“Violence in our society has reached epidemic proportions. ... Violence in the media for entertainment purposes has been established as a major contributing factor.”
—Deborah Prothrow-Stith
“The pathologies that affect America don’t come out of a TV tube.”
—Lionel Chetwynd
People throughout the United States were deeply shocked on March 24, 1998, when two boys—ages thirteen and eleven— were accused of deliberately ambushing and shooting at a crowd of students at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and firing high-powered rifles, the two attackers killed four students and one teacher. In attempting to come to terms with this tragic and baffling event, Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, said, “I don’t know what else we’d expect in a culture where children are exposed to tens of thousands of murders on television and movies. It’s a cultural disease.”
Huckabee’s statement is representative of a.....
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