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DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION
AND THE MASS MEDIA

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In 1966, NBC showed the Rod Serling made-for-television thriller The Doomsday Flight, the first movie to depict an airplane hijacking. In the story, a man plants a bomb and tries to extract ransom money from an airline. In the days following the telecast, the nation’s major airlines reported a dramatic rise in anonymous bomb threats, some of them classified as teenage pranks. The network agreed not to run the film again.

In 1985, the popular heavy-metal band Judas Priest made headlines when two Nevada teenagers shot themselves after listening to the group’s allegedly subliminal suicidal message on their 1978 Stained Class album. One teen died instantly; the other lived for three more years, in constant pain from severe facial injuries. The teenagers’ parents lost a civil product liability suit against the British metal band and CBS Records.

In 1995, an eighteen-year-old woman and her boyfriend went on a killing spree in Louisiana after reportedly watching Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers more than twenty times. The family of one of the victims filed a lawsuit against Stone and Time Warner, charging that the film—starring Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson as a demented, celebrity-craving young couple on a murderous rampage—irresponsibly incited real-life violence. Stone and Time Warner argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed on the grounds of free speech, and the case was finally thrown out in 2001. There was no evidence, according to the judge, that Stone had intended to incite violence.

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In 1999, two heavily armed students wearing trench coats attacked Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They planted as many as fifty bombs and murdered twelve fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves. In the wake of this tragedy, many people blamed the mass media, speculating that the killers had immersed themselves in the dark lyrics of shock rocker Marilyn Manson and were desensitized to violence by “first-person-shooter” video games such as Doom.

In April 2007, a student massacred thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus before killing himself. Gunman Seung-Hui Cho was mentally disturbed and praised “martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” the infamous Columbine killers. But Cho’s rampage included a twist: During the attack, he sent a package of letters, videos, and photos of himself to NBC News. The images and ramblings of his “multimedia manifesto” became a major part of the news story (as did ethical questions about the news media broadcasting clips of his videos) while the country tried to make sense of the tragedy.

Yet another tragic shooting occurred in 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. A shooter opened fire in the darkened theater, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-eight. The gunman was identified as James Holmes, a twenty-four-year-old wearing a gas mask and trench coat and carrying several semiautomatic firearms. Holmes repeatedly identified himself as “the Joker” to police. Holmes was sentenced to life in prison in 2015, right around the time of another movie theater shooting, this time at a screening of Trainwreck—suggesting these acts might be driven less by the content of films than by their ability to gather together crowds in a public space.

Later in 2015, Vester Lee Flanagan, a former TV news reporter, killed a TV anchor and a photographer and injured their guest during a live interview on location for television station WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia. Flanagan, who had been fired from the same station two years earlier, was mentally troubled, but was able to legally buy guns and ammunition for the attack. He fled the scene of the murders and committed suicide, but not before posting his own video of the shooting on Twitter and Facebook. In a rambling document he sent to ABC News, Flanagan cited as motivating factors the Virginia Tech shooting, the Columbine shooting, and the racially motivated Charleston, South Carolina, shooting in which Dylann Roof killed nine people earlier that year.

Each of these events and recent political battles over the need for gun control laws have renewed long-standing cultural debates over the suggestive power of music, visual imagery, and screen violence. Since the emergence of popular music, movies, television, and video games as influential mass media, the relationship between make-believe stories and real-life imitation has drawn a great deal of attention. Concerns have been raised not only by parents, teachers, and politicians but also by several generations of mass communication researchers.

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AS THESE TRAGIC TALES OF VIOLENCE ILLUSTRATE, many believe that media have a powerful effect on individuals and society. This belief has led media researchers to focus most of their efforts on two types of research: media effects research and cultural studies research.

Media effects research attempts to understand, explain, and predict the effects of mass media on individuals and society. The main goal of this type of research is to uncover whether there is a connection between aggressive behavior and violence in the media, particularly in children and teens. In the late 1960s, government leaders—reacting to the social upheavals of that decade—first set aside $1 million to examine this potential connection. Since that time, thousands of studies have told us what most teachers and parents believe instinctively: Violent scenes on television and in movies stimulate aggressive behavior in children and teens—especially young boys.

The other major area of mass media research is cultural studies. This research approach focuses on how people make meaning, apprehend reality, articulate values, and order experience through their use of cultural symbols. Cultural studies scholars also examine the way status quo groups in society, particularly corporate and political elites, use media to circulate their messages and sustain their interests. This research has attempted to make daily cultural experience the focus of media studies, keying on the subtle intersections among mass communication, history, politics, and economics.

In this chapter, we will:

As you get a sense of media effects and cultural studies research, think of some research questions of your own. Consider your own Internet habits. How do the number of hours you spend online every day, the types of online content you view, and your motivations for where you spend your time online shape your everyday behavior? Also, think about the ways your gender, race, sexuality, or class play into other media you consume—like the movies and television you watch and the music you like. For more questions to help you understand the effects of media in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.