Caught in the Crossfire of the Media-Violence Debate
by Daniel Batt
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Echoes of the tobacco lobby

AS THE ANTI-CENSORSHIP liber-tarians (committed unequivocally to free speech yet arguing that, when this 'speech' is the media, it hardly really affects anyone) have begun to sound as predictable as Marxists arguing against private enterprise, interesting analogies have begun to surface. Former co-editor of Arena Magazine Guy Rundle criticised the authors of The Retreat from Tolerance for their inability to take the "conservative criticism of contemporary culture seriously"-and their scorn, he continued, at the "suggestion that there is no establishable link between screen violence and real violence [was] an argument that has about as much credibility as the tobacco lobby's arguments about smoking and cancer".

In Time's coverage of the Jonesboro shooting last year, it quoted Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco. "The violence in the media and the easy availability of guns are what's driving the slaughter of innocents. As for media violence, the debate here is fast approaching the same point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco reached some time ago, it's over."

The tobacco lobby analogy is particularly helpful in regard to the types of arguments that are being used by some theorists. Advertising is a pretty obvious example of how the media influences us (otherwise, why ban ads for smoking, especially those directed at young people?). Yet the media theorist Martin Baker, responding negatively to the UK report on the death of James Bulger, reiterated a familiar argument: advertising's most likely effects are to simply "make people aware of their products". Now where have you heard that before?

Gregg Easterbrook, in a recent issue of The New Republic, clarified three points in response to the bizarre cross-purposes and conflicting interests which the media violence debate obscures: "the distinction between what adults should be allowed to see (anything) and what the inchoate minds of children and adolescents should see; the way in which important liberal battles to win free expression in art and literature have been perverted into an excuse for antisocial video brutality produced by cynical capitalists; and the difference between censorship and voluntary acts of responsibility".

This call for "acts of responsibility" on the part of Hollywood is also shared by those within the industry. David Puttnam (the producer of The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire, etc.) commented a number of years ago that many of today's films "have little or no contact with the moral universe we ourselves inhabit. They are fantasies in which the compass is allowed to swing wildly between crass sentimentality and a kind of conscienceless brutality". "Stories, songs and images", he says, "are the principal means by which human society has translated its values and beliefs from generation to generation."

The trouble is, for Hollywood, like the tobacco industry, teenagers are their lifeblood. If teenagers don't take up smoking, bye-bye Rothmans, Philip Morris and British American tobacco. If teenagers don't want to see your films, bye-bye Disney, Fox and Time Warner. Which is why there was such incessant lobbying to get films such as Natural Born Killers and Silence of the Lambs an MA rating. And, while I'm sure it has happened before, have you ever seen someone under 15 asked for an ID before a film?

Daniel Batt Daniel Batt is the Editor of Zadok Perspectives. E-mail: editor@zadok.org.au