they appear. Statistics, when used responsibly, are perhaps some of the best insights we have into helping us discover problems and their solutions. As helpful as they may be, there are still other kinds of information even as persuasive as statistics. What I have to show now are case studies. There have been numerous case studies performed over the past few decades involving children and television. I can throw out statistics all day at people in the hopes that they will see that violence on television is bad. While it is effective, my argument is much like any claim a scientist would make: it is not truly valid until tested. With this in mind, we see testing the real influence of violence on television shows that it is dangerously harmful. For an example, there is a case of a study done by a group Stein and Friedrich for the Surgeon General’s project in 1972 (Murray, 1996, p. 3). Their study consisted of taking 97 preschool children and exposing one third of them to a television diet consisting of Batman and Superman cartoons. The middle third were exposed to a diet of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, while the final third were exposed to neutral programming (neither antisocial or pro-social). These children watched over twelve half-hour episodes of their respective programs over a four-week period. They were then observed in their classroom and playroom environments. The psychologists running the study found that the children who watched the Batman and Superman cartoons were remarkably aggressive and not very apt to share and interact. While on the other hand, the children who watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood were more social, and more likely to share and interact. The middle third remained close to the same as they were before. There are many more studies just like this previous one, and all of them lead to the same conclusion: violent television does foster more aggressive and violent behavior in children. It feels like...
