Television is one the inventions which has had a prodigious effect on humans. If it has helped the housewives to get along with their tedious lives with a tinge of entertainment, then it has equally helped spread of ideas and ideologies among the people who subscribe it; but positing the view that television violence has a negative effect on society is taking things too far.
Let me explain, millions of children have grown up watching violence on tv, but violence in society only stems from those households having problems mainly including drugs and low financial stability. Ok, if violence on tv promotes violence in society, then how come the crime rates in high income neighborhoods are generally lower than low-income neighborhoods despite maybe having a tv in every room.
Television is just like many of technological instruments that can be molded to a user’s proclivities. For example, a person interested in golf would tend to watch golf and similarly a wicked person would tend to dissolve themselves in violence shown on tv, but it was the inherent qualities of a user which made tv bad, not tv which made person violent.
Millions of children grow up playing shooter games on television, but it’s not that these people growing up would take up arms and start shooting people. Like availability of tv per household is higher in developed countries but why is that terrorists are recruited from regions lacking even basic infrastructure. Television has helped millions of people all around the world to enhance their knowledge and to learn new things. Educational channels streamed in far off areas have helped children out of school to learn basics, if we tend to ignore these boons of television and focus on violence, then it is myopic on our part.
Television is just like a tool which helps human for a specific task let’s say entertainment, news and education just like a hammer is used to strike nails, but if you go on a killing spree by striking peoples head with a hammer, you cannot blame the hammer for it. Thus, in the light of above points, it can be reasonably deduced that television is not to be blamed for vices inside people but deranged people who glorify violence on television.