The Spawn of Media

In the late 1990’s Senator Sam Brownback helped persuade the American Medical Association to declare a casual connection between violent entertainment and individual acts of aggressive violence. When this statement was released many respectable organizations such as, National Institute of Mental Health, American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Pediatrics supported it.

In the twenty first century entertainment is more filled with sex and violence than ever before. If being exposed to vulgar material affects the behavior of individuals, what can really be done about it? Living in America we reside under the 1^st Amendment, the people have freedom of speech and press and can publish anything really.

In the 1930’s when America’s media was much more conservative than it is today, Hollywood in a sense regulated itself. In 1930 American movie industrialists created their own Production Code Administration (PCA). This was first supervised by William Hays. The Hays “code” presumed that movies were much more influential that books and that the standards of cinematic morality needed to be stricter than those that governed novels and other literature. The Hays code forbid any mention of certain controversial topics such as, “illegal drug trafficking,” “sex perversion,” “white slavery,” and “miscegenation.”-the idea of inter racial marriage. Some crime and immorality was allowed to be aired, but none that encouraged sympathy for illegal or immoral acts.

The Hays code assumed that adults and children could and would be sharing the same entertainment in the movie theater, film makers wanted the material that would be watched to be acceptable for all age groups. This code though was only regulating movies that were made in the USA; Hollywood soon found that they were losing money to European made movies. In 1968 Hollywood replaced their code for a system of age-based ratings. This was the beginning of a new era in mainstream media.

Labels were put on movies in order to regulate who was watching the material, but in truth these labels worked no better when someone tells you not to look, you instinctively look anyway. Explicit material was provided for the public and there was no real way of monitoring who was watching it. Like a child who has never tasted candy before Americans fell for the violence that was quickly consuming their TV screens. In 1971 only three years after Hollywood quit restricting what they aired, a movie called Clock Work Orange hit the screens. Though I have never seen this movie I have heard people describe it as a, “F^*%ed up movie.”

The First Amendment is the one of the 27 that has greatly sculpted what America has become today. Early Hollywood regulated their movies willingly. Under the 1^st Amendment they have the right to censor their movies and they have to right not to. I would like to say that there should be some government regulations on what is being broadcast in today’s media, but this would create a whiplash larger than we could handle. The freedom to say what we please is one of the greatest freedoms Americans have, but what happens when too much has been said? I have and hopefully some who are reading this have been witnessing the ethics of the American people degrade more and more over time. Each generation gets worse and worse. The generation that are now teenagers have grown up around sex, violence, drugs, we know things that older generations would never have dreamed. If you are a teenager in modern day and observe the things that happen daily, sex, drugs, cheating, stealing, lying, you could come to the conclusion that our generation has become almost completely amoral. We have sex with strangers and do all different kind of drugs and we self criticism nearly runs our lives. We do anything that gives us a “high,” a high that only lasts for a short amount of time, then leaves us feeling ashamed and full of grief. It seems to me that teenagers go through a sort of identity crisis. We cling to things close at hand to give us a sense of self. Sadly the things that we use to form a sense of self are filled with sex, violence, drugs and even hate.

It is agreed that one's culture is directly linked to the type of person one becomes. I want who ever is reading this to look around and actually see with clear eyes what the American culture is becoming. We commit acts that are thought common in todays culture. Though they are thought to be OK, truly they are not. One day, sooner than later we will be thinking of the words we may once have read, "What do you reap from those things you are now ashamed of?"-Romans 6:21

Source: REF SIRS, 2003