Celebrating Violence. Fox News disgraced itself even more than usual today on its Heartland with John Kasich show. The segment I chanced across concerned bullying, with a focus on "Girlfighting". By way of illustration, Fox ran, to the right of the talking heads making serious comments, a hyperviolent video of teenage girls fighting. I had just tuned to Fox during commercials on whatever station I was watching at the time, and was truly amazed at the sensationalized and inhuman treatment of this topic, with vicious, graphic violence being shown essentially as entertainment while the show's experts prattled on about the causes of violence and consequences of bullying.
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Did they know that their remarks were being illustrated by a video of girls beating the crap out of each other that ran for well more than a minute? I was furious. There is no way on Earth to justify showing such a video, even for a few seconds, much less for 90 seconds or 2 minutes or whatever period it ran. Plainly Fox was reveling in such violence, not decrying it.
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Another chunk of video, used to illustrate talk about the mind-deforming effects of video-game violence, showed what I presume are fictional murders of story characters that children can commit in games like Grand Theft Auto (all of which should be destroyed, along with their creators).
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The 'people' at Fox News, starting with former Congressman John Kasich, should be ashamed of themselves. It's not enuf that the Nation is ashamed for them.
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It would be salutary to broadcast news if the executives responsible for these detestable 'news decisions' were fired. If Kasich approved it, he should be fired.
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Showing such videos in a 'legitimate' news and public-affairs program normalizes violence. Exposure of people to such images desensitizes them to violence and diminishes their appreciation of how aberrant such behavior actually is.
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Fox really is a pernicious influence on society.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,516.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM