International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Most of what we know about violence in the media has explored violence on →  television. While some studies of television violence were conducted during the 1950s and 1960s, most of the information about the amount of violence on television in the US comes from the long-term research conducted as part of the Cultural Indicators (CI) Project's analysis of samples of prime-time network programs (1967 to 2002; →  Cultivation Theory ; Gerbner, George ) and the National Television Violence Study's (NTVS) short-term analysis of a larger sample of network and cable channels from the mid-1990s (→  Television Networks ; Cable Television ). In the UK, information about television violence comes from an analysis of samples of programs from the mid-1990s. Knowledge about television violence in other countries (Japan or the Netherlands, for example) comes from studies looking at violence in samples of programs taken at one point in time. Most of these studies, whether conducted in the US or in other countries, focus on physical violence (hurting or killing) because emotional violence is extremely difficult to define and isolate in a consistent way. The CI studies examine and measure the amount of physical violence on television by monitoring network broadcast television programming. These analyses show that the levels of violence on television are quite high and have been relatively stable ... log in or subscribe to read full text