Public Broadcasting Takes Stand on Juvenile Violence : Television: With Bill Moyers at the forefront, PBS devotes 5 1/2 hours next week to the issue. KCET adds more on the topic.

Beginning with a Bill Moyers special Monday night, segueing into “Frontline” Tuesday and returning to Moyers on Wednesday, you can catch quick flashes of the sights and sounds of violence: From the lead character of the 30-year-old television series “The Rifleman,” firing away, his weapon at perfect right angle with his hip, to the “if it bleeds, it leads” brand of TV news. From women slasher flicks to “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” karate chops. Even a bit of “Beavis and Butt-head.”

It’s on PBS, of all places, because the subject that public television is tackling in a major way is violence--violence against youths and violence by youths. Altogether, 5 1/2 hours of prime time next week are devoted to what Moyers calls “the whole bedeviling question of violence.”

Moyers’ two-hour “What Can We Do About Violence?” bookends PBS’ “Act Against Violence” campaign. He also returns at the close of “Frontline’s” 70-minute program, “Does TV Kill?,” to lead a panel discussion.

KCET-TV Channel 28 is getting into the act too. Its “Life & Times” focuses on violence Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., and at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday the station is repeating “Confronting Violence,” a documentary about people who have been hit by violence and fight back. Wednesday at 8 p.m., KCET premieres Nancy Salter’s one-hour documentary, “Newman’s the Man,” profiling David Newman, a parole agent and gang information coordinator at the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, a California Youth Authority detention facility.

“Almost a million kids between 10 and 19 are victims of some violent act every year,” Moyers, who helped spearhead the anti-violence campaign, told reporters here this week, “and juvenile crime itself has increased faster than the juvenile population. So that’s what inspired us.”

What works and doesn’t in the natural tension between punishment and prevention is what he explores in his four hours. “What we have done . . . is simply to travel around the country looking at some experimental programs that offer some hope”--from the Last Chance Ranch for young offenders in Dade County, Fla., to “L.A. Teens on Target,” a prevention program in Los Angeles, which deals with the consequences of violence and the danger of guns.

The “Frontline” documentary is primarily set in bucolic Hudson, N.Y., where in 1960 social scientist Leonard Eron began a study of third-graders’ aggressive behavior.

“Much to our surprise, we found that the more violent the programs the kids watched at home, the more aggressive they were in school,” says Eron. But the program takes a skeptical view of direct cause-and-effect, and instead concludes that TV is an “addiction.”

Moyers, who cites “economic hardship” and harsh treatment at home as primary predictors of violence, said the question is not whether MTV’s cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head “cause some kid to burn his house down. (It’s) what happens when the market becomes the mentor for kids . . . the arbiter of their values.”

This is the “paradox in the attack on public broadcasting,” Moyers noted, referring to calls from the new Republican leadership in Congress to cut the federal funding of public radio and television. “What our right-wing friends will not acknowledge is that it is the marketplace that is driving the violence in the media. The most violent television is children’s programming on commercial networks. . . . The message of violence in the media is, if you want juice, money, power, ratings, respect, use violence, because violence sells.”