ViolenceViolence he First Amendment Center works to preserve and protect First Amendment freedoms through information and education. The center andand thethe T serves as a forum for the study and exploration of free-expression issues, including freedom of speech, of the press and of religion, the right to assemble and to petition the government. Media The First Amendment Center, with offices at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment Tenn., and in New York City and Arlington, Va., is an independent affiliate of The Freedom Forum and the Newseum, the interactive museum of news. The with Joanne Cantor • Henry Jenkins • Debra Niehoff • Joanne Savage Freedom Forum is a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to free by Marjorie Heins Robert Corn-Revere • Rodney A. Smolla • Robert M. O’Neil press, free speech and free spirit for all people. First Amendment Center Board of Trustees CHARLES L. OVERBY Kenneth A. Paulson EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Chairman John Seigenthaler JIMMY R. ALLEN FOUNDER MICHAEL G. GARTNER 1207 18th Avenue South Nashville, TN 37212 MALCOLM KIRSCHENBAUM (615) 321-9588 BETTE BAO LORD www.freedomforum.org WILMA P. MANKILLER BRIAN MULRONEY JAN NEUHARTH To order additional copies of this report, call 1-800-830-3733. WILL NORTON JR. PETER S. PRICHARD JOHN SEIGENTHALER PAUL SIMON Publication No. 01-F01 Violence and theMedia An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment by Marjorie Heins with Joanne Cantor • Henry Jenkins • Debra Niehoff • Joanne Savage Robert Corn-Revere • Rodney A. Smolla • Robert M. O’Neil Violence and the Media An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment © 2001 First Amendment Center 1207 18th Avenue South Nashville, TN 37212 (615) 321-9588 www.freedomforum.org Project Coordinator: Paul K. McMasters Editor: Natilee Duning Designer: Kelly Malloy Publication No.: 01-F01 To order: 1-800-830-3733 Contents FOREWORD by Paul McMasters . v I. VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIA by Marjorie Heins . 1 II. FOUR VIEWS Another form of media censorship: Keeping parents in the dark by Joanne Cantor . 19 Needed: A meaningful conversation about media violence by Henry Jenkins . 22 iii The biology of violence: What brain research tells us by Debra Niehoff . 25 A criminologist's perspective on the effects of media violence by Joanne Savage. 27 III. THE PALADIN CASE AND THE LIMITS OF PROTECTION FOR VIOLENT SPEECH by Robert Corn-Revere and Rodney A. Smolla with Robert M. O'Neil, moderator . 33 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 49 Violence and the Media: An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment Foreword By Paul K. McMasters series of horrors in the flow of media our schools brings violence. The Senate Athe nation’s general proposed a $900 million anxiety about crime and appropriation for violence into sharp focus. National Institutes of The need for someone or Health research into something to blame youth violence. becomes acute. America • The Federal Trade points an accusing finger at Commission launched an the entertainment media as Paul McMasters is First Amendment inquiry culminating in a the primary reason for ombudsman for The Freedom Forum. report charging that mayhem in our midst. Hollywood has been The grisly shootings at aggressive in marketing Columbine High School in violence to Littleton, Colo., were a young people. galvanizing event in the • Surgeon General David v national quest for an Satcher commissioned a answer to violence, report on strategies for particularly violence that treating violence as affects our children. In the a disease. weeks and months immediately following the • Gloria Tristani, a member tragedy, public-policy of the Federal makers unleashed a barrage Communications of actions designed to quell Commission, delivered a public concern. major speech embracing the theory that violent • President Clinton created expression should be the National Campaign treated the same as Against Youth Violence, obscenity under the law. targeting 13 cities; he also ordered monthly • At a summit organized meetings of the Cabinet- by U.S. Sen. Sam level National Council Brownback, R-Kan., the on Youth Violence American Medical Prevention. Association, the American Academy of • Congress took up dozens Pediatrics, the American of bills designed to curb Violence and the Media: An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment Psychological policy debate. Nevertheless, manifestations of media Association, and the it is imperative that as violence: a handbook for American Academy of many voices as possible be assassins called Hit Man: A Child & Adolescent heard before minds are Manual for Independent Psychiatry issued a made up and public policies Contractors. Rodney Smolla statement saying that cemented in place. and Robert Corn-Revere, “viewing entertainment both dedicated advocates violence can lead to The goal of this report is to for the First Amendment, increases in aggressive enhance and enliven the disagree on whether such attitudes, values and public discourse by offering speech should be protected. behavior, particularly in voices and perspectives that children.” have not been heretofore It is the goal of “Violence effectively raised on the and the Media: An • The American Bar issue of media violence and exploration of cause, effect Association’s Division for its effects. and the First Amendment” Public Education to inform public debate and announced the Anchoring the publication sharpen the questions we publication of a new is the title essay by well- ask as we seek solutions. guide to help teachers known author, lawyer and The views of these national address violence in scholar Marjorie Heins, who authorities should help television programs, examines the history of divest the debate of easy movies, video games and violence in the media, the assertions and provoke a on the Internet. scholarship involving more considered media effects and the examination of the impact The rationale for all these freedom-of-speech issues that proposed remedies actions and activities raised by the debate. would have on actual appeared to lie with vi violence — not to mention academic studies that The report’s second section on the Constitution itself. suggest a link between consists of edited media and violence. There transcripts of presentations is serious concern by some, by four scholars from however, that the number widely divergent areas of and certainty of such expertise: Joanne Cantor is studies have been one of the nation’s leading overstated. Others note that authorities on the effects of even if a causal link were television on children; satisfactorily demonstrated, Henry Jenkins is an expert it still would not justify on popular culture; Debra restricting or punishing the Niehoff is an expert on the First Amendment rights of biology of expression; and the entertainment media or Joanne Savage is an their consumers. authority in the field of criminology. The fact that incidents of crime and violence have The third section features decreased dramatically in an edited transcript of a recent years has not debate between two diminished the importance prominent lawyers over one or urgency of this public- of the more extreme Foreword Violence and theExcerpted from Not in FrontMedia of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship and the Innocence of Youth by Marjorie Heins. To be published in May 2001 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2000 by Marjorie Heins. All rights reserved. I By Marjorie Heins n early 1999, two to prohibit the broadcast of students at Colorado’s “any violent video IColumbine High School programming” at times gunned down 13 of their when “children are classmates and then killed reasonably likely to themselves. Like earlier comprise a substantial ghastly and seemingly portion of the audience.”1 inexplicable crimes, this At Senate hearings a few one generated a frenzied days after the disaster, MIT search for explanations. But professor Henry Jenkins instead of talking about the questioned the assumption 1 easy availability of firearms, that TV violence, rock Marjorie Heins is a First Amendment about the mean social lawyer and author. music, video games, or pecking order at Columbine other forms of High School, or about the entertainment were personal demons that drove responsible for the the two young criminals, teenagers’ murderous many political leaders and rampage. Disaffected media pundits focused on young people move violent entertainment. “nomadically across the President Clinton media landscape,” Jenkins immediately summoned said, “cobbling together a entertainment industry personal mythology of executives to a White symbols and stories taken House meeting on youth from many different violence. Rep. Henry Hyde places.” Thus, different proposed a “Children’s individuals make different Defense Act” banning the uses of the messages and distribution to minors of images in popular culture, “sexually explicit or violent depending on their material.” Sen. Ernest upbringing, family Hollings introduced a bill environment, inherited Violence and the Media: An exploration of cause, effect and the First Amendment characteristics, and other popular entertainment, and inspiring pity and fear, they aspects of background and games invented by children purged the spectators of character. Jenkins told the at play. From the gory unruly emotions and made senators that the descriptions of wartime it less likely that they “vocabulary of ‘media atrocities in Homer’s Iliad would actually behave effects’” in