By Brigitte L. Nacos
When I saw the first sketchy news dispatches about the
unspeakable events at the Virginia Tech campus and what turned out to be the
worst mass shooting incident in the United States, I was in the midst of
selecting reading material for my new fall seminar on media, communication and
violence. I reread some parts in Sissela Bok’s volume “Mayhem: violence as
public entertainment” and her thoughtful examination of what she calls media
violence: the preponderance of violence in entertainment and news media and its
effects on heavy news consumers. To be sure, as the late George Gerbner found
in his studies of television violence, increased aggression amongst heavy media
consumers is far less common than greater insecurity and mistrust of society
among heavy TV-consumers—and yet, the small number of those who act on the
violence they witness hours after hours seems enough to question the violent content of entertainment and news media. Sissela Bok is right
when she points out that among a certain group of people, particularly
children, there is no distinction between reality and unreality.
I have spent many years in researching the connections
between terrorism, the media, and how the public and decision-makers react to
the mass-mediated coverage of terrorist deeds and I have come to the conclusion that
the ability of terrorists to exploit the news media for their purposes figures
prominently into the terrorist scheme. But it is equally true that governments of countries targeted by terrorists can and do exploit the news
media for their counter-terrorist objectives as well. We have to face all of these connections between media and violence if we want to contribute to a more peaceful world.
At this point, there has not been public information about the
person responsible for the shootings at Virginia Tech—except that the person
has been described as a college-aged Asian. Whoever turns out to have killed so
many innocent people, I am sure that we have to finally examine the mass-mediated
culture of violence we live in.
Moreover, we have to ask other questions—most of all one indirectly raised by Larry Johnson today: Why is it that we and the news media put the shootings of more than 30 Americans high on our agenda without paying similar attention to the far higher day-in and day-out killing of far more Iraqis.
We all need to take some time to think and make a commitment to fight violence here at home but also abroad in areas in which we claim to have brought changes for the better.
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