Modern Mass Media
The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution

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By Vexen Crabtree 2009 Jun 13

Mass media tabloids portray the world in an unrealistic way. Studies have shown that education, and reading respectable news instead of trash, results in a more sensible view of the world in all matters, including views on the economy and crime rates. This is also about the tendency for people to accept overly negative and foreboding forecasts of societies' declining moral worth. Research reveals that excessive television dulls the mind, causes stupidity, causes failure at school and perpetuates ridiculous and simplistic stereotypes. Educating people that TV is fiction, and that violence is wrong, can reduce some of these effects and break the link between TV violence and criminal aggression. The sorry state of populist media in the West is effecting democracy and politics and degrading society.

  1. Mass Panics Based on Exaggeration
    1. The Exaggeration of Public Fears
    2. Perception of Crime Rates in the UK
    3. The Pessimism Syndrome
    4. Baa Baa Black Sheep
    5. Flying Saucers Were a Press Invention
    6. The Millennium Bug
    7. Horribly Distorted Reporting on UK Immigration
  2. The Commercialisation of News
    1. Churnalism
    2. Profit Seeking: Sales is More Important than Truth
  3. The Worst of Society
    1. Trash Culture & Mass Media Products
    2. Enslavement - TV Causes Stupidity
    3. Violent Films and Violent Actions
    4. The Embrace of Ignorance
  4. Politics and Democracy
    1. Mass Media is an Important Part of Democracy
    2. A Lack of Meaningful Coverage
    3. Destroying Politics With Sensationalism and Lies
    4. Rupert Murdoch and his News Corps
    5. The Danger of Cheap Journalism
  5. Lobby Groups and Public Relations
  6. Which are the Best and Worst News Products?
  7. An Industry in Trouble and the Rise of Internet News
  8. Fixing the Press
    1. Consumer Behaviour
    2. Politics and Legislation
  9. Conclusions and Prevention

1. Mass Panics Based on Exaggeration

1.1. The Exaggeration of Public Fears

Downmarket media publications reflect - and exaggerate - many of the fears of society itself. People want their lives to be part of historical drama. The millennium bug, worldwide pandemics, moral panics and fear that society is going wrong all betray humankind's neophobic reactions to progress and change. Newspaper editors pick on this fear and concoct alarmist stories from everyday events and statistics; for example they publish alarmist articles on dangers from mobile phone masts even though there are none. Many editors and media owners have explained the usefulness of fear-mongering and sensationalism - it certainly sells more copy than balanced news. Fears become amplified and made more real by their appearance in headlines, creating a hysteria about a topic whereas in reality things are much better. Always remember that after thousands of hyped-up press warnings, on midnight of the 31st of December 1999, nothing happened.

1.2. Perception of Crime Rates in the UK

"Crime stories have long been a staple of news reporting, but crime news doesn't reflect the real world" says Professor Justin Lewis, head of the School of Journalism at Cardiff University. He continues: "Crime is usually reported because it is dramatic or alarming, not because it is typical or likely to have an impact on our lives. So while increases in the crime figures are seen as dramatic, decreases are seen as dull. The first will be headlined, the second glossed over. [...] Many people have assumed in recent years that crime levels are going up when they have actually been going down".1

For example in the 1990s the annual total crime rate was over 15 millions crimes per year on average in the UK. This was according to the large-scale British Crime Survey which quizzes people about crime, rather than rely on police or government statistics. In the 2000s the average was closer to 10 million crimes per year. This significant drop has occurred despite an increasing population in the UK. "Despite these changes, 65 per cent of the population believe that crime levels are increasing in the country as a whole"1. Aside from this independent source, the UK government's Home Office has itself complained of the mistaken opinions of the masses, noting that in particular, readers of poor quality newspapers are the most likely to have skewed perceptions of crime:

The Home Office says that [...] Crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years. 'Despite the number of crimes estimated by the British Crime Survey falling in recent years, comparatively high proportions of people still believe the crime rate to have risen. This is not true.' said Jon Simmons, head of Home Office research and statistics who put part of the problem down to media reporting. 'Readers of national tabloids were around twice as likely [39%] as those who read national broadsheets [19%] to think that the national crime rate has increase 'a lot' in the previous year', he said.

The Guardian (2006)2

Populist news outlets prefer to headline what sells rather than practice good journalism. And aside from crime rates, populist papers tend to report the negative side of pretty much everything.

1.3. The Pessimism Syndrome

Poor quality press and news reports portray a biased and skewed vision of the world. This is not just a form of gloomy entertainment. It has real-world effects on the life of society. The social academic Michael J Mazarr says that the "media emphasizes the negative and pessimistic side of events and therefore creates perceptual crises of faith where no real crises exists"3. Research shows that the contents of the news that people read does affect their opinions and attitudes whether or not they 'trust' them. "Over 70 per cent of viewers trust television news as fair and accurate, while only one-third trust newspapers"4. Although surveys of trust show that people do not trust much they find in newspapers, the contents of those papers effects their worldviews nonetheless. Despite intellectual doubt, the contents of trashy, poor-quality news is insidious and subconsciously absorbed.

In 1991 the [Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, DC] did an exhaustive analysis of network news and New York Times stories on the rapidly recovering U.S. economy. An astounding 96 percent of stories about the general economy were negative in tone; pessimism occupied 87 percent of the stories on real estate, 88 percent of the features on the auto industry, and a perfect 100 percent of stories on manufacturing. [Now] the intervening years have produced one of the longest economic expansions of the postwar era, [it] looks positively foolish.

"Global Trends 2005" by Michael J Mazarr5

Mazarr describes the classical sociological studies that concentrated on this negative view of the world. It became commonly known as the Pessimism Syndrome. The author continues to consider what solutions there might be to such an inbuilt, subconscious bias.

The first element of the solution involves a demand for more objectivity on the part of the news media. It would be wrong, and simplistic, simply to ask network news broadcasters or weekly newsmagazines to report "happy news"; ignoring problems is no alternative to exacerbating them, and one of the media's most important roles is to uncover social ills. [...] More fundamentally, the real solution to the pessimism syndrome is education. Citizens of developed and developing nations alike need a context to understand information they receive, a basis of objective facts that help moderate the news.

"Global Trends 2005" by Michael J Mazarr6

Mazarr points out that education is the key to shattering the dark glass that the popular press portrays the world through. Supporting his view are statistics on what people believe about crime rates. The Home Office highlighted an undercurrent of the pessimism syndrome when it complained about the public perception of crime rates: That the trash tabloids are its principal voicepieces and tabloid readers's perception of crime rates are more skewed than readers of better newspapers.

Two major points:

  1. The Pessimism Syndrome affects tabloids and popular opinion, resulting in outlandishly negative slants even on economies or crime trends that are doing well.

  2. Readers of national tabloids fall victim to this mis-reporting more than readers of broadsheet newspapers.

We have seen two factors that help prevent this skewed representation of reality:

  1. Education in general facilitates a more objective and realistic reading of the news.

  2. Avoiding the tabloids and trashy news services results in a more realistic outlook of events and trends.

It is the trashy tabloids and popular weekly magazines that are most damaging, but despite this they remain by far the most successful.

The popular presses have exaggerated events and created "moral panics" about some issues where there was not actually a problem. A sociologist who writes on this topic, Erich Goode, points out the media's active role in the creation of many issues, including: The UFO craze, the dramatizing and wholesale exaggerating of 'epidemics' of violence in school, the phantom of Satanic ritual abuse in the 1960s, the paedophile abduction of children, and even the 'fact' of increasing crime. It has been editorial policy in nearly all titles (except the qualities) since the 1980s to pick on popular fears or worries and to exaggerate and emphasize them with alarming headlines, such as with the millennium bug7. These are (or were) seen in the papers over and over, and all evaporated as the evidence and statistics failed to materialize.8.

1.4. Baa Baa Black Sheep

More detailed information: Research into the outlandish claims that Baa Baa Black Sheep has been banned (on Facebook).

Some manias form part of long-term political campaigns by newspapers. Here are two examples from the Daily Mail in its long-term concerted campaign against modernism... the stories were simply untrue, yet many people believed them:

During the Thatcher years, the Mail joined other right-wing newspapers in exposing the 'political correctness' of the 'loony left councils' - Hackney, which said the word 'manholes' was sexist and renamed them 'access chambers'; [...] Haringey, which said the old nursery rhyme 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' was racist and banned it. All these stories were fiction. Which did not stop the Mail running the Baa Baa Black Sheep story again in March 2006, when a nursery class in Oxfordshire was said to have banned it as racist. That was fiction too.

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)9

1.5. Flying Saucers Were a Press Invention

It is common sense that the popular press play up and exaggerate stories, including (and especially in previous decades) when it comes to UFOs. The press behaved in the same way as it did with other 'moral panics' - with much sensationalism, and with disregard for evidence. But it wasn't until I read the research of Martin Gardner that I realized just how much of a role imaginative newspaper editors had played in the creation of the UFO craze. It started in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold saw 9 small weather balloons that were strung together, 'flying' in formation in the sky. The papers came up with the idea of 'flying saucers' on their own, and henceforth, enthusiastically published hyped-up articles attributing all unidentified flying objects to mysterious advanced technology and aliens. It was a science-fiction decade, with a popular press to match.

"Alien Life and Planet Earth:
The UFO Craze Was Created by Sensationalist Media and Hoaxes
" by Vexen Crabtree (1999)

1.6. The Millennium Bug

A concerned researcher, Peter de Jager, attempted to warn industry experts that come year 2000, there might be an issue with the system clocks on Windows computers. This was particularly important for servers and networks. As these underlie much business, as well as national infrastructures in general, the problem certainly needed looking into. Jager received little attention, so, he hyped it up a bit. Then, the world's media took note of his warning, and propelled it into a massive story of worldwide doom and gloom way beyond the scale of the 'possible' risk initially pondered by the computer expert.

The press didn't examine the claim and investigate it. It is a simple procedure to set your system clock forward a few years to see what would happen. They didn't ask Microsoft or Intel about it. If the press had engaged with this kind of journalism - the kind that created the press in the first place - they would have discovered that not much happens when a computer's clock reaches the year 2000 and beyond. They could have then reported that some computer software firms are making outlandish claims in order to sell expensive yet pointless bug-finding software. But that's not what happened and even if they did know the truth, the papers wouldn't have ran it.

By the late 1990s, a final wave of sources joined in as all kinds of maniacs and religious groups cranked up the anxiety to the point of apocalypse. They were led by Gary North of Christian Reconstruction who declared that 'We need times so hard that men will turn to God.' Mr North had got in early, explaining in 1997 [...] 'Month by month, fear will spread. Doom and gloom will sell, as it has never sold before. I have positioned my name, my site, and Christian Reconstruction in the center of this fear. All I have to do now is to report bad news.

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)10

Gary North of Christian Reconstruction sounds rather like a modern newspaper editor! If the news services checked their facts, his claims would not have made the news.

When the Millennium Bug's big day came, nothing happened.

Across the world, it was the same non-story. No planes fell out of the sky. No power stations melted down. And the great non-event struck not only those countries which had spent years defending themselves against the bug, but also those which had done little or nothing to prepare for it. There was no story in China and India where, the world's press had warned, governments had been so lax that the bug would disable their power grids and their communications systems with the possibility of riots as the social infrastructure collapsed. There was nothing, too, from Russia and Belarus and Moldova and Ukraine, countries where the threat had been so recklessly ignored that, as Millennium Eve approached, the US State Department had issued formal travel advisories to alert American citizens to the risk to their health and safety if they were to go there. [...]

Most of those journalists who worked late in search of the promised catastrophe wrote nothing at all about the great non-story. [...]

[There was] no truth at all in hundreds of thousands of news reports and background features and confident comment which had run through just about every newspaper and broadcasting outlet in every country on the planet, stories which had been running for years [...]. Encouraged by these stories, some governments had spent fortunes.

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)10

The UK government spent between 396 and 788 million fighting the bug, according to various journalists. The USA had spent between $100 billion and $858 billion. Italy done less, and refused to check all of its systems. Nothing happened there in year 2000. Russia, one of the largest countries in the world, spent less on the Millennium Bug than did British Airways, a single company. Russia in January 2000 was no less stable than Russia in December 1999. "It was the same, too", says Nick Davies, "with the estimated 30% of small- and medium-sized businesses who had done nothing to defend against the bug".10

The papers were not then full of reports of how safe and secure the IT infrastructure of the world was. There no reports noticed of how we could trust the programmers who make server and database software, and there were no reports on the irresponsible fear-mongering of the press. If a minister or individual had stolen billions from the government, there would have been a story. But when the press hype up a problem in order to sell papers, causing governments and industry to waste billions, there is not only no story, but there is no regret and no national debate on how the press has come to be so irresponsible. The press, fully commercialised, was happy with the sales, and when the story dried up, so did their interest. For them, there is nothing more to it. The billions of dollars could have been spent on hospitals and railroads, or even on boosting the power of the Press Complaints Commission. There is something wrong with the mass media industry if it can wrought such damage unchallenged.

Related page:

1.7. Horribly Distorted Reporting on UK Immigration

My page on UK immigration (of people, that is, not of UFOs!) highlights role the press plays in whipping the public up into a state of panic about immigration, where the facts of the issue are much more prosaic. As a single example, take the housing of asylum seekers. We are allowed to house them in substandard accommodation, but we have stricter rules for (easily neglectable) old people. The Daily Mail reports11 this with its typical aggression as 'WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY DO WE LIVE IN WHEN FRAIL OLD LADIES ARE TURNED OUT OF THEIR HOME TO MAKE WAY FOR FIT YOUNG ASYLUM SEEKERS' and 'WIDOWS ORDERED OUT, THEN ASYLUM SEEKERS MOVE IN'. This terrible skew misses the facts of the matter completely, and fuels social divisions and intolerance. After examining more examples of this type of reporting, my text on UK immigration notes a cycle:

Some very popular papers report on immigration in entirely skewed and negative terms. The formula is that everything bad can be tied to immigration and foreigners; that both those groups are equated with fraudulent asylum seekers and illegal immigration. It is impossible to reach a sensible view of the truth by relying on the hot-blooded, xenophobic and misleading diatribes of some popular newspapers such as The Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and The Sun. How can the populace ever vote in elections wisely, when their understanding of migration is tainted with this type of horrible bias? The emotional response (even if followed up with more careful news reports seen elsewhere) is hard to replace with balanced tolerance. There is nothing to stop the papers endlessly peddling this type of trash: it sells because it panders to fear and ignorance, and in being sold, the papers increase those two wretched traits.

"UK Immigration, Economics and Pensions" by Vexen Crabtree (2011)

2. The Commercialisation of News

2.1. The Centralisation of News Sources

A massive series of corporate takeovers has seen, over a few decades, nearly all news products coming under the banner of just a few companies. The shrewdest companies are those that have made massive staff cuts, for example, preferring to obtain news through 'monitoring' of television and through a very small number of wire agencies, rather than directly do journalism themselves.

The process is: (a) commercialisation, (b) efficiency-drives (drastic staff cuts), which lead to (c) churnalism. As the giants gobble up local, smaller, media and news outlets and apply their staff-cutting regime to them, news becomes more and more centralised. In 1992 in the UK, locals were owned by about two hundred companies. There had already been a decline. "By 2005, according to the media analysts Mintel, ten corporations alone owned 74% of them"12.

Journalism in the world's most powerful country is deep in the same trap. The American media critic Ben Bagdikian has traced the corporate takeover. In 1997, he wrote about the corporations producing American's newspapers, magazines, radio, television, books and films: 'With each passing year... the number of controlling firms in all these media has shrunk: from 50 corporations in 1984 [...] to less than 20 in 1993. In 1996 the number of media corporations with dominant power in society is closer to 10.' By 2004, he found, the US media were dominated by just five companies: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom.

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)12

Now that investigators and journalists have been massively reduced in number, where does news come from? The answer is more centralisation. The UK now gets most of its news via a centralised depository known as a wire agency: the Press Association. This body gathers news, and shifts it on to broadcasters at high speed. Although its job isn't to check facts or investigate stories, papers tend to merely accept and rewrite wire copy. It's not just the UK - as we have seen, the commercialisation of news is a global affair - "most of the newspapers and broadcasters and websites in the world rely for most of their international news, pictures and video on just two wire agencies - Associated Press (AP) and Reuters"12. Dr Chris Paterson used software that was initially designed to spot plagiarism online, to trace the flow of global news. There is an ever-increasing quantity of news that flows automatically, without human editors. He found that by 2001 the most popular media websites were duplicating 50% of their material from the two big wire agencies and a smaller one, Agence Grance-Presse. Half was duplicated word-for-word! On half of these mass media outlets, over half was routinely copied from wire. This doesn't even include output that comes from wire agencies but is rewritten: in all cases, these sources of information are simply not checked for truth or validity. Pure disinformation can flow straight into the public consciousness. An article in The Economist on the future of news services notes this automation:

The Wal-Marts of the news world are online portals like Yahoo! and Google News, which collect tens of thousands of stories. Some are licensed from wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. [...] They are cheap to run: Google News does not even employ an editor.

The Economist (2009)13

2.2. Churnalism

The new brand of commercial owners transformed journalism from an investigative enterprise that sought to uncover truth, raise issues and debate politics, turned into an industry of mass-produced "churnalism", operating as cheaply as possible. News speeds through news factories manned by overworked journalists who have little time for research or investigation. The total number of stories processed by journalists in a day always exceeds the number of actual human beings talked to about those stories. Workers rarely get out of the office, and, the numbers of phone calls made are scrutinized by time- and money- conscious bosses.

This process has affected all normal newspaper titles, even the 'qualities'. The best-quality titles still had PR and/or wire copy in 80% of their stories (although in 20% of those contained substantial additional commentary). Yet only 1% of these stories admitted their true source. Even the best titles could only produce 12% of their stories themselves.14

In the best papers, 70% of the important facts relied upon by stories went completely unchecked, and only 12% were checked properly. This isn't just an issue with newspapers. The Cardiff researchers who done this investigation for Nick Davies, over half of all mainstream broadcast news is also wire (via the PA) and public relations material. The attraction of PA and PR, writes Davies, is not that they are better sources, but that they are cheaper. "It is no longer a matter of independent newspapers competing with each other to produce the best stories, but of mutually dependent newspapers working in tandem to produce more or less the same stories - stories which may or may not be 'the best'. Or honest. Or accurate".14

2.3. Profit Seeking: Sales is More Important than Truth

Sensationalism replaced critical thinking in a race to halt the declining sales of newspapers. In abandoning truth-seeking as the cause of story-telling, journalism became a source of misinformation. Nick Davies quotes the news editor of the Sunday Express in a leaked memo from 2003:

We are aiming to have six sex stories a week. In an ideal world, we should have a "cabinet minister affair" story. Sex and scandal at the highest level of society always sells well [...]. We must make the readers cross: the appalling state of the railways, the neglect of the Health Service, the problem of teenage pregnancies, the inability of bureaucrats to get enough done properly, etc, etc.

Jim Murray, Sunday Express news editor (2003)15

The combination of commercialism, staff cuts, and profit seeking leads to sensationalist reporting without regards for whether the underlying story is true. It has seen news change focus from accurate exposs and public engagement, to cheap stories and PR along "if we can sell it, we'll tell it" lines. It makes news desks easy to manipulate, as long as you send them something hot or easy to broadcast. The job- cuts and efficiency-drives of commercialist owners has meant that overworked staff do not have time to check stories and commercialist owners will run lines for commercial gain without caring about spreading lies and disinformation.

This loss of journalistic rigor is affecting all of society, as much of the populace (as we will see) gain their knowledge of politics and current events from such sources.

3. The Worst of Society

3.1. Trash Culture & Mass Media Products

"UK Trash Culture: 2.10. Mass Media" by Vexen Crabtree (2004)

There is a massive market for mass media products aimed at the low-attention-span trash culture types. Male-dominated trashy tabloids depict female nudes, fictional short stories of the most banal and stupid kind, advice columns designed to shock rather than educate, and news stories that are widely known to be entertaining rather than true. The Sun, The Star, The Daily Sport, for example, are three of most popular "news" papers, and almost entirely devoted to the decadent content just mentioned. Television has become the resident priest of Trash, nearly all programs cater for people with short-attention spans. Adverts are quick and shocking, programs are simplistic and moronic. Although more educated content exists it is unpopular. Thankfully the government takes a strong hand in monitoring domestic channels for content and worth, otherwise I suspect local TV would be almost entirely lost to stupidity & contentless trashy entertainment.

British soap operas are famously violent, angry, shocking, melancholic tragedies depicting casts of characters that are all stupid, short-sighted, emotionally challenged failures who seem allergic to honest, good relationships and intellectual pursuits. The masses are taught every way to fail a relationship and shown none of the compassions or developed attitudes expected of responsible relations. Petty crime, short-tempers and stupidity on the TV soaps reflect perfectly the mentality of trash culture, the self-perpetuating cause-and-affect cycle of this coupling is hard to break without serious top-down change.

3.2. Enslavement - TV Causes Stupidity

Its too bad that stupidity isnt painful. Ignorance is one thing, but our society thrives increasingly on stupidity. It depends on people going along with whatever they are told. The media promotes a cultivated stupidity as a posture that is not only acceptable but laudable.

LaVey (1987)16

One of the reasons I highlight the effect on mass media on democracy is that the media is a big influence on most of us, frequently greater than both peer pressure and parental controls. How many parents sit their children in front of the TV in their most formative years just to keep them from being a 'nuisance'? It thoroughly informs all of us with specific cultural mores that are stoic, commercialist, short-term, thrill-seeking, unintelligent and moronic.

The chief problem of human beings is passivity [...]. If you watch television all evening, or read too long, you feel a 'freezing' of your mind; it congeals; your eyes become capable only of a blank, dull state.

"The Occult" by Colin Wilson (1971)17

Some hold that this effect of passive light entertainment is cultured by the powers that be specifically for the purpose of pacifying populaces. As "modern free time" tends to lend itself to citizen activism and the size of the overall population increases, it is necessary to keep people occupied, and TV is ideal for this purpose. There are many sociological investigations into finding out the effects of the popular press on peoples and groups. "One view, that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school, is that the popular media exist to dull people's minds and get them to accept the work and consumption patterns that are needed to sustain capitalism"18. They argue however that people are not taken in by such a simple ploy. People 'take their own meanings and pleasures from the popular press'; people may seem passive whilst watching and reading, but, their imagination and subconscious form their own interpretations. I imagine the same process happening when people imagine what the 'real meaning' is behind obscure song lyrics. You can nearly always construct a more interesting story than the songwriter hirself was telling. Yet such passivity still numbs the mind's proactiveness, and the effects of this make for more docile and dumber citizens.

They don't call it the idiot box for nothing. Three studies suggest that watching too much TV makes you stupid, at least as measured by school grades and test scores. In the longest-running study [by Bob Hancox's team at the university of Otago in New Zealand, ] children who watched the least TV between ages 5 and 11 were the most likely to graduate from university, while those who watched the most TV at ages 13-15 were most likely to drop out of school. [...] Two US studies [...] draw similar conclusions. [...] Persuading children to watch quality TV is easier said than done, says Barry Milne, who worked on the New Zealand study. "The type of TV kids actually watch is not good for them"

New Scientist (2005)19

The counterculturalist and founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, explains how TV has replaced the modern dark ages Church:

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Today we have television dictating fashions, thoughts, techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of "sins" to keep people in line, we have fear of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right running shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant), and fear of imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. Borrowing the Christian sole salvation concept, television tells people that only through exposure to TV can the sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

"The Devil's Notebook" by Anton LaVey (1992)20

3.3. Violent Films and Violent Actions

There is an on-going debate in the popular press about whether violent TV causes violent behaviour. This study is one of the classic areas of study in sociology, and findings have largely found that viewing TV violence does indeed cause aggressive behaviour.

Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann (1980, 1985) found that violence viewing among 875 8-year-olds correlated with aggressiveness [even after checking for other causes]. Moreover, when they restudied these individuals as 19-year-olds, they discovered that viewing violence at age 8 modestly predicted aggressiveness at age 19. [...] Aggression followed viewing, not the reverse. They confirmed these findings in follow-up studies of 758 Chicago-area and 220 Finnish youngsters (Huesmann & others, 1984). [...] They found that at age 30, those men who as children had watched a great deal of violent television were more likely to have been convicted of a serious crime. [...]

The convergence of evidence is striking. 'The irrefutable conclusion', said a 1993 American Psychological Association youth violence commission, is 'that viewing violence increases violence.' [...] This [effect] is strongest when an attractive person commits justified, realistic violence that goes unpunished and that shows no pain or harm (Donnerstein, 1998).

"Social Psychology" by David Myers (1999)21

Educating children that TV is inaccurate and fictional reduces the aggression that children display as a result of violence programs22. The psychologist Richard Gross confirms this in his overview of the types of studies involved:

Field experiment [studies are those] in which children or teenagers are assigned to view violent or non-violent programs for a period of a few days or weeks. Measures of aggressive behaviour, fantasy, attitude, etc. are taken before, during and after the period of controlled viewing. [...] Almost without exception, they confirm the results of laboratory studies - in general, children who view violent TV are more aggressive than those who do not. [...]

The longitudinal panel study [can] tell us about cause and effect and which normally uses sound sampling methods. The aim is to discover relationships which exist over time between TV viewing and social attitudes and behaviour and so it is concerned with the cumulative influence of TV - [...] for example, in a 20-year follow-up of 400 children, heavy exposure to TV violence at age eight was associated with violent crime and spouse and child abuse at age 30, at all socioeconomic and intelligence levels (Huesmann and Eron, 1984). Sims and Gray (1993, cited in Newson, 1994), in a paper presented to the House of Lords Broadcasting Group, pointed to a vast world literature linking heavy exposure to media violence to subsequent aggressive behaviour. [...]"

[In contrast:] "According to Gunter and McAleer (1990), studies have shown that portrayals of kindness, generosity, being helpful and socially responsible can exert both short-term and longer term influences on similar behaviours among children.

"Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour" by Richard Gross (1996)23

3.4. The Embrace of Ignorance

We have a social instinct that inclines us to tell interesting stories. Cognitive processes in our brains tend to make us hear the more exciting and out-of-the-ordinary aspects of a story. People automatically attempt to tell a story in a more exciting, immediate and entertaining way than when they themselves were told the story originally. This inclination towards entertainment is described by the social psychologist Thomas Gilovich:

spacer Our appetite for entertainment is enormous, and it has a tremendous impact on the tales we tell and the stories we want to hear. The quest for entertainment is certainly one of the most significant sources of distortion and exaggeration in everyday communication.

"How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life" by Thomas Gilovich (1991)24

The billions of people who rely on the mass media for information have suffered the worst injuries of all under a bombardment of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)25

The West's popular press generally divides publications into those aimed at the realists and intellectuals ('qualities'), and those designed to titillate the masses. Not all journalists or papers are about churning out crowd-pleasing entertainment and crowd-stirring negativism about the world. Many outlets still aim to educate and inform their readers, and to reject untruth by doing investigation into stories, rejecting public relations spins, and above all, trying to give a balanced picture of the world. However, this is not what the public wants. The newspaper industry is in trouble. High-brow and quality newspapers are faring far worse than downmarket titles - the three worst-quality tabloids (The Daily Star, the Daily Express and The Sun) were the only papers to increase their sales between 1990 and 200226 (the latest date for which I have statistics).

The increase in sales of trash tabloids is indicative of a cycle: they sell more, because trash culture is growing, and, trash culture is growing because of the successful marketing of trash-targeted mass media. Marketing expert Winston Fletcher said in 1998 that what wins readers is "scandals, misfortunes and disasters"26. This trend is also the third-biggest problem facing democracy in the West, as the shallow issues that the press whip the public into a frenzy about become the ones people vote on.

So, what about outlets that represent the better end of the mass market media? A funny story from Nick Davies serves as a warning to us not to trust in their ability to break this cycle. Two insiders argued for more meaningful content:

spacer The BBC's occasional media critic, Raymond Snoddy, in a review of week's BBC output in Jul 2006 [began] by querying the fact that the deaths of two British soldiers in Afghanistan had been knocked into second place in the news by coverage of the tearful resignation of the England football captain, David Beckham. The former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell condemned the decision, saying: 'The BBC has set itself adrift in a whirlpool of trivia.'

"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)15

Snoddy then highlighted a viewer complaint of someone...

... who had complained that, by comparison with ITV news, the BBC was spending too much time on each story and going into too much detail, and as a result, she said, it had failed, unlike ITV, to run an item about a new f

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