Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee might well have been on the air spewing anti-media blather March 24, even before ambulances left Jonesboro’s Westside Middle School, scene of the tragic and troubling shooting deaths of four students and a teacher.
And if Huckabee was the first of the knee-jerkers, he was hardly the last. Among the many contaminants in the usual gas cloud from last Sunday’s morning talk shows were the bleatings of a radio hostess who treats the wounded psyches of people whom she has never met or examined (Laura Schlessinger, on ABC’s “This Week”) and an unabashedly totalitarian suggestion from Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “gun control is not the answer; culture control is.”
A little reality check:
– Were the 13- and 11-year-old suspects the only kids in Jonesboro who watched TV or went to movies or played video games or read comic books or consumed any of the other supposedly corrosive media messages that allegedly filled them with violent urges and the will to carry them out?
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Obviously not. Whatever media images those two kids took in, everyone else absorbed the same images — and shot no one.
– Then there’s the almost never-challenged assertion that the violent images that supposedly saturate media, TV especially, have desensitized kids and adults alike to violence in real life.
So why, if people are desensitized to real-life violence, are the children, parents, teachers and townspeople of Jonesboro so traumatized by the shootings?
Why are people in such horrific situations often plagued for years with guilt, fear, nightmares and depression? Why has immediate onsite counseling by real therapists and clergy become such a high priority?
Because real-life violence is palpably different from media depictions of violence; the real thing remains as potent as ever.
– Why is it that the only kind of media content that supposedly affects people is violent content? Is it really plausible that media violence inevitably warps people, but the much more pervasive positive (or at least neutral) images of “Seinfeld,” “Home Improvement,” “ER,” “Ally McBeal,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Sesame Street” and on and on and on have no impact?
– Do any of the media-bashers actually watch TV, particularly broadcast television, where violence has become relatively rare over the last several seasons?
Shouldn’t a law enforcement hero — even on, say, the ludicrously violent “Walker: Texas Ranger” — be able to use violence as a last resort against violence initiated by criminals? Isn’t violence a permissible, even a logical, tactic in a teen’s cartoonish battle against evil vampires, ghouls and the like on WB’s “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”?
Yes, there’s more violence on cable, but nobody gets cable unless someone with a favorable credit history requests and pays for it. These are adults, presumably, who surely are entitled to get cable and decide whether to make it available to their kids.