ABSTRACT
Public concern and research have focused on several areas of television’s impact on us as individuals. Television’s role in changing our attitudes and values is governed in large part by our predispositions. Creation of new opinions is the next most frequent effect, although not nearly as frequent as reinforcement. Television’s rarest effect is conversion. Television advertisements would stand a much better chance of achieving conversion if an advertiser could dominate the mass media. Monopolization would occur if all media would carry commercial messages only about that advertiser’s product. Violence in television has been a major issue since the 1950s. Reinforcement theory suggests that exposure to televised violence reinforces existing patterns of behavior. By and large, radio and television have stayed free of obscenity, a result of federal law and self-regulation. However, times and programming concepts have changed.
