Television Aggression

According to George Gerbner, violence is the overt expression of physical force against others or self, or compelling of action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed. To extend Gerbner’s definition of violence, I selected 4 television programs to count verbal as well as physical aggression in these TV shows. One of the many educational television programs that I selected was Barney. To my opinion Barney did not contain any verbal or physical aggressive behavior. This show taught children how to live with one another and how to avoid aggression. I also chose one child’s cartoon which is an all-time favorite Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry contained at least 10 physically aggressive behaviors per episode. The two main characters, Tom and Jerry do not communicate much, but they use violence as a way to treat each other. Whereas Fairy Odd Parents, another cartoon that I selected had both physical and verbal aggression. It contained about 3 physical aggressions and about 6 verbal aggressions. Last but not the least a very common program that is watched by both adults and children is The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. After several hours of watching this show, I concluded that it contained at least 10 verbal aggressive behaviors versus at least 4 physical aggressive behaviors per episode. The numbers of violent episodes per program correspond to the numbers found by Signorelli and discussed in the chapter in our textbook. I also noticed that those who acts violently are rewarded most of the times. According to a study done at the University of Arizona, 73% of individuals who commit crimes in cartoons and children's shows go unpunished in violent scenes. Television shows that the character who commits the crime receives no punishment, which teaches children that it is alright to commit a crime because nothing will be done. Criminals and violent acts do not get punished. Children begin to believe that violence doesn’t really hurt others.