Violence in the Modern Day Media

een very good at listening to their elders," James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows my Name. "But they have never failed to imitate them." (Sherrow 56) This basic truth has all but disappeared as the public increasingly treats teenagers as a robot-like population under the sway of an exploitative media. White House officials lecture film, music, Internet, fashion, and pop-culture moguls and accuse them of programming kids to smoke, drink, shoot up, have sex, and kill. A recent report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pools evidence from over 2,500 studies within the last decade on over 100,000 subjects from several nations to show that the compiled evidence of the media's influence on behavior is so "overwhelming" that there is a consensus in the research community that "violence in the media does lead to aggressive behavior" (Methvin 49). Given that the majority of the scientific community agrees that "the research findings of the NIMH publication support conclusion of a causal relationship between television violence and aggressive behavior" (Wurtzel 21), why is it that "the Saturday morning cartoons" are the most violent time slot on television?" (Methvin 49) And that "despite slight variations over the past decade, the amount of violence in the media has remained at consistently high levels" (Wurtzel 23).
             Despite the negative effects media violence has been known to generate, no drastic changes have been made to deal with this problem that seems to be getting worse. We, as a whole, have glorified this violence so much that movies such as "Natural Born Killers" and television shows such as "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" are viewed as normal, everyday entertainment. It's even rare now to find a children's cartoon that does not depict some type of violence or comedic aggression. It is this aggression that is rubbing off on our societ
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