Gitlin, Todd

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Hofstra Law Review Volume 22 Issue 4 Article 16 1994 The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and Television Todd Gitlin Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr  Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Gitlin, Todd (1994) "The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and Television," Hofstra Law Review: Vol. 22: Iss. 4, Article 16. Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol22/iss4/16 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship @ Hofstra Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hofstra Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Hofstra Law. For more information, please contact lawscholarlycommons@hofstra.edu. THE REAL PROBLEM IS VIOLENCE, NOTVIOLENCE AND TELEVISIONTodd Gitlin*While I agree with a great deal of Professor Gerbner remarks,' Iwant to use the iceberg for a different purpose metaphorically. What Iwant to say, essentially, is that the issue of television and violence isa veil over a real iceberg. It is a kind of stage iceberg. It is a kindof flat that was built to conceal something which is deeply serious.And what is deeply serious, the real iceberg, is violence. I want tosuggest, somewhat in the spirit of Marvin Kitman,2 that the measureof the fact that we are having these discussions this year-that is,discussions about television and violence and not discussions aboutviolence and what to do about it as a society-is a suggestion that, asa society, we are not prepared to take seriously violence in the realworld and what might be done about it. Instead, we are having asurrogate discussion.What annoys me about the fact that it is liberals who are havingthis discussion, is that it is liberals who have principally defaulted onthe discussion about what to do about violent crime in the society.Conservatives, for twenty some-odd years, have let you know justwhat they want you to do. And you can hear it on their commercials.You do not have to see this year's commercials to know what theyare going to sound like. They are going to sound like "clang," theslam of the penitentiary gate. That is a position. 'Three strikes andyou are out," or one of these kinds of strikes and you are out. Thoseare positions. We know what they are. Liberals for many years-andI speak here as someone who mostly agrees with them-have failedto make a serious proposal about what to do about violence. It ismuch easier, as various people have pointed out, to go before a press* Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mass Communications Program, Universi-ty of California, Berkeley. Editor's note: This article was originally presented at a live Sym-posium on Television and Violence held at Hofstra University School of Law on April 8,1994.1. George Gerbner, There is No Free Market in Television, 22 HoFSTRA L. REV. 879(1994).2. Marvin Kitman, Reducing Television Violence, 22 HoESTRA L. REv. 871 (1994).1Gitlin: The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and TelevisionPublished by Scholarship @ Hofstra Law, 1994HOFSTRA LAW REVIEWconference and fulminate about images and campaign against TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre. That does not take any expenditure. Itcertainly does not impose any new taxation on anyone or suggest thatsome money should be extracted from some part of the governmentin order to be applied elsewhere. It does not require that I threatenany interest except that of a few venal and deservedly culpable corpo-rations. It is too easy.If, in fact, the charges against media are accurate, if it is a rea-sonable practical social science assessment that, as ProfessorDonnerstein said earlier, perhaps five or ten percent of real worldviolence can be attributed to television violence,3 well then, I proposethat we have five to ten percent of our discussion about violence be adiscussion about television violence. I am interested in the other nine-ty to ninety-five percent. And what I want to suggest is that thereason we are having this relatively parochial conversation about theissue is because we are afraid to take seriously what has happened inthe society to generate, for example, 38,000 gunshot deaths a yearand to put these vast percentages of the youth population of the cit-ies, especially the black population, in jail or on probation or parole.There are two things in particular that ought to be part of aserious debate. One, of course, is the issue of guns. I find it morethan amusing that Senator Hollings, the co-sponsor of the bill wewere talking about this morning,4 is attached to the NRA and, inparticular, voted against, the Brady Bill' that would have, horror ofhorrors, provided for a five-day waiting period.6 My God, a five-daywaiting period.Canadians watch the same television we watch for the most part.Ninety percent of Canadians live within one hundred miles of theU.S. border. And while they have some of their own television, theywatch a lot of our stuff. They like it for various reasons. And theircrime rates, which have been rising in recent years,7 enough to cause3. Edward Donnerstein, Mass Media Violence: Thoughts on the Debate, 22 HOFSTRA L.REV. 827 (1994).4. S. 1383, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. (1993). For a further discussion of the Hollings Billsee Arthur Eisenberg, The Hollings Bill: Unconstitutional Under the First Amendment, 22HoFsTRA L. REv. 793 (1994); Kathleen Peratis, Banning Speech Does Not Cure Social Ills,22 HOFSTRA L. REv. 801 (1994); John Windhausen, Congressional Interest in the Problem ofTelevision and Violence, 22 HOFSTRA L. REv. 783 (1994).5. H.R. 1025, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. (1993).6. Id.7. Surge in Violent Crime Reported, Facts on File World News Digest, Apr. 9, 1992,available in LEXIS, Nexis Library. From 1981 to 1990, "the rate of violent crime had in-[Vol. 22:8852Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 22, Iss. 4 [1994], Art. 16https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol22/iss4/16REAL PROBLEM IS WOLENCEa similar alarm among them, are simply not in our ballpark. The gunrestrictions are one important reason.I was in Ottawa last October where this was being debated.Some people in Ottawa were up in arms-quite upset. "Up in arms"is not the right image. They were down on arms because justthen-this was in the middle of October-the metropolitan area ofOttawa had just had its fifth homicide of the year. Good God! Therewould be dancing in the streets in any American metropolis with suchstatistics!Parenthetically, the same movies which I find loathsome, whichplace a pleasing cast upon violence-The Terminator sort, LethalWeapon, all movies with titles which have something like "weapon"or "lethal" or "death" or "terminate" in them-the same movies areshowing everywhere, everywhere in the world, without the same sortof homicidal consequence as in the United States. Plainly, the avail-ability of guns is a factor. It is a considerable factor. To my mind, itis a vastly more important factor than television.There is a slippage that takes place when the subject of televi-sion violence takes place. It is the moment at which we switch fromdiscussions of the causes of aggression to discussion of the causes ofviolence. It is rarely noted at that moment in the conversation thataggression is not bodily dangerous violence. If we had a society fullof young people who were quick to resort to fist fights, I could livewith that. I am sure most of us could. That is not the problem. Thatis not the sort of behavior that is precipitated, as many experimentalstudies have pointed out, by television watching. It is not that behav-ior that is the problem. The problem is that people have the meanswith which to convert aggression into violence, often lethally incapac-itating.The second enormous absence in this discussion is inequality. Itis true-and I think it was Professor Gerbner who first pointed thisout-people who watch television the most are the people who aremost dependent on it, the people who are most likely to be alone, thepeople who are most powerless in the society as a whole; that means,disproportionately, the old-who do not have the energy to commit alot of violence and do not have the hopes that something might comeof it-and, the young, in particular, young people who are the mostpoor, which means disproportionately people of color in the city.creased 52%... Sexual assaults had increased 144%. Nonsexual assaults had increased57%." Id.1994]3Gitlin: The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and TelevisionPublished by Scholarship @ Hofstra Law, 1994HOFSTRA LAW REVIEWNow, whether it is true that what animates them and agitatesthem about television is the images of mayhem on television orwhether, on the other hand, as I suspect, what animates them is thattelevision is a nonstop reminddr of what other people have that theydo not-namely, the whole glittering panoply of consumer goods thatmiddle-class America assumes to be its birthright. I do not knowwhat it is about television that is most pernicious. There are manythings. But neither does anyone else know.I would not take it as established that what is most agitating andcrime-inducing about television is gun-play. It seems to be perfectlyreasonable-since there are many studies that have established this inthe past-that one important reason crime becomes a way of life, isthat in a relatively wild society, crime is an illegitimate means bywhich some people attain what other people attain by legitimatemeans. That is, if you cannot get money by earning it, then you getit by mugging or robbing a convenience store. I am not saying that iswhere all, or even most, violent crime comes from. But I think it isan important element in the story.Those, it seems to me, are the central issues that ought to beunder discussion.Having said all that, I very quickly want to hop, skip and jumpout of the, I think, disingenuous self-defense offered by the televisionnetworks. The television networks do not care about the quality ofwhat they do. Possibly my only difference with George Gerbner inthis regard is that he distinguishes sharply between the creative peo-ple, so-called, and the executives.8 I tend to think that line is farmore blurred and a lot of the people in the industry-at least thepeople I interviewed in 1981 when I was researching a book aboutthe industry-were not exactly champing at the bit to write enduringwork. They were champing at the bit to make a lot of money.Wherever it is that we draw the line in the industry, I certainlydo not want to defend the industry. I think, in fact, to say that thestate should regulate it in some ways takes us, as a democratic pub-lic, off the hook. That seems to be the way we like to approach a lotof our pathologies and discontents. We want the state to reach outand stop something, while we presumably do not have to get up fromour couches. I like dissent. I like the vitality of democratic combat. Ithink it is perfectly reasonable for people who loathe what they see8. See Gerbner, supra note 1, at 882.[Vol. 22:8854Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 22, Iss. 4 [1994], Art. 16https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol22/iss4/16REAL PROBLEM IS VIOLENCEon television to conduct all kinds of campaigns, write letters, picket,humiliate people who deserve to be humiliated-anyone attached toan Amy Fisher television movie is a perfectly good subject for goodold-fashioned civil disobedient behavior-and I am for that. Verymuch so.But I am also-like Peggy Charren and other people who havecontributed to this discussion-of the mind that Gresham's Law, thelaw that bad money drives out good money,9 or, in other words, thatthe grotesque drives out the less grotesque, is something that con-stantly should be put to the test. And the way to put it to the test isfor the society as a whole to undertake seriously an obligation tomake available a different world than is available through commercialtelevision. The world that is different from what is going to be oncommercial television is always going to be disturbing and unusual,by definition. We have now lived with television long enough thatwhat we see on it as our daily diet has become normal. We nowhave kids graduating from Harvard who think that they should writelike what they see on television. They think that is a high order ofachievement. It has become that. The only way to fight this processis for the society to make a commitment to underwrite culture whichis not subjected to the crude preferences of the market.In that sense, television should be like forms of transportationwhich could not exist without subsidy, just as the railroads would nothave existed in America without land subsidy, just as we would nothave an airline industry without subsidy, just as we would not havepublic schools without subsidy, just as we would not have streetswithout subsidies, sewers and the rest of it. Even though at any givenmoment many people may feel we can live without a high quality ofculture, I think that if we are serious rather than simply rhetorical, ifwe are serious about a society that despises violence and mediocrity,we should subsidize it. That we have only one public television net-work increasingly reliant on commercials, that we spend as little onthe subsidy of work of worth, by far less per population than anyother industrial society, is a crying scandal.Finally, I am interested in the discussion about violence andtelevision not because I think that the real scariness of the world andthe real ways that we are living in America are going to be seriouslyaddressed if we take some of the violence out of television, but be-9. Geoffrey P. Miller, Public Choice at the Dawn of the Special Interest State: TheStory of Butter and Margarine, 77 CALm. L. REv. 83, 97 n.70 (1989).199415Gitlin: The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and TelevisionPublished by Scholarship @ Hofstra Law, 1994890 HOFSTRA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 22:885cause, we can look through the violence on television issue as a sortof lens, through which to see the larger waste and the larger incapaci-ties of our society.6Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 22, Iss. 4 [1994], Art. 16https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol22/iss4/16

The Real Problem is Violence, Not Violence and Television

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