My paper draft...

Kristopher Rodriguez
Doctor Louie Lucca
April 27, 2010
HUC 130
Television through My Eyes

vi•o•lence
n.
1. Physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing.
2. The act or an instance of violent action or behavior.
3. Intensity or severity, as in natural phenomena; untamed force.
4. Abusive or unjust exercise of power.
5. Abuse or injury to meaning, content, or intent.
6. Vehemence of feeling or expression; fervor.

me•di•a–noun
1. a pl. of medium.
2. (usually used with a plural verb ) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely

Imagine you are ten years old, watching a favorite show of yours, called WWE Smack Down. You are so excited to see your favorite characters do so many crazy stunts in a squared circle, like a frog splash, or a choke slam, or even the new move that just came out from a new character that arrived, the Jack Hammer. This new character (a man who calls him Goldberg) just won with this move, and you are awestruck with the power of this man. You are ten years old and you your think what your watching is real, that the man in that ring really knocked out this guy and he actually won a real wrestling match. Well in comes your father who is watching the program with you and tells you that what you are watching is fake and that nobody could really do that move at all, without help from the other guy. You ask why are they helping each other if they hate each other, and your father answers the obvious answer: wrestling is fake, a soap opera, an over the top performance that isn’t real at all.

The next morning appears and you are off to school. It’s a nice day with a little cloud cover and you’re feeling pretty good. You have almost completely forgotten last night and your mind is set on other things. You’re walking with your whole family to the car so that way you’re all together. All of a sudden as soon as you get to the entrance to the parking lot you look over at the playground near your house and you see a bunch of kids actually wrestling on the hard concrete floor. You see that they are almost half naked, bleeding from the top of their heads, and they have each other in headlocks. Your father sees what you’re looking at and hurry’s you away, but not before you see one of the boys give the other the Jackhammer and you see him limp on the ground.

I never knew what happened to that boy. I never even knew his family, who he was what kind of person he was, and honestly I didn’t care. What sparked my interest, what stuck in my mind was that almost everything they used on each other I could have announced out loud if I was announcing a wrestling match instead of seeing an actual fight. I thought of the entertainment side of it, not of the violence, but of the entertainment.

It seems to me at this point and age of my life that most people would attribute to the raise of violence in the last couple of decades is due to the way that violence is portrayed in everyday life on a television screen at home through the eyes of our children. It seems that to me, media didn’t have a lot of control as to what went on the T.V. screen at the time of me being introduced to professional wrestling, and if they did my opinion is that they let it get as worse as it did because they needed the ratings to get people to watch they’re show. It does how ever come at a cost for us as humans because most things kids watch on T.V. stay in their heads for a very long time especially if it’s something that catches they’re attention when they watch T.V. Twenty four/Seven. According to sources in the Washington post (Vedantam, “As Well As Children”), “Teenagers and young adults who watch even as little as an hour of television a day are more likely to get into fights, commit assaults or engage in other types of violence later in life…” which means that young people of any age can just turn on the T.V. watch something and actually get even more violent themselves. Now to me wouldn’t that mean that actually watching a very violent T.V. show like World Wrestling Entertainment might have something to do with why kids are acting like the characters of this program? From my own boy-hood experiences then that means that this is exactly what’s happening in our society in yester-year, and it still continues into our society today.
But apparently this “…claim isn’t supported by data.” According to Levitt and Dubner, they are “…making an entirely different argument here. Our claim is that children who grew up watching a lot of T.V., even the most innocuous family-friendly shows, were more likely to engage in crime when they got older.” Well there are statistics that actually prove this fact true according to an article called “Want to Raise a Bully? Turn on the TV…” four-year-olds watching the daily average, which is about 3 hours, were 25% more likely to become bullies. Also a single child “watching more than eight hours of television per day was 200% more likely to bully.” So stating these facts actually proves the point of children actually watching television can not only lead to bullying and violence outside on the streets. This should encourage people to not watch TV at all but according to this article it hasn’t.
`Well I know one thing for sure that