV and video-game screens, critics for The Times consider the impact. A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critics, explore the history and mythology of on-screen violence. The TV Watch columnist Alessandra Stanley differentiates between different types of violence on TV, while Chris Suellentrop puts video-game carnage in perspective.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/03/arts/critics-on-violence-in-media.html?hp&hp

See picture at top and read exposés from top...

Feelings of aggression after playing video games are more likely to be linked to gameplay mechanics rather than violent content, a study suggests.

Researchers carried out a range of tests, including making a non-violent version of popular game Half-Life 2.

Games modified to have counter-intuitive, frustrating controls - leading to feelings of incompetence - produced more aggressive reactions.

The team called for more sophisticated research into violent gaming.

"There's a need for researchers who are interested in these questions not just to pull two video games off the shelf from the high street," said Dr Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute, who carried out the research along with colleagues from the University of Rochester in the US.

"We need to have a more sophisticated approach so we're all reading from the same experimental methods."

The link between violence and video games is a heavily debated topic among psychologists.

One recent study suggested that playing violent video games for long periods of time can hold back the "moral maturity" of teenagers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921743

Television is nothing more or less than a survival tactic during the festive season.

The phrase “Oh look, The Hobbit’s on” can momentarily distract a loved one from their Yuletide quest of waterboarding themselves with cranberry jelly and stuffing. Telly is also a good way to wind down from the real-life Hunger Games that is Christmas shopping, a sport that drops you, totally defenceless, into a shopping mall and demands you scale a mountain of produce – ahem, presents – by garrotting your fellow contenders with weaponised Christmas ribbon.

Perhaps that is television’s other appeal at this time of year: a chance to mentally detach yourself from the madness and stop asking so many questions. Why are we celebrating a humble baby’s birth by trying to gastronomically outdo Henry VIII between bouts of retail fever that would make Imelda Marcos blush? You might as well celebrate the life of Buddha by pouring gravy on an orgy.

Of course, the most traditional televisual offering of them all is the carol concert. Nothing quite captures the glory of God-made-flesh than two hours of singing punctuated by the occasional spruik for the network. Channels Seven and Nine were so keen to shoehorn participants from their various reality TV shows into their respective concerts this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking Jesus Christ was the first ever winner of Bethlehem’s Got Talent.

Both Carols by Candlelight and Carols in the Domain were fun, but did they need to be Peter Jackson long? No issue if you’re a big fan of carols but those members of the audience still young enough to believe Christmas is about Santa Christ (rather than choke-slamming rival shoppers while nursing your gout) didn’t make it to the end awake.

Happily, Doctor Who was an excellent Christmas outing for slightly bigger kids (some of them with beards and a TV blog), tackling adult themes with a sense of childlike adventure. Here, the Doctor and Clara found themselves in the north pole being hunted by Dream Crabs, horrid things that attach to your face and induce a dreaming state as they feast on your brain (feasting being how they celebrate the birth of the Dream Crab Messiah).

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/dec/29/doctor-who-delivers-the-atheist-skewed-sci-fi-horror-we-all-need-at-christmas

Read about violent games and violence on TV from top...

People who regularly play action video games could be at increased risk of developing neurological and psychiatric disorders, a study suggests.

The research, published in a Royal Society journal on Wednesday, found that people who played games such as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V and Tomb Raider were more likely to employ navigational strategies associated with decreased grey matter in the hippocampus part of the brain.

Decreased volume in the hippocampus has been associated with disorders such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and Alzheimer’s disease.

The lead study author, Prof Greg West, from the University of Montreal’s department of psychology, said the paper indicated that benefits of video games, such as improved attention and perception, highlighted in previous studies, could come at a price.

“Since 2003, research has been reporting cognitive benefits of video game playing so that we could use them to manage cognitive decline in older people or special populations [eg people with early stage dementia],” said West.

“People are suggesting these games are good and we’re saying ‘Hey, wait, there might be a serious risk with them.’ I don’t want to be alarmist. The message is enjoy video games, enjoy them in moderation but don’t expect them to improve some sort of cognitive ability.”

The researchers asked 59 healthy young adults, with an average of 24, to complete a virtual reality task consisting of an eight-arm radial maze containing landmarks.

Of the participants, 26 were identified as action video game players, meaning they reported a minimum of six hours a week (the average was 18 hours) spent playing such games during the previous six months. The remainder had played them very little or not at all in the same period.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/20/video-game-link-to-psychiatric-orders-suggested-by-study

Gus: I do everything in moderation for the rest of eternity, or until I die, whichever comes first. Read from top.

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But the world gets stranger, and more uncertain still. What should give us most pause is that our children’s thoughts will come to mimic the incoherence of artificial intelligence. The “intelligence” of the algorithm doesn’t have a mind. It has no values and represents no ethos beyond the constant churning out of content. As algorithms and machine learning come to control more and more of our daily lives, from how movies are made to the medical treatment you receive, the role of the human mind in the running of society will become superfluous—a vestigial appendage. And filling the void that it once occupied will come more of the moral and intellectual incoherence that we see in these absurd YouTube videos.

This is our first intimate encounter with cybernetic intelligence of any significance. It’s our first real exposure to artificial creativity where and when it counts. This isn’t a randomly generated song or art created in a lab as a prototype of what artificial intelligence might someday be able to “achieve.” This is artificially created culture where it matters most, where the minds of our children are themselves being formed within the imagination-less void of an algorithmic feedback loop. And the effects are already discernible. As one concerned mother reports on Reddit, her child was actually beginning to imitate the often odd, even demented speech patterns in the videos. Our children and the algorithm are echoing mindlessness.

The violence in these videos are actually the least troubling thing about them. Stories intended specifically for children have since time immemorial often been lurid expressions of collective wisdom. Just go back and read Snow White in the original German if you need proof. But fairytales and folklore are in many ways the exact opposite of AI-generated videos. In the surreal violence of myth is the distillation of our collective wisdom as a human race, developed through eons of lived experience in the world. If anything, they’re the very embodiment of coherency. But AI is the inverse of this, and in many instances we degrade ourselves by engaging with it. As Jaron Lanier writes in You Are Not A Gadget:

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

But the same logic, both economic and moral, that animates the creation of these videos doesn’t seem to be abating any time soon. We have a future to look forward to in which our creative consumption, our entire lives, will be organized to keep us circling around the nihilistic void of the algorithm, mimicking it as it mimics us.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-...

Read from top... Watching a public hanging is not fun either... The point in the end is that the "de-humanisation' of humanity by bots is not the sum-total of humanity. The "de-humanisation" of humanity by humans has long been a problem to deal with. By re-humanising humanity with compassion and the more precise imagination of sciences we can actually make progress to moderate the silly imagination that brought us die Gebrüder Grimm's fairy tales and the biblical floods of an angry god.

The lyrics of death metal band Bloodbath's cannibalism-themed track, Eaten, do not leave much to the imagination. But neither this song - nor the gruesome lyrics of others of the genre - inspire violence. 

That is the conclusion of Macquarie University's music lab, which used the track in a psychological test. 

It revealed that death metal fans are not "desensitised" to violent imagery. 

The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Open Science, 

"[Death metal] fans are nice people," said Prof Bill Thompson, from the Australian university, which is based in Sydney. "They're not going to go out and hurt someone."

This latest study is part of a decades-long investigation by Prof Thompson and his colleagues into the emotional effects of music. These effects, he explained, are complex. 

"Many people enjoy sad music, and that's a bit of a paradox - why would we want to make ourselves sad?" he asked. "The same can be said of music with aggressive or violent themes. For us, it's a psychological paradox - so [as scientists] we're curious, and at the same time we recognise that violence in the media is a socially significant issue." 

With a classic psychological experiment that probes people's subconscious responses; and by recruiting death metal fans to take part. The test involved asking 32 fans and 48 non-fans listen to death metal or to pop whilst looking at some pretty unpleasant images. 

Lead researcher Yanan Sun explained that the aim of the experiment was to measure how much participants' brains noticed violent scenes, and to compare how their sensitivity was affected by the musical accompaniment. 

To test the impact of different types of music, they also used a track they deemed to be the opposite of Eaten.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47543875

Read from top.

A new clothing line lets you camouflage yourself as a car to mess with surveillance cameras. 

Teenagers get news from Facebook – who knew! And more streaming options with Disney+.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthisshow/anti-surv...

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See also:

No Australian-made comedy or drama series made the top-10 list of most watched Australian shows in 2018.

Reality television took up six slots, with Married at First Sight on top with two million viewers.

There's always room for junk on television, in moderation, but Australian networks have been stuffing their faces — with cooking competitions, home reno blitzes and the eternal search for "true love" — in the decade since MasterChef debuted on our screens.

Meanwhile, a new wave of scripted series is beginning to emerge from the fringes of Australian television.

To see the future of Australian television, you need to look beyond broadcast to the flush of quality scripted comedy and drama series coming through streaming platforms — from YouTube to ABC iview.

This year alone has produced Sarah's Channel, Robbie Hood, The Heights and Internment.

Many of these ride solo online, while others use a combination of streaming and broadcast television.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-24/australian-tv-streaming-short-for...

Note that "this year alone" does not produce TV shows...

The media are deliberately misrepresenting a study to stoke panic over alleged violence in the children’s animated show Peppa Pig. Across the political spectrum the headlines have been absurdly alarming. “ASSAULT ON PEPPA: Peppa Pig and Disney’s Frozen are too violent for Children, experts claim” shrieks the right-wing The Sun, while the more left-leaning Independent breathlessly declares, “Peppa Pig: Experts Find Shocking Levels of Violence in Children’s TV Show”.

According to the media, it isn’t just Peppa but also Daniel Tiger, The Octonauts, Paw Patrol as well as Toy Story 3 and 4, Frozen, Finding Dory and a handful of other kids’ shows and movies that are supposedly deemed to be too violent.

As a vigilant and diligent parent of a young child who routinely watches Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, The Octonauts and Daniel Tiger, I find these headlines and their revelations alarming. The Sun’s and The Independent’s stories had me deeply concerned that I was allowing my child to be exposed to violent and damaging material via Peppa Pig.

I myself have watched countless hours of these shows with my child and found them to be rather benign and good-hearted children’s programs, so I wanted to learn more about the ‘shocking violence’ that experts discovered of which I was apparently blissfully blind.

According to The Independent, “A new study looking into violence featured in animated series and films found that more than eight moments of pain and brutality were inflicted across a selected range of entertainment aimed at children.”

As I read the Independent story further though, a bunch of red flags popped up. For example, the thin article made a bizarre shift in its closing three paragraphs when it dropped the violence angle altogether in order to inform readers that actress Harley Bird, who voiced Peppa, recently stepped down from the role after 13 years. I was expecting to read that Ms. Bird had been brutalized while working on the show or had turned into a violent hooligan, but no, the article just ended with that odd whimper of a factoid.

The biggest red flag of all, though, was that neither The Sun nor The Independent ever linked to the supposed “study of violence in children’s entertainment” they were referencing, nor did they include the name of the journal in which it was allegedly published. Being the intrepid non-reporter that I am, I did what The Sun and The Independent’s actual reporters hoped readers wouldn’t do, and searched for the report.

Upon finding the study in everybody’s favorite magazine, Pain: The Journal of the International Association of the Study of Pain, I was shocked to learn that not only are Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger not viciously violent shows creating serial killers and sociopaths, but that the “study” in question has absolutely NOTHING AT ALL to do with violence.

The study is actually titled “The socio-cultural context of pediatric pain: an examination of the portrayal of pain in children’s popular media”.And it wasn’t investigating “violence featured in animated series and films” but rather how kids’ entertainment presents pain and reactions to pain on-screen.

The banal study concluded, “A narrow depiction of pain was presented in children’s popular media, with an overall underrepresentation of pain, numerous maladaptive portrayals of pain, and gender differences in both sufferer and observer responses.” Definitely a less sexy headline than “Assault on Peppa Pig.”

The British and Canadian researchers behind the study were actually trying to understand how to use the power of children’s entertainment to help kids understand regular, everyday pain, and how to be empathetic.

You wouldn’t know that from The Sun or The Independent’s click-bait headline and lazily reported story, which isn’t just meant to garner ad revenue by deceiving viewers but also to gaslight parents and instill in them a growing sense of fear, as well as further undermine, confuse and conflate common language.

For example, making the terms ‘pain’ and ‘violence’ interchangeable, as both media outlets did in this case, is totally in line with the insidious woke culture that distorts language beyond recognition and brazenly and shamelessly declares that “silence is violence”.

Trust me when I tell you that silence is not violence. Violence is violence. Only someone who has never been punched in the face will tell you that silence and violence are the same thing.

This Peppa Pig story is just another obvious example of the media’s mischievous and malicious mendacity. One can go through the list of much more egregious media lies that had, or potentially could have, more catastrophic impact than just besmirching poor Peppa Pig.

For instance, the establishment media’s slavishly slanted coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war, or the propagandasurrounding Syria’s supposed chemical weapons attacks, or the cavalcade of Cold War inspired disinformation regarding Russia…be it alleged interference in the 2016 election, or supposed hacking of power grids, or use of “microwave weapons”.

This manufactured Peppa Pig story is proof that the corporate media aren’t interested in uncovering facts, only in pandering for profit, and that their loyalty is always and every time to money, not to truth.

The bottom line is this: Peppa Pig is a safe and trustworthy show for kids to watch, but the establishment news outlets of both the left and right are not a safe or trustworthy product for adults to consume.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/508668-peppa-pig-shocking-violence/

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