The television violence overkill was first reported in a study by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters in 1951. The first Congressional hearings were held by Senator Estes Kefauver's Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. The usual industry suspects were rounded up and gave what have since become the usual promises of mending their ways "next fall."

Next fall and most subsequent seasons, violence further increased as the freeze on new TV frequency allocations established the unchallenged cultural hegemony of national network broadcasting.

What is Wrong?
Clearly, something is wrong. Broadcasters are licensed to serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity." They are paid to deliver receptive audiences to their business sponsors. Few industries are as public relations-conscious as television. What compels them to endure public humiliation, risk the threat of repressive legislation and invite charges of undermining health, security and the social order?

The usual rationalization that violence delivers the goods – it "gives the audience what it wants" – is disingenuous. As the trade knows well and as we shall see, violence as such is not highly rated. That means that it coasts on viewer inertia, not selection.

Unlike other media use, viewing is a ritual; people watch by the clock and not by the program. To the limited extent that some programs have a larger share of certain time-slots and can, therefore, extract a higher price for commercials, violent programs in those time slots may yield the broadcaster some marginal profits. For a robust industry, sensitive to public and legislative criticism, those incremental profits are hardly worth the social, institutional and political damage violent programs exact.

Something is wrong with the way the problem has been posed and addressed. A virtual obsession with asking the wrong question obscures the factors that in fact drive violence and trap the industry in a difficult dilemma. The usual question – "Does television violence incite real-life violence?" – is itself a symptom rather than diagnostic tool of the problem. Despite its alarming implications, and intent, or perhaps because of them, it distracts from focusing on the major conditions producing violence in society and limits discussion of television violence to its most simplistic dimension.

Violence is a complex scenario and social relationship. Whatever else it does, violence in drama and news demonstrates power. It portrays victims, as well as victimizers. It intimidates, as well as incites. It shows one's place in the "pecking order" that runs society. And, it "travels well" on the world market.

Changing the Debate
Let us, then, try to change the terms of the debate so that something might come of it.

Violence on television is an integral part of a system of global marketing. It dominates an increasing share of the world's screens. Despite its relative lack of popularity in any country, the system has far-reaching consequences. It inhibits other dramatic approaches to conflict, depresses independent television production, deprives viewers of more popular choices, victimizes some and emboldens others, heightens general intimidation and invites repressive postures that exploit the widespread insecurities it itself generates.

Behind the problem of television violence is, therefore, not only the simple problem of regulation (or industry self-regulation) but the more critical issue of who makes cultural policy in the post-electronic age. Reconsidering the debate about violence creates an opportunity to move the cultural policy issue to center stage, where it has long been in most other democracies.

The convergence of communication technologies concentrates control over the most widely shared messages and images. With all the technocratic fantasies about hundreds of channels, and with the anti-violence posturing filling the mass media, it is rare to encounter discussion of basic issues of policy. The questions we ought to be raising are these:

• What creative sources and resources can provide what mix of content that flows along the "electronic superhighway" into every home?
  
• Who will tell the stories to our children and for what underlying purpose?
  
• How can we assure the survival of alternative perspectives?

These questions have been discussed and sometimes dealt with in the parliaments and legislatures of both established and newly emerging democracies. For example, France levies a 3 percent tax on theater admissions and a 2 percent tax on videotapes, which is paid into a fund for independent productions. Other countries in Europe and Scandinavia have comparable programs.

In the United States, these questions have not yet been placed on the agenda of public discourse.

What follows, then, is an attempt to formulate and address some prior questions we need to address before we can construct such an agenda.

• What is new and different about television?
  
• What systems of casting and fate dominate its representations of life?
  
• What conceptions of reality do these systems cultivate?
  
• Why does violence play such a prominent, pervasive and persistent role in them?
  
• How [do we] deal with the current proliferation of violence while, at the same time, enhancing rather then further curtailing cultural freedom and diversity?

The New Cultural Environment
A child today is born into a home in which television is on an average of over seven hours a day. For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell.

This is a radical change in the way we employ creative talent and shape the cultural environment. Television is a relatively non-selectively used ritual. Other media require literacy, growing up, going out and making a selection based on some previously acquired criteria.

But most people watch by the clock and not by the program, and that means that TV is the only medium that will reach viewers with messages and images they would otherwise never select. All other media – films and print – are used selectively by people seeking out what interests them.

But there is no "before" with television. Television is there at birth and stays there throughout life. It helps to shape from the outset the predispositions and selections that govern the use of other media. Unlike other media, television requires little or no attention;its repetitive patterns are absorbed in the course of living. They become part and parcel of the family's style of life, but they neither stem from nor respond to its needs and wants.

The roles children grow into are no longer home-made, hand-crafted, community-inspired. They are products of a complex, integrated and globalized manufacturing and marketing system. Television violence is an integral part of that system.

Not All Violence is Alike
Of course, there is blood in fairy tales, gore in mythology, murder in Shakespeare. Not all violence is alike. Violence is a legitimate and even necessary cultural expression. Individually crafted, historically inspired, sparingly and selectively used expressions of symbolic violence can balance tragic costs against deadly compulsions. However, such tragic sense of life has been swamped by violence with happy endings produced on the dramatic assembly-line. This "happy violence" is cool, swift, painless and often spectacular, designed not to upset but to deliver the audience to the next commercial in a mood to buy.

How people and life are represented in the new cultural environment is not only a question of numbers. Representation cultivates a sense of opportunities and life chances. It contributes to our conceptions of who we are and how we relate to others and the world. It helps define our strengths and vulnerabilities, our powers and our risks. No longer can family and community engender a sense of self and of values without the presence in the home of a tireless stranger telling all the stories.

On the whole, prime-time television presents a relatively small set of common themes, and violence pervades most of them. The majority of network viewers have little choice of thematic context or character types, and virtually no chance of avoiding violence.

Nor has the proliferation of channels led to greater diversity of actual viewing. If anything, the dominant dramatic patterns penetrate more deeply into viewer choices through more outlets managed by fewer owners airing programs produced by fewer creative sources.

Casting and Fate
Annual monitoring and analysis of network television drama (see sidebar on the Cultural Indicators project) provides an aggregate bird's-eye view of familiar territory. It is what everybody watches but nobody sees – from the ground.

Casting and fate - the building blocks of the story-telling process - reflects and accommodates the violence scenario. Middle-class, white male characters dominate in numbers and power. Women play one out of three characters. Young people comprise one-third and old one-fifth of their actual proportions of the population. Most other minorities are even more underrepresented. That cast sets the stage for stories of conflict, violence and the projection of white male prime-of-life power.

The moderate viewer of prime-time television drama sees every week an average of 21 violent criminals arrayed against an army of 41 public and private law enforcers, most of them equally violent. There are, week in and week out, 14 doctors, 6 nurses, 6 lawyers and 2 judges to handle them. An average of 150 acts of violence and about 15 murders entertain us and our children every week, and that does not count cartoons and the news. Those who watch over three hours a day (more than half of all viewers) absorb much more.

About one out of three (31 percent) of all characters and more than half (52 percent) of major characters are involved in violence in any given week. The ratio of violence to victimization defines the price to be paid for committing violence. When one group can commit violence with relative impunity, the price it pays for violence is relatively low. When another group suffers more violence than it commits, the price is high.

In the total cast of prime-time characters, the average "risk ratio" (number of victims per 10 violent characters) is 12. But the price paid in victims for every 10 violent characters is 15 for boys, 16 for girls, 17 for young women, 18.5 for lower class characters, and over 20 for elderly characters. Women, children, poorer and older people and some minorities pay a higher price for violence than do white males in the prime of life.

Violence takes on an even more defining role for major characters. It involves more than half of all major characters (58 percent of men and 41 percent of women). Most likely to be involved either as perpetrators or victims, or both, are characters portrayed as mentally ill (84 percent), young adult males (69 percent) and Latino/Hispanic Americans (64 percent). Children, lower class and mentally ill or otherwise disabled characters, pay the highest price &emdash; 13-16 victims for every 10 perpetrators.

Lethal victimization extends the pattern. About 5 percent of all characters and 10 percent of major characters kill or are killed, or both. Most likely to be so involved are Latino/Hispanic and lower class characters. Being poor, old or a woman of color means double-trouble; they pay the highest relative price for projecting that kind of power.

Major characters who are "bad" are, of course, more likely to be killed than those portrayed as "good." But gender, race and age also matter. For every 10 positively valued men who kill, about 4 are killed. But for every 10 "good" women who kill, 6 are killed, and for every 10 women of color who kill, 17 are killed. Older women characters get involved in violence only to be killed.

The Cultural Indicators team calculated a violence "pecking order" by ranking the risk ratios of the different groups. Hurting and killing by most majority groups extracts a tooth for a tooth. Minority groups tend to pay a higher price for their show of force. Women, especially older women, children and youth, lower class, mentally disabled people and Asian Americans are at the bottom of the heap.

What Drives Television Violence?
Formula-driven violence in entertainment and news is not a reflection of freedom, viewer preference, or even crime statistics. It is the product of a complex manufacturing and marketing machine. Mergers, consolidation, conglomeratization and globalization fuel the machine.