Seduction of the Innocent

13. Homicide At Home

Television and the Child

"They dare not devise good for man's estate.
And yet they know not that they do not dare."
- Shelley

To lump all mass media of entertainment together as if they were equal is often both erroneous and misleading. Of course they have many similarities, but they also have fundamental differences. That is very correctly recognized by the law, as in the decision of the United States Supreme Court in voiding the ban of a movie: "Nor does it follow that motion pictures are necessarily subject to the precise rules governing any other particular method of expression. Each method tends to present its own peculiar problems." A commodity like crime comics which is not a legitimate medium of entertainment for children can only profit if it is discussed not for what it is, but under the general name of mass media. It is true that some crime movies are as brutal as comic books, but these movies are not specifically merchandised for children. You can almost recognize a comic-book publicist by the frequency with which he speaks of mass media, mass media of communication," etc., when he is really just defending comic books. To class comic books in terms of mass media is to class starlings as songbirds. Of course songbirds and starlings are all birds.

A committee of the National Education Association, after studying "The Effects of Mass Media upon Children and the School Program," reported that "mass media including radio, television, motion pictures, comic books, current periodicals, and other communication means which have become an integral part of modern life affect human behavior to such an extent that it is the responsibility not only of the teacher and the parent, but also of all other community agencies to build a higher level of what we might call 'taste' on the part of the consumer." This is much too general and superficial to be of any use. Lumping all the media together has done some of them an injustice, while serving as a protective screen for crime comics. Legitimate methods of control of one may not apply to the other. Some media have done themselves considerable harm by making common cause with crime comics in opposing control of them. They feared, of course, that any control would spread to them.

What does happen is that if the crime comics industry continues to lead a charmed life, the other media will be more exposed to the very censorship which they want to avoid. Pocket books are facing the danger of this creeping censorship right now. It is not censorship of children's crime comics, but its complete absence that threatens other media with unwanted controls. Quite apart from the fear of censorship, the defense of comic books stems from the inverted snobbishness of some who defend the right of what they consider the lower orders to read any trash sold to them.

In our studies we found marked differences between the media in their effect on children. The passivity is greatest in reading comic books, perhaps a little less with television, if only because often other people are present in the audience. In both, the entertainment flows over the child. Passivity is least in going to movies, where others are always present. The media have their maximum appeal at different ages. Movies seem to have the greatest appeal from eleven to twenty-one, television roughly from the ages of four to twelve. The time spent with different media varies, too. Comic books have the greatest hold on many children. Once in the Hookey Club when crime shows on television were discussed, an eleven-year-old boy said: "Television is bad, but it doesn't stay with you like a comic book." The mother of an eight-year-old girl said to me: "Television is not half so bad. It is the comic books. They are handy. They are ten cents. They are always around. They don't just read them once, they read and re-read them, from the bathroom to the kitchen and back." Children literally live with comic books.

What is said of one medium may be totally untrue of another. I know many people, children and adults, who have turned to read the original book after seeing an adaptation in the movies. The examples include such authors as Henry James, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Jules Verne, Theodore Dreiser, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte. In all these years we have not found a single child who turned from a comic-book adaptation to the original. And yet experts for the defense of comic books, mixing together the media whenever possible, make this one of their chief claims.

Radio, movies and television are considered worthy of regular serious critiques in newspapers. Nothing like this exists for comic books. Nor is it even possible, for the few critics who have written about them find them subjects for toxicology rather than criticism.

Yet the different media are not mutually exclusive. Some of them blend very well; when they blend with comic books it is always in their worst aspects. There are radio comic books, TV comic books and movie comic books. But the great inroads that television was expected to make - and for a short time seemed to have made - have not materialized. The movies killed the dime novel, but television did not even wound the comic-book industry. The low order of literacy of television fitted in well with the almost total illiteracy of crime comics.

One can often learn about one medium from observation of another. My conclusion that children reading crime comic books often identify themselves with the powerful villain has often been challenged by wishful thinkers. It was borne out by a brilliant review of the television show Senate Crime Investigation by Fern Marja. This review was some of the best reporting of that memorable performance when for the first time organized crime was made a drawing card in a show with the criminals themselves and their prosecutors as the chief stars. "It is difficult to tell," she wrote, "whether the secret of the legislators' popularity is their identification with good or their necessary contact with evil. And Frank Costello is beginning to threaten the supremacy of Hopalong Cassidy as a TV attraction. . . . Is the racketeering boss hero or villain to the general public?" And later when the district attorneys were testifying she noted: "Imperceptibly, at first, the mood of the chamber changes. Here and there a yawn is visible. Mr. X and Mr. Y [the district attorneys] are men of good will, but they lack Costello's drawing power. It is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that honesty bores the gallery. . . . A spectator stirs restlessly. 'Listen,' he says to an attendant, 'when's Costello coming back? That's what I want to see!'" If true of adults, why not of children? Others made similar observations. John Crosby, the New York Herald Tribune's radio and television critic, reported that it had been noted that "large segments of the population showed a tendency to sympathize with the witnesses, no matter how shady their past." And a newspaper editorial at the time wondered "whether these exhibitions will (not) add to the glamor of crime in many people's imaginations."

The study of comic books is indispensable for understanding what happens in less overt form in other media. If one has studied comic books one recognizes sadism for sadism's sake even if it is embellished with psychological thrills, as in some movies, radio and TV programs.

The mass media have power for good or ill, on society and on the individual. No amount of facile theorizing can explain that away. They present a new ethical problem. And if at present they do so much harm, the industries themselves by their own momentum evidently cannot remedy that. This became especially clear to me when I heard a high television-executive say that if all violence and horror were removed from comic books and television everything in the world would remain the same. That unethical type of argument has been made at every step of progress mankind has ever made, be it aseptics, vaccination or meat inspection.

One thing true of all the media is that many people glibly discount their influence on children. But they have a continuous impact on masses of children that would have been unheard-of in former times and they really mediate between the child and his environment. For example, in the most lurid crime stories the final defeat of the villain is supposed to cancel out his previous triumphs and achievements. That is psychologically naive.

The lesson these stories usually convey to children is not that the villain should have been better, but that he should have been shrewder. In other media, especially in television, this extolling of the villain exists, too, although it is seldom as raw as in comic books.

The race ridicule and nationality stereotypes of comic books is also spread to some extent through other media. The mayor of the city of New York has commented severely on the race prejudice shown in television murder mysteries. (He did not mention the race prejudice in comic books which is much more widespread and harmful and about which he could do something, since they are sold on newsstands on city property.) The excuses for not interfering with this are the same for all media.

Whenever the question of the harm done by mass media is raised, the easy retort is that it is all up to the family. But the family itself is invaded with an all-round amphibious offensive. Take a peaceful American family on a quiet evening. Papa rests from his work and is reading Mickey Spillane. Junior has just come home from a movie with a "DOUBLE-SHOCK SHOW: The Vanishing Body and The Missing Head." He settles down to look at one of those good crime television shows where a man is beaten up so mercilessly that he is blinded for life. His older sister, just this side of puberty, is engrossed in the comic book Reform School Girl!, which blends sex, violence and torture in its context. (The advertisements in comic books have been worrying her about her development and she has just discovered the secret solution, the "BULGE-MASTER" [$5.98], advertised in this book.) Mama had been invited for the evening to see an avant-garde film. But when she read the title of the program, Meditation on Violence, she decided to stay home instead and use the evening to keep abreast of the latest in child psychology. Recently she had attended the Illinois Congress for Parents and Teachers and heard the director of the Association for Family Living propound: "Hostility is one of the basic emotions and has to be expressed someplace. Home is the best place to do it. So she got herself two recent hooks on psychology. One has the title Children Who Hate, the other is a psychological text book with twenty-five chapters in which the only psychological subject to which a whole chapter is devoted is "Hostility."

In other words, papa, mama, and the two children are all subjected to the impact of the same current fashion, the extolling of hostility and violence.

It is essential to recognize that the various media have an influence on one another although that is not generally realized. The newer medium may influence the older. It is well known that the movies have influenced the theater. We speak of a television-level melodrama in the movies and a comic-book-level show on television. The paradox is this: All the mass media together have influence on the child, but each follows separate laws. And the lowest medium, the only illegitimate one as far as children are concerned, the crime comic has in fact the greatest influence on all the other media.

In the last half-decade or so crime comics have influenced all the media in some degree. In that sense one can speak of a comic-book culture, especially for children. Comic books have been in competition with the other media not only with regard to money but with regard to children's minds as well. I have not found, as many would have us believe, that the good influence of the legitimate media makes comic books better, or restricts their circulation. On the contrary, comic books make the other media worse. It is true, as is always pointed out by comic-book defenders, that crime and horror shows existed long before comic books. But there is a new special touch - blatant, crude and shameless - that the other media now have to absorb, imitate and rival in order to be able to compete with the comic- book industry. Children's minds have been molded to strong sadistic fare. If he does not slap the girl around, what kind of a he-man is the hero? If he does not strangle her or poisdn her, where is the excitement? And if there is no murder, where is the plot? So it is not possible to improve children's shows on television or radio as long as crime comic books are left the way they are.

Some time ago I saw a Western movie in which the villain shoots the sheriff straight in the face. It was a children's matinee and at that point the children first laughed and then loudly applauded. This was not the so-called natural cruelty of children that adults like to speak about. This particular type of response was inculcated in these children by the most persistent conditioning in habits of hate ever given to children in the world's history.

There is at present in all the media, especially as they affect children, a pattern of violence, brutality, sadism, bloodlust, shrewdness, callous disregard for human life and an ever-renewed search for subhuman victims, criminal, racial, national, feminine, political, terrestrial, supernatural and interplanetary. Brutality is the keynote. It is self-understood that such a pat tern in a mass medium does not come from nothing. There must be clues in real life as to why violence is in the air.

Children need proper food, vitamins, fresh air, games and schooling and love. Nowadays there is a dogma that they also need stories about violence and crime. Formerly hostility was concealed. Psychiatrists in those times would not admit that an ordinary boy could hate his father or a daughter, her mother. Bernard Shaw wrote about that, but the psychiatrists didn't. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. The same type of dogmatic person who formerly saw only sweetness and light and physical or hereditary causes now says that knowing about violence and sadism adjusts children to the world. What kind of a world, and what kind of an adjustruent?

The quantity of violence in all the media is stupendous. It has become almost a national pastime for committees of women's clubs to count the murders in children's programs during a week. But quantity alone does not give the real picture. Hamlet is not just a play about violence. It has a plot, poetry, character development, philosophy, psychology. And yet, in the course of the play Hamlet kills five people. It is the context that counts, not the quantity.

Granted that this cult of violence originates somewhere in our social life, there is a dynamic reciprocal relationship between the audience and the creators of mass entertainment. The same influences come to bear on both producers and audience. Gradually, through constant reiteration, brutality is accepted and the producers can say that this is what the children (and adults) wanted in the first place. In speaking of children they use the refinement of a false argument by saying that this is what children need. The audience, on the other hand, feels that this is what it is supposed to like, in order to be virile and up-to-date. So there is a vicious circle, with normal business needing morbid audiences and healthy audiences spoiling normal business. The aberration becomes the norm and the norm creates the aberration.

What all media need at present is a rollback of sadism. What they do to children is that they make them confuse violence with strength, sadism with sex, low necklines with femininity, racial prejudice with patriotism and crime with heroism.

If one studies this phenomenon carefully, one will see that in this orchestra of violence the comic-book industry has set the tone and the rhythm. For a while, before 1945, it seemed that the crime-comic-book industry had a monopoly on the brutalization of children. Now it has some competition from television and the other media. So children may get the idea that violence is natural from any or all of the media, as well as from other children exposed to these media too. In the Hookey Club a boy once described a movie where the hero strangled the girl. "Why did he have to strangle her?" I asked. The answer was "Well, there has to be some adventure in the world." The story is told of the two little boys who had gone to see a romantic movie. "It was boring," said one. "Not to me," said the other. "I didn't mind. Whenever they kissed I closed my eyes and pretended he was choking her."

In a competitive way the media influence each other in the direction of the ritual of violence. Crime comic books influence television and radio, both of them influence the movies.

In all this consideration of other media one should never lose sight of the fact that, in complete contrast to comic books, movies - and radio as well - are an enormous educational influence, that they have given us unforgettable artistic experiences and that they are indispensable instruments of what could be best in our culture. To some extent this is also beginning to be true of television.

To trace the influence of one medium upon the other is as difficult as tracing influences in the history of literature. But there are clear indications which can be unearthed. Pocket size books for adults have become a mass medium, too. Excellent books have been published in this form - novels, stories, non-fiction, detective stories, etc. But here too a pattern of crudest sadism on the level of comic books is discernible. This is the announcement of one of these pocket-size books:

Sounds like a children's book! Certainly it is a book for adolescent-minded readers brought up on crime comics.

Some pocket-size books express nothing but the pornography of violence, which derives from crime comics directly or indirectly. Some of the worst are to be found in places where juveniles buy candy and sodas and find large displays of the worst crime comic books. What do the publishers of these specimens do to justify them? They follow the trail blazed by the comic-book industry and have their most questionable products endorsed by a psychiatrist. In the book-publishing trade that is something new. It is a direct lesson from psychiatrist-endorsed comic books. One such pocket-size book has a brief endorsement by a "Renowned New York Psychiatrist." He 'writes that the book is "an authentic picture of nymphomania," it is "educational," it gives a true picture of nymphomania," it is "clinically accurate" and "certainly the wider the knowledge of man's ills, whether they be of the mind or body, the greater the progress toward the cure."

The high point of the book is the detailed description of the heroine poisoning her lover. He is in horrible agony, shakes, falls and gets a series of convulsions. She watches all this with ecstatic joy. Every convulsion of the dying man is "like a virile thrust to her. Her own body twitched and moved spasmodically." When he finally dies," . . . she reached her own paroxysm.

This is no isolated example. There are others offered to adolescents in which the obscenity is also as much in the endorsement as in the book. Here is one endorsed by an "Internationally Famed Psychiatrist." The endorsement says that this book also is an "educational experience," that it shows a disease "medically known as satyriasis . . . based on one or more emotional traumas occurring in early life" and that such a person "will stop at nothing to gain his ends, not even murder." (Even medically that is entirely false.) In this book, girls are murdered, but the high point here is when the hero beats the heroine. She "enjoys the blows." "It was like the time she had watched the Negro being beaten and stoned and what she had felt then she was experiencing again." Sadism (or masochism) as sexual fulfillment - that is the "educational experience" in these books.

A medium influenced by crime comics and rivaling them in viciousness is bubble-gum cards. Children collect them and they are widely distributed. I have quite a collection myself, contributed mostly by young children. They seem to have escaped the notice of child experts. Here are some sample pictures on bubble-gum cards:

1) A baby sleeps peacefully in his crib and an enormous serpent hovers over his head. There is also a dark-skinned native brandishing a big knife.

2) A card entitled "Desperation and Death" shows a huge exotic bird clawing at the middle section of a native. Of course you are shown blood where the skin is torn.

3) A man is bound to a kind of pillory, his hands tied and stretched out in front of him. Another man with raised sword is about to cut off his hands.

4) A man is kicked, his shirt is torn and there is blood on his forehead.

To influence children's parents, bubble-gum makers use the same methods that the crime-comics industry uses. There is a little magazine for juvenile card collectors. One number announces a new "Wild Man" series. At the masthead it says: "Dedicated to Child, Church, Home, School, Community." It is reported that bubble-gum manufacturers have more than $10,000,000 annual profits.

To some extent children's toys are a medium, too, and here the influence of comic books and other media is demonstrable. Toys are fitted into the school-for-violence pattern of child entertainment. For example, a central toy firm supplies many stores with toys. Its catalog has an elaborate chart showing what each toy "will contribute to development: mentally, physically, socially, vocationally." This is all tabulated for age and sex. If you look under "age group 2 to 4 years you find holsters and guns, and more holsters and guns, some of which apparently contribute to the development of the child mentally, physically and socially, but not vocationally. One does not contribute at all, so evidently there are refinements in the education of children aged two to four which are not readily apparent. There used to be only about ten companies manufacturing toy pistols, knives and other such weapons for children. Since the boom of television, however, there are almost three hundred of them.

In the playroom we have often observed children delighted to get a chance to play with different types of blocks and construction sets. When we ask them if they have ever done this before they say No. When we ask what toys they usually play with they customarily answer: guns.

The fight against violent toys by mothers (and grandmothers) is an old one. When Goethe in 1795 heard that a miniature guillotine was being exhibited at the Frankfurt fair he asked his mother to buy one for his six-year-old son August. But she wrote him:

What would the old lady have said about the present armament program for American children? Toys not only satisfy the child's imagination, they direct it. If we are really concerned about the growth of children's social feelings, we need a disarmament program for the nursery.

The violence which movies have been showing since the middle forties differs in quantity, quality and emphasis from the Jack London two-fistedness of the twenties. Canadian-provincial censors at a national convention have had the courage to say that sex in movies is a relatively minor problem, but crime and brutality is nowadays a major one. In some advertisements of movies the comic-book influence is noticeable.

The movie Problem Girls is advertised with the slogan "Nothing Can Tame Them!" There is a drawing beside the title showing a voluptuous girl hanging from her wrists which are tied together in typical comic-book fashion. She has long streaming hair, is barefoot and seems to be clad in a clinging night gown. Next to her is a woman who is punishing her with a water hose. The whole setting has nothing to do with punishment or correction. It is strictly a perverse, sexually sadistic scene, of the type sold surreptitiously as obscene photographs.

Some time ago I saw a movie which had this episode: A young woman was nursing her baby; a man tears the baby away from her, throws it to the ground and kicks it away, then he hits the young mother over the head with a fence paling, knocking her over, and kicks her off the scene.

Sometimes children pattern their behavior after movies plus comic books. I saw a ten-year-old boy in the Clinic who had a long list of misdoings in school. He had pushed a little girl down an entire flight of stairs, which he got from the movies, and he twisted little girls' arms behind their backs, which he got from comic books. He did not tell me that as an excuse. He felt as guilty about his fantasies as about his acts.

Hollywood has been surprised that abroad some of its movies based on good books have been banned for minors. That happened, for example, in Sweden, despite the famous titles of the books. Of course it all depends on the ingredients of the movie. Swedish parents objected to too much violence (plus sex) for their children. Great Britain, Australia and other countries followed suit in attempts to keep movie violence and sadism away from their children. Recently a conference of British and American exchange teachers took place in the American Embassy in London, to discuss the effects of American movies on children. The headmaster of a London school spoke of the bad values these films taught his pupils. An American teacher made the typical defensive argument that the children could distinguish between entertainment and truth. This fallacious argument is heard frequently. Fiction and fact are not totally separated; there is a dynamic relationship between them. In this instance a British teacher answered that even many adults in England felt that the values in the movies applied to American life in general. All such criticism of American mass media is played down or goes unreported in the American press. It would be important for the public to know about it.

Some movie writers look in crime comic books for new tricks. For instance the producer of the movie serial Atom Man vs Superman, which was shown in about half the movie theaters of the country, is said to be "an avid reader of the comics, from which he gets many of his ideas."

Frequently different critical standards are used when people criticize media. Parents' Magazine, whose publisher and some of whose advisory editors have been so defensive about comic books, says in a movie review: "A brutal whipping-scene prevents this from being a film for the children." In comic books this is a standard ingredient.

All the media have one characteristic in common: The mothers are fighting a losing battle with the experts. Many experts, self-styled and otherwise, say that children laugh all this off, or, if they don't, there must be something wrong with the children (not, of course, with the media). The book Parents' Questions and Helpful Answers by the Child Study Association of America gives the same stereotyped fallacies about radio programs that have been used to defend crime comic books: Eight-year-olds can take "a good deal of blood and thunder without any ill effects," it serves "as emotional outlet" and if a child is frightened by a program it is not the program that is at fault but "something more deeply personal." To a parent who asks about "trash on the radio" this book gives the helpful answer that it is like "folk and fairy tales." All this bad advice comes from the fundamental error that "the final judgment of values is up to the child. That, of course, leaves it all to the child and then leaves the child helpless against adult seduction.

Quite apart from the mail I have received, I have polled hundreds of mothers on this and unless they repeat what experts have told them in lectures or over the radio or in articles, they feel the way Mrs. Walter Ferguson expressed it in her column "A Woman's View":

"Every thinking mother knows how these outside forces (comics, movies, radio and TV) have influenced her family. . . . Today most children use their leisure to look at Westerns in movie theaters, to pore over unfunny comics which picture criminal activities or to listen to the same sort of thing over the radio. When television becomes as widespread as radio we can expect it to make a profound impression upon American children. . . . None of the women I have talked with believe these things are good for children. They only hope the impressions left will not be too deep."

The more the pattern of violence becomes violent, the more experts are quoted to defend it.

Unfortunately psychiatry - or rather, some of its modern practitioners - has taken a defensive attitude about crime and sadism in the various media. They have provided a rationalization for that which they should help to prevent. There are three reasons for that. One is that hardly ever are these pronouncements made on the basis of actual study or even knowledge of what is going on. The same psychiatrists who will spend three years and hundreds of hours with an individual neurotic patient will pronounce on what happens to children from a ten-minute inspection of comic books (if that) or pronounce on children's movie programs without ever having been to a Saturday matinee with a child audience and with children's programs. Like educators, teachers and clergymen, psychiatrists were unprepared and not adjusted to the new impact of mass media on children, and as a result they have made themselves part of the education for violence.

The second reason is an over-individualistic outlook. On the basis of what they know of individual cases, psychiatrists pronounce largely on crime, delinquency, war, social organization and world peace, leaving out all mass-conditioning and all historical, social and economic forces.

The third reason is that the psychiatrist, despite his formal training, still remains a member of the society in which he moves and, as the whole crime comics issue has shown, is not so immune from the social pattern as he may think.

Television is on the way to become the greatest medium of our time. It is a marvel of the technological advance of mankind. The hopes it raises are high, even though its most undoubted achievement to date is that it has brought homicide into the home. Its rise has been phenomenal. For every set in 1946 there are now (1953) more than two thousand. Television has a spotty past, a dubious present and a glorious future. That alone distinguishes it from crime comic books, which have a shameful past, a shameful present and no future at all.

Many people do not realize fully television's immense potentialities. That seems to hold true for some of the producers and, in the ascending line of power, the sponsors and advertising agencies as well. There have been some plays, news programs and documentaries which one can hardly forget in one's adult education. They are still experimental, but they vibrate with possibilities. There have been excellent children's shows, like Chicago's Zoo Parade; Mr. I. Magination; Uncle Lumpy; Mr. Wizard; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; Paul Whiteman TV Club; etc. Some good children's shows do not have a long life, or their time gets cut down. A survey conducted by Harold B. Clemenko, editor of the magazine TV Guide, shows the two programs most favored by parents for their children, Magic Cottage and Mr. I. Magination were discontinued. Captain Video, most objected to by parents as making their children "nervous," stayed on. This sort of thing is what makes parents dismayed and they write letters to people, papers, magazines or the stations to try to get the good programs back. But the question is not so simple.

The trouble with television is that it has no vision. Formulas and felonies triumph over everything else. According to Norman Cousins, "the standardized television formula for an evening's entertainment is a poisoning, a variety show, a wrestling match." What more could anyone want? For one thing, a fuller exploitation of the possibilities. It would be quite wrong to blame the television industry alone for that. A medium cannot be better than the life it mediates. There was once an excellent program called Rebuttal. Its purpose was to give people who in these tense times are under attack by supermen on subcommittees a chance to be seen and heard. This program lasted only for a few weeks. It was not the public nor was it the television producers who did not want to continue it. It was the lawyers of the various people under attack, who advised their clients not to commit themselves.

It is the bad things that television does that unfortunately command most attention. About one third of all programs for children have to do with crime or violence. Untrained viewers may miss this proportion because as in crime comics they do not realize that crime is crime and violence is violence even in the patriotic setting of a Western locale or in the science-fiction setting of interplanetary space. If you are looking for a realistically televised violent act your chances of finding one are statistically greater if you look for it on a children's program. Two different children told me excitedly that they saw on TV how molten iron was poured on a man. I asked each of them why that was done. Neither knew precisely. One said he guessed it was done for revenge; the other guessed it was done because the man knew too much. That is about the extent of motivation in these violence-for-violence's-sake shows. It is not the motivation, but the violence itself that makes the impression.

New York Times critic Jack Gould (not letting himself be sidetracked by the false theories of the psycho-publicity men) has very correctly objected to such scenes on the children's hour television screen as "the gruesome choking to death of a girl." But children have seen this hundreds of times in comic books and the harm is not that they find it "thoroughly unpleasant" but that they have been conditioned to get a thrill out of it and find it thoroughly pleasant.

One might assume that the violence on television is just an addition, an adjunct, to make stories more exciting. But not only does the whole structure of these shows contradict this, there is also internal evidence. An experienced TV writer gave an inter view about the way it is done. "You have to work backwards," he says. "You're given a violent situation and you have to work within that framework." In other words, the violence is not an addition, but the hard core of what the television makers want. This revelation of technique is also an answer to the false view that so many people subscribe to, that the violence is there be cause it is something people want and children need. The brutality in TV crime shows is so insidiously glorified that many people do not recognize it as such any more and accept it as smart. Here, for example, is the famous detective who "fights crime without gun" and "can break a man's arm without wrin kling his gray flannel suit" (or his conscience). He also knows how to "break a bad guy's back if necessary." All this of course, just as in comic books, "as a method of self-protection."

The deductive approach to crime and crime detection, the Sherlock Holmes touch, has been supplanted on television to a large extent by sadism. We asked a nine-year-old television captive, who in telling about the programs seemed to distinguish between mysteries and thrillers, what the difference was between them. His reply: "Mystery is like a heavy amount of suspense, as much suspense as can go, like somebody comes with an axe in the dark and chops somebody up. A thriller is not too much suspense, but quite enough to give you a lot of thrill." To such children classic stories like the League of Red-Haired Men or The Purloined Letter would seem incredibly trite.

For the child television-viewer, as for the comic-book addict, a sweet smiling happy girl, who is not vicious, not scared, not the helper or victim of a murderer, is just silly or perverse. A series of stills of what is done to girls on TV is good raw material (no pun intended) for the cultural anthropologist or sexual psychopathologist. I have found that children from three to four have learned from television that killing, especially shooting, is one of the established procedures for coping with a problem. That undoubtedly is one of the effects of television on children. It is a most unhealthy effect.

Murders, gunshots and violent acts are as plentiful on TV as raisins in a raisin cake - in fact some producers seem to think they are the raisins. An average child who is no particular television addict and takes what is offered absorbs from five to eleven murders a day from television If he would confine himself exclusively to adult programs, the number would be less. It is obvious that the amount of violence offered children by TV derives partly from crime comics. More important than the amount, however, is the qualitative aspect, the connection of violence with other things - family life, sex, daily living, absence of tragic feelings, etc. - and the details themselves. A cartoon in Pathfinder magazine with a woman sitting before a television screen saying, "This one had a happy ending - she finally murders her husband . . ." is not just a joke. In a serious vein, the television version of Macbeth with the head cut off on stage and later shown in close-up is typical of the crudity of style and cruelty of content. Whether viewers are emotionally disturbed by such things or whether they are made indifferent and callous by them, they certainly are not elevated or introduced to Shakespeare. The Ford Foundation's Omnibus presentation of King Lear showed Gloucester's eyes being gouged out in such a way that Cue magazine commented, "It was the most ghoulish and revolting bit of business we have ever seen on any stage or screen."

In the face of criticism and in an effort to ward it off, the television industry, again following the example of the comic book industry, has made widely publicized pompous announcements about a code. The code is pure in that it does not seem to have affected anything or been affected by anything. It is strictly on paper and not on the TV screen. But even the code puts the emphasis on matters which have not done the most harm, namely the specific crime-murder-terror formula. The code and what has been done about it reminds one of the patient who, when told by a physician that he must cut out wine, women and song, replied that he would follow the advice at once, and begin by giving up song.

Outside of the regular television critics, some of whom have stressed the harmful aspects, the literature about television and children is not very helpful. It can be summarized by saying that nearly all these authors want us to study the child, but not the television industry. It emphasizes the individual child (always abstractly) and the individual family, not the general aspects of what television actually does. The assumption seems to be that when anything goes wrong the child must be morbid but the entertainment normal. Why not assume, if such sweeping assertions must be made, that our children are normal, that they like adventure and imagination, that they can be stimulated to excitement, but that maybe something is wrong with what they are looking at? Why assume that they need death and destruction instead of assuming that their interests can be pleasurably directed toward constructive things? And why not assume that they have a latent curiosity about sex which can be satisfied decently instead of being directed toward sadism?

In one brief article "Television for Children," for example, I find no less than three times the phrase "indiscriminate viewing" on the part of the child. That reveals an anti-child attitude. If you repeat three times that the child "views indiscriminately" you might say at least once that what is there to view is offered indiscriminately. If a child is too fascinated by television programs the author suggests diverting his interest "with cookies and milk." I do not know whether the author, like the rest of us, indulges occasionally in any vices; but if he does, would he stop in the middle for "cookies and milk"? No wonder he comes tothe standard conclusion: "Actually there is nothing to fear about what TV is doing to our children," the familiar comic-book formula which has served the industry so well.

Unfortunately some psychiatrists and child specialists have written in a similar vein, again as with comic books. Never before in the history of medicine have physicians been so san guine about children's health as these psychiatrists, without any evidence from clinical research, are about the effect of mass media. One psychiatrist writes dogmatically that normal children are never seriously disturbed by routine experiences such as television. Why should something so new, so experimental and still so unroutine as television be accepted as "routine"? It is an intrusion into the home which from a mental-hygiene point of view still needs scrutiny and correction. He further states that the important thing is that television affects different children differently. That of course is the cheapest truism. The point is what do some television programs have in common that is, or may be, harmful to many children? To say that the average child is "in no way basically disturbed" introduces the loaded word basically. Is it "basic" if the child suffers from nightmares or if he begins to steal or if his character imperceptibly develops in the direction of an obtuse attitude toward the feelings of others? It is my belief that as physicians, especially when we make pronouncements affecting millions, we should have more regard for questions of prevention, whether the harm to be avoided is 'basic" or not.

He also discounts the effect of television murder stories on children: "TV murders do not represent death to the pre-school child. . . . Many children take this synthetic death, blood and murder in their stride and remain undamaged by it. . . . They take it quite casually . . . in order to become well-adjusted one will have to face the common experiences that are a part of the child's life." Is it really a common experience of children to see a bloody death?

The present director of the Child Study Association of America has stated: "Parents have found that the children can watch a half-dozen murders in one evening, get up, kiss mama and daddy good-night, go upstairs, sleep soundly and the next day get their usual grade in spelling."

That is a most unclinical statement to make. They could do that if they had early stages of tuberculosis or some other diseases, or if psychologically they had been very badly affected by the "half-dozen murders." This is a crude superficiality in defense of violent television shows. Parents often do not recognize the harm done to chil dren by crime shows. The director of Child Study goes on to say that if children get into trouble over sights on television "these children were sick before they ever saw a TV program." According to these people it is always the rabbit that starts the fight with the dog.

Lay writers have considerable difficulty in steering their way through the vast generalizations of the experts without becoming confused or getting misled. Robert Louis Shayon tried to do this in his book Television and Our Children. He comes to the conclusion that "what television can do to your child will depend on what your child is, what you are educating and guiding him to be before he looks at television." I think it is the other way around: What television can do to your child will depend on what television is, what you are allowing it and guiding it to be before it gets to the child.

My studies of the effect of television on children grew out of the comic-book studies naturally - I might say inevitably. More and more children told me that they did not read so many comics because they were looking at television. A few children gave up comic books for television. Many combined both. The study of the effect of television on children is more difficult and I marvel at the glib generalizations that have been made about its harmlessness.

We have used with television the same individual and group methods we used with comic books. It is significant how a show is reflected in a child's mind, what his memory vividly retains and what he represses and brings up in later sessions. I found especially revealing what children draw when asked to draw anything they have seen on television. Typical of many others is the drawing made by a sweet little girl of six. The color scheme was massive red, a lot of black and a little blue. She said: "I drew the picture of a man in his hotel room, and someone came in from the window and he had a stick in his hand and he's going to hit the man over the head." And this is exactly what she had drawn, with even the room number over the hotel-room door.

To evaluate the time spent by children before the television screen is difficult. It varies so widely with different children and with the same child that statistical averages are misleading. I have seen a number of children who apparently spent as much as four or five hours a day.

Sometimes it is not easy to determine the influence of television with precision because so many children have been conditioned in similar directions either before or at the same time by comic books.

A ten-year-old boy sent to the Clinic for fire-setting brought us some of his comic books: Detective Comics, Planet Comics, Master Comics, Space Western, Batman. He said he liked TV and looked a lot at Roy Rogers, Sky King, Captain Video, Space Cadet, Captain Midnight, Space Patrol and Flash Gordon. A little thing like fire-setting did not rate with him.

During the last few years, when television has been growing so fast, children are sometimes not sure themselves whether they get some of their ideas from comic books or from television. Even so, many observations can be made. The later hours and going-to-bed problem has certainly become exaggerated in most families. I have heard about quite a number of nightmares which are without question attributable to TV.

Some children get overstimulated by violent programs. This happened to Ernie, a ten-year-old boy of superior intelligence much overprotected by his mother. She told me: "He gets very excited sometimes. While looking at television he gets so excited he smacks the girls."

We lead children on to look at the wrong things, then blame them if they develop a craving for what they see. Much as I have searched for it, I have been unable to find that crime and violence programs satisfy psychological needs in children. One would have to assume that the need for outlets of violent aggression in children has suddenly tremendously increased. My findings in this respect corroborate Helen Muir, children's book editor of the Miami Herald, when she makes a distinction between "the real needs and desires of children" and "just the superimposed synthetic so-called needs which are not needs but cravings." She goes on to say, "Sure, the children want TV. And if they started smoking marihuana they'd want marihuana." Mrs. Muir also puts the finger on the worst harm that many so-called children's programs do to children. They fill them up "with false values that confuse and trouble."

I have found that with regard to simple values necessary for social orientation, television has confused some children, troubled others, and made still others (who are not supposed to be affected at all) callous and indifferent to human suffering. Whether such a child then commits a delinquent act or not often depends merely on incidental causes. That was the case with thirteen-year-old Anthony who was a truant and who was questioned in the Hookey Club. He said: "I spend about six hours a day on television. My favorite programs are Lights Out and mysteries."
"What happens?" he was asked.
"People get murdered. People kill for money, for property or for power. They kill women because they are going to tell on them or something. It may be the girl friend of the murderer or a crook that may be murdered. Sometimes the girls do the killing: They shoot them. There is one program where the man needed pills, he had a bad heart. The girl took the pills out of his reach, and moved his phone so he couldn't call anybody, and his pen and pencil so he couldn't write anything, then he died. She was married to him. She killed him because she was tired of him." (This was related in a matter-of-fact way, as if describing a self-understood circumstance.)

He went on: "I like the mystery programs very well. It is all more or less the same thing. The women or the men kill for money, power or they might get tired of a person or they love somebody else. There was a program where this man, he was old, and this girl he married was young. She fell in love with the first young man that came around, so she shot her husband."

About seven months later this boy was arrested for stealing. I examined him again and closed my report to the Children's Court with these words: "This is a typical case of a boy who has spent many hours a day looking at television programs, many of which glorify crime, violence, lawlessness, and depict these scenes in emotionally alluring detail. Under these circumstances, it seems to me not surprising that a boy succumbs to temptation and I believe that the adult world is more to be blamed than this individual child, who has made a good effort to adjust himself. I should point out to the Court that the observations of the bad effect of television programs on this boy were recorded on the chart several months before he was arrested for these delinquencies."

That the good ending of a crime story cancels out the effect of all previous mayhem in a child's mind is as untrue for television as it is for comic books. As a six-year-old boy told me about television, "the cowboys shoot the bad guys, the bad guys shoot the good guys.

The ideas children absorb from endless TV viewing are certainly not healthy. A nice little girl of ten was undergoing a routine examination at the Clinic, having been referred by a social agency. She was the kind of child who does not play and every day after school for hours she watched TV. I asked her, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "A nurse," she said, looking at me with big serious eyes.
"Why?" I asked her.
"So that I can poison people" was her immediate reply.

For some children, television has one good effect, in contrast with crime comic books, which have none. I have not seen it mentioned, but children express it often in one way or another. Television gives a feeling of belonging. Adults get that when they not only hear but actually see in their own living room a famous star performing or a prominent figure interviewed on programs like Meet the Press. Children get the feeling not only that they are taken into the adult world on the screen, but share the same entertainment with older children and adults - even with the neighbors! This is of course totally different from the solitary overheated entrancement of comic-book reading. It is a positive and good effect of television and it shows how wrong the television industry is in identifying itself with the comic-book industry in its publicity.

Childhood used to be the time for play. Here television has made tremendous inroads. Children look at television (and/or comic books) and often do not play any more, or their playing time is markedly shortened. They get no positive constructive suggestions for their play. What they see on TV (except for a very few children's programs, such as Frances Horwich's Ding Dong School) they cannot act out or imitate or work through in their play. If they would it would be dangerous play, hurting themselves or others. This, I believe, interferes to some extent with their healthy growth, because play is an important factor in normal development. Premature cessation of play in favor of the passivity of the television screen cannot well be made up for later on. The stereotyped repetitive stories create rigidity and poverty of ideas and fantasies. The two-gun heroes usurp the stage of the dreams of childhood. Instead of the spontaneity necessary for mental health there is a regimentation of feelings. That children imitate what they see on the television screen is undoubted. There have been cases where five-year-olds have shot at the screen with their father's gun to join in what they were looking at. An adolescent girl strangled a six-year-old girl with a stocking after watching a television mystery program. Boys have broken younger kids' bones, arms or legs with wrestling holds that they have learned from rough television shows. Juveniles have shot at girls in imitation of scenes on television. Of course those who prefer to hold that "deeper causes" (usually undemonstrated) rule out all precipitating, conditioning and inducing factors, bitterly contest the fact that watching television may lead to imitation.

Children's play on the street is now of a wildness that it did not have formerly. Children, often with comic books sticking out of their pockets, play massacre, hanging, lynching, torture. The influence of comic books - and also of television- is discernible in the nature of these games. Normal play has, I believe, curative forces. But if it gets too violent, these curative forces are extinguished.

The tales that children tell nowadays are also apt to show the influence of comic book-television lore. Three boys, ages ranging from six to eight, recently told the story that a man had grabbed one of their pals, had tied him up, beaten him, cut off his head and buried him in a vacant lot. Policemen were digging patiently for some time in the place the children pointed out, until it was finally realized that it was all made up. The details of the plot should have indicated to them that it was all comic book-television stuff. Even the police played the role assigned to them in comic books!

In television cases as in crime-comics cases I have found a law to be operative. All those factors seemingly insignificant or trivial coming from the child's previous life or from other media enter into the chain of causation if they tend in the same direction. Television has added one more agency in the bombard ment of children with negative incentives.

There are many points of contact between much of television as it is today and crime comic books. The form is different, but the content is similar. As one child said in a study by Dr. Florence Brumbaugh, director of Hunter College Elementary School, television programs are "really comics that move.

It is the faults of television that are like crime comics. In herently the two are nearly opposites. Television is a miracle of science, on the constructive side of the ledger one of the greatest practical developments of scientific principles of physics. Comic books, on the contrary, are a debasement of the old institution of printing, the corruption of the art of drawing and almost an abolition of literary writing. Television is a signpost to the future. Crime comics are an antisocial medium that belongs in the past.

Television has taken the worst out of comic books, from sadism to Superman. The comic-book Superman has long been recognized as a symbol of violent race superiority. The television Superman, looking like a mixture of an operatic tenor without his armor and an amateur athlete out of a health-magazine advertisement, does not only have "superhuman powers, but explicitly belongs to a "super-race."

Like comic-book figures, crime-television heroes seem to have minds that function only when they draw a gun, prepare to kill somebody or foil someone else's plans. There is no doubt that the highly seasoned fare of children's programs has interfered with the reading of children's books. In one public library the children's departnent figured that, on account of television, children took out a thousand fewer books than they had the year before. Classic books, mutilated in comic-book form, have been adapted to the television screen. The passivity induced by both television and comics have some similarity. Parents have often told me that without comic books they could not keep their children quiet, and more than one woman has told me what one mother expressed like this: "Give him his TV set and he's perfectly content if he never goes out" - but she was referring to her husband, not to her son.

The public has judged television much more harshly than it has comic books. That comes from the fact that adults actually see television, whereas as a rule they have no idea what comic books their children really read, or what is in them. When a famous TV star was criticized for plunging necklines, she pointed to the millions of girls in "bras and panties" in children's comics. Some time ago the television industry launched a high-pressure sales campaign. Parents were bombarded with big advertisements that played frivolously with both parents' and children's feelings: "There Are Some Things a Son or Daughter Won't Tell You" and "How Can a Little Girl Describe the Bruise Deep Inside?" This was to show how badly children need television sets. One expert proclaimed that children need TV for their health just as much as they need fresh air and sunshine. His column was dropped from one newspaper as a result, although he had taken his endorsement back. This whole TV campaign brought an outcry of indignation from the public. But what the TV industry and its experts had done was minute compared to the harmful and unscientific promotion campaign the crime-comics industry has been waging for years.

Of course television and crime comic books also meet when comic books are based on television programs. Take the example of Captain Video. This comic book is certainly as bad as other crime comics. There is a lot of assorted violence. Morbid fantasies are conjured up for children, like the one that suddenly mankind's legs do not function: "All of us have recited our theories and admittedly found them inapplicable! There is no hope for mankind's regaining the use of its lower extremities!" The treatment for this infirmity costs "one million dollars for each patient." The hero has a "dreaded electronic ray gun whose scintillating bolt results in complete paralysis." There is the superman cult of the "one man alone to stem the tide of frightening destruction, guardian of the world." The injury-to-the-eye motif is not missing, either.

When Pathfinder magazine wrote about this television show it had an illustration with the legend: "Gory after-dinner crime for juveniles defeats happy puppets" and classified the program as a juvenile crime show." To this the advertising agency objected, writing (in a letter published by Pathfinder) that the program "is not classified, nor has it ever been classified, in the crime category." They wish to call it a "science fiction" show. That is the familiar comic-book-industry alibi. Anyone who wishes to do anything about improving television programs either from within or without must first realize that scientifically not the disguise but the content is decisive, that crime is crime, paralyzed legs are paralyzed legs, violence is violence and torture is torture, whether the time and place are now and here or in the remoteness of science fiction.

What is the future of television, especially for children? It should be almost impossible to keep it as bad as it often is now. More and more people will demand television instead of tele violence. In contrast to the crime-comic-book industry with its hacks and hackneyed product, there are many gifted, wide-awake young men and women in the television industry anxious to show what they and the medium can do. I have spoken with some of them and I know that they would like nothing better than to devote their lives to the further development of television as a medium of entertainment, information and instruction. I doubt whether a medium like television, pregnant with the future, and commanding such superior personnel, can be held back in the long run.

The greatest obstacle to the future of good television for children is comic books and the comic-book culture in which we force children to live. If you want television to give uncorrupted programs to children you must first be able to offer it audiences of uncorrupted children.

Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham (Rinehart & Company, Inc. New York, Toronto 1953, 1954)

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