ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a large-scale quantitative methodology incorporating content analysis of complete television schedules in major US cities, and survey questionnaires to assess the correlation between the viewing of television violence and beliefs on matters of politics, public safety and social order. It deals with the assertion that television is the central cultural arm of American society. The chapter suggests that the essential differences between television and other media are more crucial than the similarities. The chapter shows why traditional research designs are inadequate for the study of television effects and suggest more appropriate methods. Television is the chief common ground among the different groups that make up a large and heterogeneous national community. Television, the flagship of industrial mass culture, rivals ancient religions as a purveyor of organic patterns of symbols – news and other entertainment – that animate national and even global communities’ senses of reality and value.
