Media Violence
...go unpunished, 68% of news stories associate violence with youth, approximately three quarters of scenarios carried out by ‘evil’ characters present no remorse, criticism, or penalties and less than half of the programs aired on television actually link violence with pain. As you can automatically presume, media violence is sweeping the nation by storm. This high of concentration of violence displayed by the mass media however, makes it conventional to behave in a violent manner and thus increases aggression by exuding distorted perceptions of a certain race and age; encouraging the public to act violently and lastly by desensitizing the contemporary society to violent crimes that occur across the globe.
Nowadays the media tends to overemphasize and/or exaggerate events in order to attain viewers and ratings. However, by exuding distorted perceptions of the truth, the media detrimentally affects the public’s view of the world.
Recently, “depictions of race have been distorted” (Dorfman and Woodruff, 1998). For years now African Americans have been greatly overrepresented in television news stories. In fact between 1988 and 1992, they accounted for 65.2% of the population living in poverty despite constituting for only 29% of the individuals actually living in scarcity. Most recently however, African Americans have been greatly overemphasized in news stories regarding illicit drug use, despite being vastly outnumbered by the percentage white drugs users present in society. By overemphasizing the extent of drug use present amongst African American communities the media “distorts issues of race by under-representing white perpetrators” (Dorfman and Woodruff, 1998).
Currently the images displayed in the mass media do not reflect the lifestyles of many African Americans living and surviving in...
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