vision. That is nearly ten percent of one’s life lives watching television. That is insane; to say that you and I will spend years upon years, watching television. There is so much that people, even we, could do in a seven-year period. Entire wars can be fought in seven years, college educations can be attained, millions of people will be born and millions will die, many things can happen that have more significance than seven years of television. That is a very large percentage of time to be doing solely one thing, and the fact that that one thing is watching television, is very, very unfortunate. The television, as said before, is a very influential object. Being worse for children, we see that at the later stages in life (ie: eighteen and over, approximately adulthood) most people will not be swayed too much by the hypnotic powers of the television. This is not to say that it cannot happen, but studies show that most people are fairly set in their ways, especially mentally, once they reach adulthood and it takes a lot for them to be affected. Children, on the other hand, are prime candidates to the influences of the television. They are the most avid viewers and the most vulnerable. It is here where most violent tendencies, if any, are fostered. With the addition of cable television to broadcast television, a recent survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs identified 1,846 violent scenes broadcast and cablecast between 6 a.m. to midnight on one day in Washington, D.C. The most violent periods were between 6 to 9 a.m. with 497 violent scenes (165.7 per hour) and between 2 to 5 p.m. with 609 violent scenes (203 per hour) (Murray, 1996, p. 2). This statistic probably seems quite outrageous, but it is true and there are numbers even higher than that on given days. Two hundred violent scenes per hour are gaudy numbers, yet the even more baffling but more concealed truism is the time slots of these major occurrences. The tim...
