Article 2THE CONTEXT OFTELEVISION VIOLENCEEllen A. WartellaEllen A. Wartella is Dean of the Col-lege of Communication and WalterCronkite Regents Chair in Communi-cation at University of Texas at Austin.“The debateabout mediaviolence hasfollowed thehistory of media. . .as well asthe history ofour field?Iam delighted to be here this eve-ning and to be invited to make thesecond Carroll Arnold lecture. It isan honor to follow David Zarefskywho last year talked about the state ofpublic discourse. This year I want to ex-amine television violence.The debate about media violence hasfollowed the history of media in thiscentury as well as the history of ourfield. I wish to acknowledge my col-leagues on the National Television VIO-lence Study from whom I have learnedmuch and with whom I am privilegedto work: at Texas, Wayne Danielson,Nick Lasorsa and Chuck Whitney; atUC-Santa Barbara: Ed Donnerstein JoelFederman, Dale Kunkel, Dan Linz’ JimPotter and Barbara Wilson; at W&on-sin-Madison: Joanne Cantor and atNorth Carolina: Jane Brown and FrankBiocca. In addition there are more thantwo dozen graduate students around thecountry with whom we have worked.This is truly a collaborative project andone which resides in a particular histori-cal context. Tonight I take as my themejust this notion of “context” for our un-derstanding of television violence.In these remarks the notion of “con-text” of violence has multiple meanings:I want to talk about the social and cul-tural context for the current round ofcriticism and inquiry into television vio-lence. Second, the National TelevisionViolence Study monitoring of televisionis premised on the notion that not alltelevision violence is the same-thatthe context of a violent act or portrayalis crucial to distinguishing amongportrayals-and so I will engage in adiscussion of how the context of violencevaries across the television landscape. Fi-nally, I will address the particular politicaland public policy context within whichthis project is situated and the upcomingpolicy decisions concerning potentialremedies for television violence.. Thatcontext matters and how it matters is theoverarching theme I want to talk about.Let me say at the outset that I con-sider myself to be a non-violent person.I am not particularly radical in that be-lief, but I prefer non-violence to vio-lence by the same token that I preferreasonableness to irrationality or peaceto war, or life to death. I concede thatthere are times at which violence maybe necessary but I do not find violencepreferable to non-violence. As a critic ofviolence on television, I am not abso-lutely opposed to showing violence inall instances. That is far too narrowingfor some televised depictions of viollence do have educational or socialvalue. The crux of my concerns is notso much with the fact of violence, al-ways, but with the quality of violenceas depicted on television today. How-ever, because I am also a firm believerin free speech and the First AmendmentI am apt to argue for more responsibilit;from industry, and for public and gov-ernment expression of concernto hold the industry to account.inorderLet me try to unfold an analysis of thestate of violence on television in Amer-ica, and its interplay with real violencein our world. In short, I want to set thestage on which television is projected. Iwill say this again and again: context isimportant. The context in which vio-lence takes place, or is viewed, mattersdearly.AS Americans, we live in a violentsociety. We have always lived in a vio-lent society. Indeed, America cele-brates the outcome of a democraticrevolution, which like all revolutionswas at least for a time inseparabldfrom a certain accepted violence. Tohave stood the ground at the bridge inConcord as a Minuteman and fired theshot heard round the world was to becast into history as a hero. That gemi-nal violence leading to the birth of ournation provides the benchmark againstwhich we may contrast other violencein American history and differentiatebetween degrees of violence and Ameri-can morality.From card c. Arnold ~~~~~~~~kk'd kt~~re, NOVCYII~P~ 23, 1996, pp. 1-11. 6 1996 by Allyn & Bacon. Reprint& by permissionAll violence is not the same. Anyviolent episode or era will reveal a com-plex set of causes, effects, means andends buried within it. My entire genera-tion, for example, was indelibly shapedby the violence of the 1960s. We wit-nessed JFK and RFK and MLK andMalcolm X all gunned down whileimages of violence in the streets ofNewark, Watts, Chicago, Detroit andelsewhere played into our view of theworld, never to recede from it. The Vi-etnam war was our living room war.“That germinalviolence leadingto the birth ofour nationprovides thebenchmarkagainst whichwe may contrastother violencein Americanhistory . . . .”In trying to sort out human behavior,the significance of surrounding, or con-textual, factors is unavoidable. Circum-stances surrounding acts of violencedeserve extra attention. Moral, legal, re-ligious and social issues, and sometimesmitigating facts, are bound within thespecific context in which human beingsact under life’s real terms. This is evi-dent across contemporary American ex-perience. Contextual concerns framedthe trial of Lt. Calley and his role in theMy Lai Massacre, the beating of Rod-ney King by officers of the LARD (andthe trial and riots which followed), orthe prosecution of a wife who kills herabusive husband. A framework, part re-ality and part ‘morality, surrounds eachpicture of violence extracted from thereal world. In any event, these framesare nearly always essential for the pic-tures themselves to be comprehensible.What startles us completely aboutsome violence is its entirely extraneousnature: the shooting spree of a CharlesWhitman atop the University of Texasbell tower, or the random mayhem in aScottish schoolroom. The utterly unrealnature of such extreme violence leavesus gasping and groping. It leaves us witha fear, for it is a violence that fits noframe, no intelligible explanation.In the past 15 or so years, a remark-ably cavalier, vicious, wanton and sense-less pattern of violence entered societyand the American psyche. Drive-byshootings and gangbanger crimes, fu-eled by a trade in handguns and crackcocaine, ushered in fears of an epidemicof violence we may not fully compre-hend. The violence panic of this time,unlike that of the 196Os, seems muchmore to surround children and youth, asboth the victims and the perpetrators