Media Violence, Definitions and Context of

The term media violence refers to any acts of physical force directed toward animate beings in mass communication outlets such as movies, television programs, computer and console video games, newspapers, magazines, comic books, and so on. Violence has been ubiquitous in the media especially since the beginning of the television era. Indeed, the National Television Violence Study (NTVS), the largest study conducted in the 1990s to assess media violence, concluded that about 60% of the 10,000 sampled programs contained violence that most of the time had lethal consequences. The popularity of violence portrayed in media has created concern among the public and policy makers and has led scientists to embark on a mission to determine whether and how media violence exerts a negative influence on ...