Assaulting TV

The latest research "proving" that watching little more than an hour of TV makes teenagers and young adults more "aggressive" is reported on in today's Washington Post and The New York Times. In the study, an astonishing 25 percent of teenagers who view more than 3 hours of TV daily had committed violent acts which caused serious injuries. Interestingly, The New York Times noted that the researchers found that watching TV did not increase violence among girls, a finding not mentioned by the Post. This new study, published in the journal Science, is one of a long series of such studies. Last month Scientific American reported that TV watching is addictive. Curiously, those researchers noted that people watching the boob tube reported themselves to be in a relaxed and passive mood. Perhaps TV's effects are more like mellow marijuana than revved-up crack.

The researchers in Science failed to square their findings with the fact that although Americans are not watching any less TV, violent crime rates in the United States have been dropping for about a decade and are now at low levels last seen in the 1960s. This is possibly because more would-be criminals are watching TV behind bars.

But what about the positive effects of staring at TV? TV also teaches children that there is a bigger world with more to aspire to than is available in the parochial worlds of their local communities. In addition, puzzled IQ researchers have noted that average intelligence as measured on tests has been rising for most of this century, the so-called Flynn Effect. In fact, the average has risen by an astonishing 15 or so points in the last 50 years in the United States. Could this rise in intelligence be a side effect of TV viewing? Now, that would be a fascinating study.