ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes media effects studies on the subject and looks at the media as sites of violence via their coverage and dramatization of the phenomenon and journalists' own risks. Everyone wants to know what role the media play in violence. Nationwide US media theatrics fail to address the role of religion, race, masculinity, a risk society, or firearms in creating violent people. By the early 20th century, academic experts had decreed media audiences to be passive consumers, thanks to the missions of literary criticism and the Psy-function. Distribution and cue analysis argues for a more interactive relationship, such that the media have reciprocal impacts on social conduct. Psy-function research is promoted in the bourgeois media for its claims that children consuming the media are likely to engage in violent conduct. Abundant tests of media effects are based on, as the refrain goes, ‘undergraduates at a large university in the Midwest.’.
