COMMENTARY: TIME FOR TV DETOX
By Arnaud De Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large

United Press International
March 5 2007

WASHINGTON, March 5 (UPI) — The bilious index is up in America as
television commercials resort to mindless anger to sell their wares.

A Snickers ad featured two plug-ugly bruisers chomping at either end
of a candy bar until their lips touched and kissed accidentally —
and then quickly tearing clumps of hair from their chests to prove
their virility.

TV "shockvertising" is now an "edgy" amalgam of someone zapped by
a meteorite while waiting to disembark at his office on the moon;
real car crashes; passengers side-swiped and tossed around like
crash-test dummies; a car that terrorizes and attacks a lovesome
pink piggy bank; everybody slaps each other hard in the face; a guy
throws a rock at somebody’s head; a couple driving at night pick up
a hitchhiker carrying a large ax (and some beer), followed later by a
second hitchhiker with a chainsaw; a sky diver sans parachute throws
himself out of a plane to chase a six-pack of beer.

Civility appears to have been relegated to a quaint custom of
yesteryear. Cruel and callous are traits to be admired. Mind-numbing
violence is a-okay and healthy. The country came to love a murderous
crime boss named Soprano. Good characters are bad ones. To peddle
something in a television commercial these days the take-no-prisoners,
arrogant salesman must make the prospective buyer feel like a
twittering half moron.

Sex is ubiquitous in sitcoms and docudramas — only raunchier. Paris
Hilton and Britney Spears and now their countless imitators can’t
seem to get out of the front seat of a sports car without giving the
paparazzi a well-waxed view sans panties.

TV commercials, blogs and YouTube send subliminal messages that say
sex is power and money. The new feminist movement in cyberspace seems
to be raw sex for raw power. Invasive cosmetic surgery for teenagers
is part of the unwholesome mix. Stats for Botox injections, chemical
peels, laser hair removal, are all up year over year. "Who needs brains
when you have these?" proclaims the T-shirt on a well-endowed teenager.

When teenage sex no longer shocked, the envelope pushers dabbled with
the menage a trios and intergenerational sex. But that didn’t last
long either. So it’s back to violence.

There are now some 16 million suffering from "explosive rage disorder,"
according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The endless
gory details of Iraqi horrors on television news and documentaries
have also contributed. Orlando, Disney World HQ, is now the angriest
city in America and Manchester, N.H., the least angry, according to
a Men’s Health magazine index. One would expect New York City with
all its hustle and bustle and frustrations in inclement weather to
occupy a high in the survey; it was only 57th angriest.

Good news for some and a dirge for others is word that rap music
has gone into a tailspin after climbing off the charts for the past
30 years. In a study by the Black Youth Project, the majority of
youngsters said rap videos were too violent. Another poll by AP and
AOL-Black Voices said 50 percent of respondents judged hip-hop cadences
"a negative force in American society." "You don’t come to the hood
no more" and ghetto revivals fail to captivate as they once did.

So all is not lost. Hip hop hoodlums still seek events to terrorize —
e.g., last month’s NBA All-Star Game — but resistance now mobilizes
to ridicule the troublemakers.

Study after study has demonstrated that children exposed to violent
TV shows were more likely to be convicted of crime later in life. And
women who OD’ed on TV violence threw things at their husbands and men
were more likely to beat up their wives. And these women are also at
increased risk of heart disease, according to cardiologists at Los
Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

>>From TV advertising to video games, acts of violence, even if only
violent spoofs in commercials, are woven in and out of the viewing
fabric. By the time a youth reaches 18, he/she has witnessed 32,000
murders, 40,000 attempted homicides, and 200,000 acts of violence.

Couple that with news reporting on wars and civil strife, and for some,
violence, even murder, becomes an acceptable solution to problems.

TV commercials are only one medium for the 3,000 advertisements that
most people are exposed to daily. Cross-marketing of products linked
to TV shows and movies, radio, online in cyberspace, static and mobile
billboards, even airline barf bags, are some of the others.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission issued a report,
two years overdue, mandated by Congress that suggests a law that
would let the FCC regulate violent programming, the way it supposedly
regulates sexual content and profanity. No one thought this would
get much beyond defining "excessive violence."

One can plausibly argue that violence is in the human DNA. In the
20th century alone, the Russo-Japanese war, two world wars, the
Russian civil war, the Armenian genocide, the Abyssinian conquest,
the Spanish Civil War, India’s partition, the French Indo-China war,
the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, China’s Cultural
Revolution, the Iraq-Iran war, the Rwanda genocide, and a few others,
caused well over 100 million killed.

Over the centuries, some historians estimate the number of killed
"in the cause of Christianity" at more than one billion, which
would make Muslims less sanguinary than Christians. In 5,000 years
of recorded history, there have been some 6,500 wars, many of them
taking a million lives each.

For couch potatoes, ignorance is bliss. According to the Sourcebook
for Teaching Science, the number of hours per day TV is on in an
average U.S. home is 6 hours 47 minutes. Number of minutes per week
parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 3.5.

Percentage of Americans that watch TV while eating dinner: 66
percent. Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps
precipitate real life mayhem: 79 percent. But they don’t connect the
dots. So TV detox is long overdue.