IT’S PLAYTIME ON TV — WITH SADISM, MURDER AND VIOLENCE

Educators, writers and public officials are finally coming around to admitting what evangelical ministers have been warning against all along, that TV is contributing to crime, immorality and violence. And this will continue as long as the TV networks appeal to the baser instincts of man to gain large audiences. It is only recently that parent groups have begun to protest against this degrading kind of programing. The following article appeared recently in a large metropolitan newspaper. May our children be spared from this soul-destroying medium.

The average child sees 13,000 violent deaths, usually in graphic and often sadistic detail, on television between the ages of 5 and 14.

If this estimate from a TV survey is accurate — and a spot check of major networks in recent days suggests it must be low — how much harm is being done to children.

Parents used to be lulled by the psychological theory that make-believe violence and crime on TV acted as a sort of lightning rod to disperse harmlessly a child’s own inevitable feelings of anger and aggression.

But the current reassessment of violence in American life that has been flickering sporadically since the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy has sparked considerable rethinking about TV’s influence on young children.

It’s almost impossible, of course, to set up an incontrovertible and single cause-and-effect relationship between a specific TV program and an act of violence by a child or an adult.

But recent research does indicate that when children see violent behavior on television, they tend to become more aggressive — not less — in theis activities.

One suburban nursery school has sent home to parents a letter saying: “The behavior of the children this past week has been influenced by TV to the extent that we have become alarmed. Conversations have assumed a violent tone of very serious and dangerous proportions.”

The teachers reported to parents that a group of four boys had chased a girl into a corner, yelling that they were going to take all of her clothes off and cut her body into little pieces.

Two others used construction materials to build a “girl-smashing machine” and described its workings so realistically some of the other youngsters were visibly upset for some time.

These episodes could be traced to a specific TV program the children had been permitted to watch at home.

What a child sees on TV is particularly influential in areas in which he has had no first-hand experience, studies show. The stereotypes of behavior he learns from television in areas other than his everyday life seem to be particularly resistant to change.

Such learning from TV may not be immediately apparent, but tends to be stored up to use when an occasion seems appropriate, research shows.

Children today get far greater and more emotional exposure to the value systems of TV than to any other moral code or religious teaching.

According to television values, anything goes if you’re a good guy, and shooting is a quick, clean way to remove a human obstacle.

Justice may triumph over evil in the last 90 seconds of the script. But small children are likely to have learned far more from what has occurred during the preceding 25 minutes about what is supposedly acceptable and convenient in human behavior.

It’s easy to argue that violence has always been a part of human life. But not until television has it been so constantly, so casually a part of children’s immediate family life. That TV does influence behavior is a fact that advertisers bet billions of dollars on every year.

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