Several events that occurred over the past week demonstrated an increasing tendency to blame the entertainment industry for society's ills. This attention-getting, knee jerk reaction to a difficult and complex situation is unfortunately nothing new. The wizened veterans of comic's golden age can recall how the comic book, a vibrant mass medium during the 1940s, took the rap for juvenile delinquency during the 1950s.
In Washington, the new Bush administration's laissez faire approach to the mass media took a hit when Attorney General John Ashcroft, reacting to the recent spate of high school shootings, blamed the videogame manufacturers and the entertainment industry for 'glorifying and selling violence.' Since the political climate in Washington has largely taken gun control off the table for both parties, 'violent media' is a convenient target. Ashcroft singled out videogames, which 'literally teach shooting.' While it's unlikely that his comments will produce in much in the way of action, it does set a tone to the debate and provides a 'scapegoat' solution for the problem of teen violence that may result in ill-considered actions at other levels or branches of government.
Which leads us to the legislation introduced in the New Hampshire legislature that would tax sales of video equipment, video rentals, videogames, and videos themselves with the proceeds going to a fund for abused women. Shelters for battered women are a good idea, of course, but the idea that videos have some causal effect in creating assaults on women is pernicious and without corroborating evidence. Was violence against women unknown before vcrs and videogames become commonplace in the 1970s?
Fortunately, it is doubtful that this benighted legislation will pass the New Hampshire legislature. American public opinion has not bought in to the 'violence in society is caused by violence in the media' charge, perhaps persuaded by examples such as Japan, a far less violent country than the U.S. that has much more violent comics, films, cartoons, and videogames. The charge has been trumpeted by politicians from both the left and right wings of the political spectrum. On the left are handwringing liberals like Marion Wright Edelman working tirelessly to pablum-ize children's television, while on the right are both the fundamentalist religious elements like the Rev. Pat Robertson and 'cultural conservatives' like William Bennett. There are dangers to free speech and freedom of artistic expression no matter which party is in the White House. Since people won't easily buy in to the argument that 'violence in society is caused by the media' in the abstract the real danger to free expression lies not in the bombastic jeremiads of a William Bennett, but in the accumulated weight of anecdotal evidence. All it takes is a few well-publicized examples and people start to see a pattern that can often lead them to erroneous conclusions.
Thus the scariest incident of the past week was an article in the Monterey Herald on Sunday, March 25, 2001 (see 'Monterey News Story Ties RPGs to Assault'). The story concerned two young marines who were attending a Defense Department language school at Fort Ord. These young men were arrested for attempting a Leopold and Loeb-like random killing that the Herald linked to the soldier's participation in violent roleplaying games. The fact that they weren't actually part of the group that regularly played fantasy games at Ford Ord was obscured by testimony from high school acquaintances that one of the marines had been into fantasy roleplaying while in high school. Random violence is very scary, and associating it with RPGs or comic books or anime can demonize these essentially harmless pastimes in the process of explaining incomprehensible actions.
