Blame the box

Press, 15 January 1986, Page 14

Blame the box

If violence on television did not exist, politicians would have to invent it. It is an ideal scapegoat for violent crime. Nobody can prove television’s innocence. This truth has recently been rediscovered. The new year is likely to bring a noisy campaign to clean up the small screen.

On December 8, the Home Secretary, Mr Douglas Hurd, warned broadcasters to exercise more self-con-trol in the depiction of sex_ and violence. If they did not, he hinted, some new legislation might be thought up to force them to. Some days earlier, Mrs Thatcher had told Tory trade unionists that the Government was very worried about the amount of violence on television. Mr Norman Tebit, the Conservative party chairman, had gone much further, specifically blaming “today’s violent society” on the “valueless values” of the permissive society, in which ’‘violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media.” His speech (which began with a smutty double entendre) went on to mourn “outdated bourgeois concepts” such as good manners and family life. His party’s research department is now busy trying to find some evidence for Mr Tebbit’s views, so that he can make a more studied case. The Home Office is examining the latest studies of television and violence. So is the 8.8. C., which started to review its internal guidelines after Mrs Thatcher’s speech.

All the work in this area is controversial. Some physiological and psychological studies suggest that watching violent scenes makes people more aggressive in the laboratory, but nobody can say for sure whether it affects them in real life. International comparison does not suggest a clear correlation between a country’s crime statistics and its televised sex or

violence. American television is full of violence; so is American society. Japanese television — like its other media — is also full of violence. Yet violent crime seems to be relatively rare in Japan. At the moment, British radio and television and exempt from the Obscene Publications Act; The commercial broadcasting companies are governed by the Broadcasting Act, which enjoins the Independent Broadcasting Authority (1.8. A. to ensure that programmes do hot offend against good taste or decency or encourage crime. (The 1.8. A. has never been successfully prosecuted under this part of the Act.) In practice, the 8.8. C. and the 1.8. A. operate very similar guidelines. Cable television programmers have been told by their statutory policeman, the Cable Authority, to follow the 1.8.A.’s guidelines until a special, less strict, set is written for them. The present broadcast guidelines do not include a list of dos and don’ts; they are concerned with principles. There have been several attempts to extend the Obscene Publications Act to broadcasting. A Conservative member of, Parliament, Mr Winston Churchill, has E resented a private memer’s bill which would extend the Act to radio and television, and would tighten its definition of obscenity both for them and for articles on sale in places accessible to children. Fewer than half of the prosecutions brought under the Act since 1980 have succeeded. Mr Churchill’s proposal involved drawing up a list of nasty, or arousing, things that television must not show. The Government has not yet said whether or not it will support his bill. If not, it may find itself accused of holding a party it does not want to go to.