Acceptance of Violence?
“We’re so used to seeing this thing on television” was Fanny Clain’s response to the Brussels attacks earlier this year. After being severely injured in the attack, Clain was more startled by the intensity of the explosion than the act itself. What’s shocking is that her attitude in response to violent attacks is not rare. In a world where media plays an influential role in shaping public opinion, we are unfortunately greeted with an immense amount of violence. Whether in movies or on a 24-hour news cycle, violence consumption is on the rise. And it’s not to say that there is anything wrong with such violence. In fact, many individuals find explosions and gore quite entertaining. This epidemic, however, stems from beyond the common action movie into our news cycles. Our local news channels are inundated with constant sound bites of mass shootings, police violence, and homicides. This constant violent feed is detrimental to the human psyche, and eventually, we begin to respond to traumatic events with sentiments like Fanny Clain’s, those of indifference.
In this paper, I will analyze the psychological effects of becoming indifferent to violent news, better known as desensitization. By arguing how violence has become increasingly normalized in our society, I will address the implications of these frequencies, and how this, in turn, affects our feelings of empathy and compassion towards victims of violent events. News today often bombards the American people with negative stories, almost always having to do with the topic of violence. Over a three-year span, the National Television Violence Study analyzed violent content on over eight thousand hours of cable and broadcast programming. The study found that sixty percent of the eight thousand hours contained violent content (Wray 10). Professor Lori Dorfman and her colleagues examined 214 hours of local television and found that more time was allotted to violent crime stories than any other topic (Scharrer 292). These stories were usually the first two segments in the newscast (Scharrer 292). Violent news essentially takes precedence to non-violent news, speaking to ethics within the journalism industry. Why the media chooses to highlight such violent news is beyond me. Perhaps this epidemic of violence says a lot more about our society beyond the effects on our psyche. Nonetheless, these studies quantitatively show that violent news is no stranger to the media. There is considerable history that outlines the beginning of violent news cycles. German scholar Jurgen Wilkes studied seventeenth-century news sheets and found an emphasis on “murder, cruelties, executions, catastrophes, and violent actions” (Sherrow 44). The 1960s, in particular, was a period of extensive violence in the United States. Political assassinations, violence within the Civil Rights Movement, scenes from the Vietnam War, and urban riots flooded TV screens (Sherrow 44), displaying the atrocities being committed in our country. American history has been shaped by war and bloodshed, which may speak to such comfort in violence When a country’s sheer existence is incomplete without acts of violence, this may provide some insight as to why there has been such acceptance of violence. The problem, however, is that we come to accept these tragedies as everyday occurrences rather than troubling coincidences. The frequent sight of violence in our news cycles has a drastic effect on what we perceive to be violent or brutal. Psychologist Anita Gadhia-Smith addresses the psychological effects of a violent news cycle, suggesting that violent media leads individuals to feel a sense of ‘vulnerability and powerlessness,’ but also addresses that “there can also be some desensitization happening” (qtd in Rogers). Desensitization, defined as …show more content…
This attitude has gone beyond our TV screens, and can be applied to violence in the real world. Our society has slowly become desensitized to issues of both domestic and police violence as well, two pressing issues that claim the lives of many individuals. In her dissertation on social relationships, Julia Wood addresses the normalcy of domestic violence today. Wood states that “although we recoil from labeling violence between intimates as normal, its frequency renders the adjective disturbingly appropriate” (Wood 240). Wood approaches this prevalence from a different perspective, claiming the desensitization of domestic abuse as the product of narrative, leading to the “cultural authorization of violence and women’s toleration of it” (Wood
“We’re so used to seeing this thing on television” was Fanny Clain’s response to the Brussels attacks earlier this year. After being severely injured in the attack, Clain was more startled by the intensity of the explosion than the act itself. What’s shocking is that her attitude in response to violent attacks is not rare. In a world where media plays an influential role in shaping public opinion, we are unfortunately greeted with an immense amount of violence. Whether in movies or on a 24-hour news cycle, violence consumption is on the rise. And it’s not to say that there is anything wrong with such violence. In fact, many individuals find explosions and gore quite entertaining. This epidemic, however, stems from beyond the common action movie into our news cycles. Our local news channels are inundated with constant sound bites of mass shootings, police violence, and homicides. This constant violent feed is detrimental to the human psyche, and eventually, we begin to respond to traumatic events with sentiments like Fanny Clain’s, those of indifference.
In this paper, I will analyze the psychological effects of becoming indifferent to violent news, better known as desensitization. By arguing how violence has become increasingly normalized in our society, I will address the implications of these frequencies, and how this, in turn, affects our feelings of empathy and compassion towards victims of violent events. News today often bombards the American people with negative stories, almost always having to do with the topic of violence. Over a three-year span, the National Television Violence Study analyzed violent content on over eight thousand hours of cable and broadcast programming. The study found that sixty percent of the eight thousand hours contained violent content (Wray 10). Professor Lori Dorfman and her colleagues examined 214 hours of local television and found that more time was allotted to violent crime stories than any other topic (Scharrer 292). These stories were usually the first two segments in the newscast (Scharrer 292). Violent news essentially takes precedence to non-violent news, speaking to ethics within the journalism industry. Why the media chooses to highlight such violent news is beyond me. Perhaps this epidemic of violence says a lot more about our society beyond the effects on our psyche. Nonetheless, these studies quantitatively show that violent news is no stranger to the media. There is considerable history that outlines the beginning of violent news cycles. German scholar Jurgen Wilkes studied seventeenth-century news sheets and found an emphasis on “murder, cruelties, executions, catastrophes, and violent actions” (Sherrow 44). The 1960s, in particular, was a period of extensive violence in the United States. Political assassinations, violence within the Civil Rights Movement, scenes from the Vietnam War, and urban riots flooded TV screens (Sherrow 44), displaying the atrocities being committed in our country. American history has been shaped by war and bloodshed, which may speak to such comfort in violence When a country’s sheer existence is incomplete without acts of violence, this may provide some insight as to why there has been such acceptance of violence. The problem, however, is that we come to accept these tragedies as everyday occurrences rather than troubling coincidences. The frequent sight of violence in our news cycles has a drastic effect on what we perceive to be violent or brutal. Psychologist Anita Gadhia-Smith addresses the psychological effects of a violent news cycle, suggesting that violent media leads individuals to feel a sense of ‘vulnerability and powerlessness,’ but also addresses that “there can also be some desensitization happening” (qtd in Rogers). Desensitization, defined as …show more content…
This attitude has gone beyond our TV screens, and can be applied to violence in the real world. Our society has slowly become desensitized to issues of both domestic and police violence as well, two pressing issues that claim the lives of many individuals. In her dissertation on social relationships, Julia Wood addresses the normalcy of domestic violence today. Wood states that “although we recoil from labeling violence between intimates as normal, its frequency renders the adjective disturbingly appropriate” (Wood 240). Wood approaches this prevalence from a different perspective, claiming the desensitization of domestic abuse as the product of narrative, leading to the “cultural authorization of violence and women’s toleration of it” (Wood