Understanding the Problem
But today's mass media are part
of the problem. Professor Felton Earls of the Harvard School of Public Health
has found that, though the graphic depiction of violence on television or in
the movies may not provoke most viewers to commit violent acts themselves,
research does suggest that it adversely affects a particularly
vulnerable subset--children (especially boys) with attention-deficit or
information-processing disorders.
What may be more important to public policy is that the fears and perceptions
of the white middle-class mainstream shape the stories that the media choose
for coverage--perpetuating stereotyped images of black or Latino perpetrators
and white victims, for example, and accepting almost as a fact of life the
widespread violence that occurs within communities of color. As Professor
Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland points out, "there is a crucial
difference between the public's awareness of a social condition, such as
violence or poverty, and its conviction that this condition presents a
problem to be tackled and solved." Steve Rabin, of the public relations
firm Porter/Novelli, notes that the AIDS story has become framed in the public
mind as a chronic epidemic of the underclass--one more minority urban problem
we do not know how to solve. Unless something happens to change this
perception, we are not likely to see any new resolve to raise the issue to a
public priority. Violence, like AIDS, may be construed similarly as a problem
to be contained rather than solved, unless something happens to change the
images in the media, adds ABC News Senior Medical Correspondent George Strait.
Viewing violence only as a minority urban problem dangerously misconstrues the
issue, Fullilove contends. However real the barriers of class, race, ethnicity,
or sexual orientation that divide us, we do not live in a social "mosaic" of
self-contained groups. In her study of the AIDS epidemic, she has found that
there are no "impermeable boundaries": "When you ask intravenous drug users,
Do you have sex with people who don't use drugs intravenously? they say yes.
And when you ask gay men, Do you ever sleep with women? they say yes." Nor is
the "post-crack, post-trauma" culture confined to the inner city. The language
and voice of the inner city--with their recognized commercial potential--have
been absorbed into the mainstream popular culture of youth, aided by the mass
media.
We cannot realistically compartmentalize people or their problems, owning some
and disowning others. What we need, Fullilove asserts, is a more "ecological"
understanding on which to ground our search for effective public policies. This
entails broadening the discussion to include voices not usually heard through
the mass media, Rabin observes, and "augmenting" media images, as Olmos
suggests, to reflect the real diversity and interconnectedness of American
people. By way of illustration, Olmos cites his own typically complicated
ancestry: "I stand here as an African, by way of Asia, indigenous to this
country, cross-bred with Europeans--which gives you this brown person, this
'Hispanic' person standing here in front of you."
"Is the media really serving a kind of substitute function for the socialization
and the rearing of children?
"The problem is not violence. The problem is a whole host of other things that
have to so with racism and hopelessness -- deteriorating communities, drug use,
families that won't work, schools that don't work."
Felton Earls
Professor of Human Behavior and Development
Harvard School of Public Health
and Professor of Child Psychology
Harvard Medical School
