Television and Children's Aggressive behavior: Another Look

Violence and aggression have been part of children's fictional lore from early times. The fireside story and the fairy tale were, however, a relatively small part of the child's life, usually integrated into a more or less cohesive and stable system of socialization. With the arrival of radio and then television the situation changed markedly. Control of the content of entertainment to which children might be exposed left the hands of parents, family, and subculture. True mass media entertainment came into being.

Violence has always been a part of American television, but it has gradually and consistently increased over time. In 1954, for example, no more than 17 percent of prime time television was devoted to violence-saturated action adventure programs; by 1961 it was up to 60 percent. In one week of Los Angeles entertainment television in 1960 there were 144 murders, thirteen kidnappings, seven torture scenes, four lynchings, and a few more miscellaneous acts of violence, all occurring before 9:00 p.m., when most children are still watching. Almost 200 hours weekly were devoted to crime scenes in 1964, with over 500 killings committed per week; two-thirds of the violent shows appeared before 9:00 p.m. By 1968 it was estimated that “the average child between ages five and fifteen watches the violent destruction of more than 13,400 persons on TV.”¹

More recent analyses disclose that the pattern has continued through the present. Since 1967 the most accurate and sophisticated estimates of violence saturation on television during prime time and Saturday morning have been provided by Professor George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications. Each year Gerbner records all programming for a representative week in October and then has trained teams of observers record the number of overt acts of violence in each show. In 1969, he reported, 80 percent of all programs contained violence, with a frequency of violent episodes of about five per play or eight per