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Pros And Cons Of Media Censorship

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Media Censorship Will Not Stop the Violence

Violence will be with us forever. We cannot change that. However, we can, and must change the way our children and we relate to it. Leonard Pitts Jr., columnist for the Miami Herald, explains it this way:

Despite the way it seems, carnage did not begin at Columbine. To the contrary, human beings have always had a tremendous capacity to inflict pain on one another, a capacity that reaches far deeper than whatever is on the marquee at the local multiplex. I do not dispute that we live in a violence-besotted culture that has helped anesthetize children -- all of us, really - to the effects of physical aggression. So yes, it is proper and necessary for us to debate the way violence is …show more content…

In an experiment conducted in 1960, Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura and colleagues showed nursery-school children television clips of adults abusing a toy clown called a Bobo doll. Then the psychologist watched how the children played in the room with the doll and other "nonagressive" toys. Children who had seen the aggressive videos were much more likely to kick and beat the clown, especially if they had seen the adult being rewarded for the behavior. The children continued to act violently even when the abuser had been dressed as a cartoon-like cat (Mestel). Teenagers are constantly bombarded with a barrage of sex, profanity, and violence. When they turn on the radio they hear about murder and rape. When they turn on the television they see the same horrible acts being portrayed. Industry representatives say they have worked hard to implement voluntary rating systems that inform parents of the products' content, but they continue to deny any knowledge of specific marketing of adult-rated products to a youthful market. However, magazines with huge numbers of under-17 subscribers such as Teen, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and YM all carry ads for R-rated movies, as does MTV whose core audience is ages 12 to 24. In a forum in The Plain Dealer a fifteen year-old female wrote:

As a 15-year-old, I am very aware that various

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