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Violence and Nonviolence in Media Studies

Violence in the media has been among the most vehemently discussed issues in public debates about media and a major concern in numerous scholarly traditions of media research as well. Typically, debates about media violence have centered on the question of causality—specifically, whether violence in the media causes real-life acts of violence. Researchers in the effects tradition looked for evidence of the impact of exposure to media violence, while scholars in later approaches like cultivation research and cultural studies addressed broader long-term implications of media violence on culture and politics. In light of questions raised by the latter approaches about the meanings and consequences of violence in the media, the philosophy of nonviolence has also been proposed as a global theoretical framework within which to critique media violence.

Nonviolence, as adopted from the thought of Mahatma Ghandi, shifts the focus of inquiry from questions about media as a possible cause of real-life violence to broader questions about the place of media discourses of violence in the context of real-world violence, especially in the form of terrorism and war. Nonviolence, like cultural studies, shows how certain narrow, historically and culturally specific ideological views of violence become naturalized in media discourses into appearing as natural, universal, and commonsensical. However, nonviolence derives from a broader set of concerns than cultural studies in that it is driven by an ethical imperative not only toward politics or social justice, but also toward the recognition and reduction of the conditions of violence in the real world. Nonviolence, in other words, informs media studies with the critical intellectual resources to contest the naturalization of violence in media discourses and by extension the consequences in the real world of such discourses as well.

Violence in Media Studies

Violence in the media has been a long-standing concern of researchers, regulators, parents, and media creators. Even in the early years of mass media, concerns about the possible impact of violent depictions in media leading to real-life violence appeared from time to time. One of the earliest large-scale media research projects, the Payne Fund Studies of cinema, examined among other topics the possible relation between juvenile delinquency and movie watching, lending support to public concerns that children engaging in criminal behavior may have been influenced by movies. By the 1950s, concerns about crime and media had extended to comic books with their graphic depictions of crime, violence, and sexuality, leading to Senate investigations on the topic as well. In the following decade, as concerns about social and political unrest grew, television violence was studied elaborately as part of a broader commission on violence. Since the 1980s, popular music and music videos have come under scrutiny and criticism, most notably from the efforts of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center, for allegedly promoting violence and glorifying criminal lifestyles. In more recent years, the graphic depiction of gory violence in video games has been a matter of concern as well, especially in the wake of unexpected acts of mass violence like those in Columbine High School. Although most concerns about media violence have revolved around graphic portrayal and possible imitation by audiences, somewhat different concerns have emerged about the media's role in representing another form of violence: war. Television news was criticized for sanitizing coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, and media coverage since the attacks of September 2001 and the subsequent war on Iraq have all been critiqued a great deal from various standpoints.

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