Study of TV Violence Will Widen the Focus

In an effort to improve on past surveys that emphasized bullet rounds and body counts, a new industry-funded study of televised violence will assess whether broadcast blood and gore are artistically defensible or merely gratuitous, its sponsors said Wednesday.

The UCLA Center for Communications Policy, selected by the four major networks to conduct the study, will spend at least two years examining portrayals of violence in everything from made-for-TV movies to Saturday morning cartoons, said center director Jeffrey Cole.

Describing the planned study at a press conference, Cole said it will try to address qualitative issues instead of duplicating the quantitative focus of previous studies. In addition to prime-time and children’s programming, it will encompass television commercials, movie promotions and video games, he said.

The center will study televised violence for at least two programming seasons, and possibly a third. It will issue annual reports of its findings, the first of which is due next July.

Most academic studies conducted over the past 20 years have counted incidents of fighting, shooting, and other violent acts without examining context, Cole said. But the center intends to address how graphically violence is portrayed, whether it is relevant to the plot and whether those who commit it are punished.

While Saturday morning cartoons are “problematic” because they tend to contain gratuitous violence, Cole said, the center’s evaluators will generally “operate on the assumption that not all violence is necessarily bad.”

The industry-sponsored effort is designed in part to head off efforts in Congress to increase federal oversight of TV programming. At Wednesday’s briefing, representatives of the four networks--ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox--urged Congress to refrain from regulating content, calling it “an area fraught with constitutional peril.”

The networks will pay the center about $1 million for the first two reports. Although the UCLA center’s reports will be released publicly, the networks will not be required to follow any recommendations they contain.

CBS Senior Vice President Martin D. Franks, speaking for the four networks, said that the reports will provide new insight into how different media approach violent themes.