1. Violence is widespread across the television landscape.
Turn on a television set and pick a channel at random; the odds are better than 50-50 that the program you encounter will contain violent material. To be more precise, 60% of approximately 10,000 programs sampled for the National Television Violence Study contained violent material. That study identified an average of 6,000 violent interactions in a single week of programming across the 23 channels that were examined, including both broadcast and cable networks. More than half of the violent shows (53%) contained lethal acts, and one in four of the programs with violence (25%) depicted the use of a gun.
2. Most violence on television is presented in a manner that increases its risk of harmful effects on child-viewers.
More specifically, most violence on television follows a highly formulaic pattern that is both sanitized and glamorized.
By sanitized, I mean that portrayals fail to show realistic harm to victims, both from a short and long-term perspective. Immediate pain and suffering by victims of violence is included in less than half of all scenes of violence. More than a third of violent interactions depict unrealistically mild harm to victims, grossly understating the severity of injury that would occur from such actions in the real world. In sum, most depictions sanitize violence by making it appear to be much less painful and less harmful than it really is.
By glamorized, I mean that violence is performed by attractive role models who are often justified for acting aggressively and who suffer no remorse, criticism, or penalty for their violent behavior. More than a third of all violence is committed by attractive characters, and more than two-thirds of the violence they commit occurs without any signs of punishment.
Violence that is presented as sanitized or glamorized poses a much greater risk of adverse effects on children than violence that is presented with negative outcomes such as pain and suffering for its victims or negative consequences for its perpetrators.
3. The overall presentation of violence on television has remained remarkably stable over time.
The National Television Violence Study examined programming for three years in the 1990s and found a tremendous degree of consistency in the pattern of violent portrayals throughout the television landscape. Across the entire study of roughly 10,000 programs, the content measures which examined the nature and extent of violence varied no more than a percent or two from year to year. Similar studies that have been conducted since that time have produced quite comparable results.
This consistency clearly implies that the portrayal of violence on television is highly stable and formulaic -- and unfortunately, this formula of presenting violence as glamorized and sanitized is one that enhances its risk of harmful effects for the child audience.
In sum, the evidence clearly establishes that the level of violence on television poses substantial cause for concern. It demonstrates that violence is a central aspect of television programming that enjoys remarkable consistency and stability over time.