{mean old world}

Can we agree that the media puts a higher premium on stories that get ratings? 

Yes? Okay. Great. 

Can we also agree that shocking, upsetting, and tragic stories often score higher ratings than cheerful stories about neighborhoods coming together to care for the elderly or board up dangerous abandoned buildings? 

Excellent, we're still on the same page.

Finally, can we agree that a majority of shows on television (in all its various modern incarnations) rely on violence, murder, cheating, and other generally bad behavior to drive plotlines?

Yes? Awesome. That's settled. Now let's talk about why this is a concrete (not theoretical) problem in our current society. 

Baby, it's a mean, mean world

Yesterday I learned about the social psychology principle termed mean world syndrome by George Gerbner.  It explains what we are currently seeing in the United States, in terms of peoples' incorrect belief that things are more violent and dangerous in our country than they were a year or ten years ago. This term was used to encapsulate Gerbner's research demonstrating a direct correlation between how fearful people feel about the world around them and the amount of television watched. What people see on television, even though much of it is fictional, has an enormous impact on worldview. 

This is a problem because by the time children have reached maturity, they have seen hundreds of thousands of violent acts on television. In spite of the fact that crime rates have declined steadily and dramatically in the United States over the last decade, the images promoted by the media are consistently the most violent. Furthermore, I have read different statistics that state that anywhere from a third to 75% of people committing criminal acts on television go unpunished. This skewed anti-reality is informing reality for many people. 

I looked up the numbers to see if the U.S. was really experiencing more violence, as is pretty commonly accepted anecdotally. (I don't even watch tv, and I often feel that things are falling apart after listening to NPR on my commute to work).  Turns out the numbers clearly show the opposite is true. If you don't believe me, check them out. You can find the FBI Crime data from 1960 here.  

Truth and Fiction

So how can we hold the kind of complexity necessary to successfully navigate reality, in our media scrambled brains? How can we embrace the truth, which is that life is awfully complex and two things that appear to be opposite can sometimes both be true? How can we separate our emotional reactions from the ones grounded in reality? How can we teach our brains to discriminate between the fiction we feed it and the reality required to sustain us? 

Quite simple, we think! We reason! We use the big, beautiful, massively powerful brains we have been given and start actively questioning reality. We ask ourselves why we hold the beliefs we hold. We challenge ourselves to be better and more aware. 

Disclaimer: I do not love television. I think it's dangerous and depressing. This has been my position for many years.

Shout out to Snopes to making so many of us better, more inquisitive, analytical people!