Television : Aiming for the Truth About Our Violent Society

Common-wisdom time. Everyone knows that crime in the United States is up dramatically, right? And that television gore is one of the prime reasons?

But wait a minute. Perhaps we don’t know what we think we know.

There’s no question that crime is a voracious Pac Man that renders some segments of the nation more perilous than passive. Yet by far the most arresting aspect of last Thursday night’s “Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?” was its truth-liberating statistics about crime. They’d been previously reported in this newspaper and elsewhere, but not with such visibility.

Fronting the ABC News hour was reporter John Stossel, armed with such visual aids as a graph with Justice Department statistics showing that all crime during the last 20 years is down about 25% and that violent crime has dropped 2%.

Why, then, does so much of the public believe the opposite--the result being an aggressive campaign to have Congress bring its clout to bear on perpetrators of TV violence as one means of curtailing real-life violence?

Stossel and others suggested that what has risen is not the rate of crime itself but the reporting of crime. “We’ve seen . . . large increases in reported rape over the last 30 years,” University of Texas criminologist Mark Warr said on the program. “Does that mean that rape is going up? Possibly, but it could also be that women are more willing to report a rape today than they were 30 years ago.”

What’s more, Warr added that when the news media headline crime statistics over long periods, they rarely take into account population increases that have occurred during the same years.

And, finally, he noted that relentless TV news emphasis on violent crime--abetted by technology that brings instantaneous reporting of everything grisly--adds to the impression that your next-door neighbor is John Wayne Gacy and just about everyone is constantly at risk.

That’s not to deny that violent crime is a major problem in the United States. But how much is television to blame for the real-life carnage, and how much of the blame lies elsewhere?

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Interestingly, Canadians--especially those in large urban centers--watch essentially the same entertainment television as U.S. viewers. From Hollywood’s lips to Canadian ears, the blood and bang-bang travel right across the border.

Yet their crime rate is dramatically lower than ours. And, notably, so is their access to guns.

A message here? It’s not unlike the one “Kids Killing Kids” aims to deliver at 8 p.m. Tuesday on both CBS (Channels 2 and 8) and Fox (Channels 11 and 6). Arnold Shapiro (“Rescue: 911”) is the executive producer, David J. Eagle the writer, director and producer of this commercial-free drama that tells four separate stories of youths who fall prey to guns. In a twist, the stories are then retold to show how things would have been different without the presence of guns.

Eagle, best known for creating socially aware “Afterschool Specials” for kids, says it was two years ago that he thought of doing an “Afterschool”-type program telling four separate stories of kids who meet tragic ends due to guns. But, after he and his associate, Carol Starr Schneider, researched handgun violence and presented their program proposal to a spate of networks, they were turned down across the board. One network executive claimed he was declining “because of (fear of) the NRA (National Rifle Assn.),” Eagle said.

Some time later, Eagle said, he learned from Judy Price, CBS vice president for children’s programming, that CBS (which earlier had rejected his proposal) had put a kids-and-guns afternoon program into development with Shapiro. Price united him and Shapiro, and it was Shapiro, Eagle said, who came up with the concept of showing kids-and-guns tragedies from two perspectives.

By this time, protests against TV violence had become a steady loud din, prompting Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and others in Congress to put pressure on the industry to drastically change its ways. As the pressure increased, so did the determination of the networks to alleviate it by demonstrating their goodliness.

According to Eagle, a top CBS executive decided that the network could get more “brownie points” if “Kids Killing Kids” were plucked from the afternoon ghetto and showcased in prime time. So, although made on a relatively skimpy “Schoolbreak Special” budget, “Kids Killing Kids” was granted Shapiro’s “Rescue: 911” slot in prime time as part of a weeklong slab of programs examining the problem of violence in the United States.

“CBS also decided to make it an event and offer it to the other networks,” Eagle said, “but only Fox took it. I understand one of the networks turned it down because they thought our story about suicide was too scary.”

Just as the youth suicide rate in the United States is too scary. And the recent case of the 10-year-old Los Angeles boy who who came to school and fatally shot himself in the head with his father’s automatic pistol is too scary. And the number of kids with access to guns is too scary.