Questions about the effects of television violence on children have existed since the earliest days of this medium. Fistfights, shootouts, car crashes, rapes, take your pick. Violence is universal on television, sometimes gory and gruesome, other times clean and remote. This classic study remains one of the documentaries to examine TV violence in children. Clips from action-adventure series, Saturday morning cartoons, the nightly news and MTV are all invading our television screens everyday. Prime time programs average eight hostile acts per hour; children's shows four times as much. Violence is depicted as a normal, justified response to conflict and threat. .
Television violence is being seen all over the world as we speak. There is a great amount of violence being watched in millions of homes this contributes to the growing amount of violent crimes across the U.S. As the future approaches parents seem to be more involved in what their children are seeing on television. This growing trend of violence on television will continue until drastic measures are taken. .
Children begin watching television at a very early age, sometimes as early as six months, and are ardent viewers by the time that they are two or three years old. The general pattern of viewing is one of a steady rise in the number of hours viewed from early childhood through preadolescence and then a sharp drop in viewing during the adolescent years. By watching television, the children are only expected to play a viewer role, while not realizing the familiarity of their role as a student in a classroom. This is leading American culture in the process of converting their culture from a word-centered to an image-centered society. .
Some of the first violent cartoons seem very harmless when compared with many that exist today. "Loony Toons" was a big hit on Saturday mornings for many years, and much of the content made it seem okay for even animal characters to hurt each other.
