Dexter, Decency and DVRs

what kills me is that PTC misses the whole point of Dexter. There are tons of shows and movies that celebrate vigilantism -- especially vigilantism performed under a cover of "law enforcement." Dexter presents the vigilantism as an illness -- forcing the audience to question its own positive feelings toward vigilantism. In that sense, its probably the 'healthiest" crime based show on television -- far healthier than "Monk", which literally celebrates the title character's mental illness by making it both amusing and the reason why he can "get the bad guy."

I couldn't agree with you more about the PTC's FCC efforts. My feeling is: You opted to have children, and now you're responsible for monitoring their viewing if you're worried about it. It's called the V-chip--use it. My options should not suffer because you have children.

Of course, I'm also bothered by the fact that these people are often Republicans (although I think Winter has a Democratic background). They're all for small government, minimal to no regulation, and letting market forces work their magic until they want something themselves. Then they have no problem whining to government for intervention to promote their priorities. The hypocrisy kills me.

Bemused: Winter is (or was) a Democrat, I'm pretty certain. As I've written often, decency isn't really a left-right issue; it's libertarian-authoritarian, or something like that. The decency crusade is where the paternalistic left meets the paternalistic right.

I'm a little disturbed by the reasoning here. I've seen every episode of Dexter from both seasons on Showtime. I know lots of other people who have, too, and not one of them thinks it belongs on broadcast TV. And truthfully, it's not because we want to protect our own kids from seeing what's on the show. For me, it's more about insulating other kids from it, the ones who don't have parents who are paying attention, and the ones who are maybe a little troubled, alienated, and struggling with their impulses. Kind of like the young Dexter portrayed in the series.

What the young Dexter is taught in the series is wrong, by any moral compass. The justification of murder, the rationalizing of acting on violent impulses, these things are surely as toxic to our public health and safety as second hand smoke at the beach. I can control what my own kid watches. What I can't control is what the budding sociopath who sits next to her in school watches. That's why TV is supposed to be regulated in the public interest. Because its potentially dangerous influence is well-proven, and because everyone is entitled to protection from that.

CBS rates Dexter TV-14. There's no way any 14 year old should be watching that show unsupervised, and no amount of editing is going to make it NOT feed the pathology of kids on the edge who are exposed to it. After Columbine, Les Moonves said "Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with this is an idiot." Don't you think he had a point?

@Parent: I don't deny you have a point regarding CBS's rating of Dexter. But I, for one, just don't want the FCC/government setting the moral compass. Perhaps we can agree on the morality issue here, but it's a slippery slope and I don't want the government in the business of legislating, regulating or enforcing morals--mine or yours.

@Parent: "CBS rates Dexter TV-14. There's no way any 14 year old should be watching that show unsupervised, and no amount of editing is going to make it NOT feed the pathology of kids on the edge who are exposed to it. After Columbine, Les Moonves said "Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with this is an idiot." Don't you think he had a point?"

The Parents Television Council cited precisely this quote in its press release about Dexter.

In a cover story I wrote about the decency wars a few years ago, I wrote about the "secondhand smoke" line of argument about TV content: basically, ideas affect society, therefore, we must be able to prevent you from exposing your children to ideas that we--whoever "we" is--believe to be dangerous to society as whole. In other words, it is not enough that I make the right decision as a parent. I must also prevent you from making the WRONG decision as a parent.

While I sympathize with the argument, being a parent myself, honestly, I believe this line of reasoning is the most dangerous of all to civil liberties. It assumes that (1) it is possible to determine what content affects behavior and how and (2) that it is desirable to restrict certain kinds of content, as a kind of social engineering to produce the kind of society "we" all want.

Art affects people. TV does, music does, games do, sports do, books do. To conclude from that that anyone can determine how a specific piece of content will produce specific behaviors in people is a leap too far. And if it were possible to do so, that would be even more disturbing. War kills more people than serial killers. I demand we restrict those works I find to promote war! Greed is destroying our society--I demand that TV that children might watch not promote greed! Etc.

To get back to the Moonves quote, anybody who thinks the media had NOTHING to do with Columbine is an idiot, only in the sense that the media have something to do with everything. But anybody who claims know specifically what media had specifically what effect in Columbine is--well, if not an idiot, then wrong or disingenuous.

...but, just to make clear, I have no objection to people protesting Dexter, boycotting advertisers, etc. -- I draw the line at government intervention, which the PTC has not called for (in this case).

I also personally draw the line at deputizing myself to make blanket decisions for other parents about what is appropriate for their children, of whatever age.

It's not about sheltering people from ideas, or presuming on the rights of other parents, unless you think the same about prohibiting alcohol or tobacco sales to kids. In which case, you're WAY off the common sense charts. The fact that violent TV programming makes the world less safe is well established. And the way Dexter goes about it is well established as the WORST. Consider this report, for example:

After reviewing 41 studies on media violence conducted since 1963, L. Rowell Huesmann, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, said the evidence is compelling: "Media violence increases the risk significantly that the viewer or game player will behave more violently both in the short and long run."
Moreover, citing his own earlier work, he said the public health threat from media violence was nearly as important as the threat posed by cigarette smoking, and more of a threat than sexually transmitted HIV, childhood lead exposure, or exposure to asbestos.
Dr. Huesmann's review appeared in a special supplement to the Journal of Adolescent Health summarizing an expert meeting convened in September 2006 by the CDC.
"It is now not just kids in bad neighborhoods or with 'bad' friends who are likely to be exposed to bad things when they go out on the street," he said. "A 'virtual' bad street is easily available to most youth now."
The "virtual bad street" is media portrayals of violence and is particularly troublesome when it is shown as justified or unpunished, he said.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/tb/7531

@Parent:

I do in fact believe that in a free society the bar for regulating expression--if it can ever be cleared at all--should be higher than that for regulating tobacco, foodstuffs or asbestos.

@ Parent: While there is undeniably some back and forth influence, I remain highly skeptical of studies that claim to have quantified the complex interplay between media and culture. At least since the days of cowboy and indian radio shows and dime-store novels, people have tried to make the argument that violent media makes society (and specifically kids) violent. It is my impression that youth crime rates have high correlations with economic circumstances, and we should also be taking a closer look at all the medicines, food additives, junk food, meat growth hormones, environmental toxins, etc that are being pumped into kids. Bottom line, though, is that Violence is part of human nature, and human societies will always have to deal with that challenge.

Sheltering kids from violence (or other variations of moral ambiguity) isn't going to help kids learn to make informed, responsible decisions any more than uncritical overexposure would. Either way, the issue boils down to parenting, and whether parents engage their kids in critical dialogue on these important issues. My little sister and I were exposed to WAY more than most other kids we knew in terms of movies/media when we were growing up. My dad tried to expose us to whatever he could find, and then we'd talk about it and try to make sense of it. I'm not saying that's what everyone should do, just that parents have a really important job to do, figuring out how to raise kids to be decent, responsible people in an imperfect world.

You raise the Boy Next Door hypothesis, of the potential homicidal maniac lurking across the fence, a ticking time bomb waiting for the right trigger. I don't doubt that there are folks out there that fit that description, it freaks me out to think about them too. But there are a lot of factors that influence the path of a person's mental illness - body chemistry, pharmachology, interpersonal dymanics, environmental factors, etc. I would think that if they were headed in a destructive direction, that the role of media would be a nonissue (if it wasn't the movies or video games, it would be something else that provided a trigger or focus point). This whole issue really gets to me, because I don't want society or governments making decisions based on fear. Because I don't want to hand over my rights because someone says I'll be safer without them. As far as government regulation goes, ideas should definitely be more strongly protected from regulation than products like asbestos or tobacco. Those products pose a legitimate public safety hazard to the health of people who use them, and the dangers associated with those products are physical and reasonably quantifiable. Ideas are a completely different matter. The government has little-to-no business (I tend to think none) deciding what ideas are "dangerous", and what ideas people need to be "protected" from so that society will be "better." I don't think that we should let the government make these kinds of judgment calls; maybe it would make things easier for busy parents, but it would set a really scary precedent that would just make it easier for the government to do more stuff like that in the future, in a wider variety of contexts.

Media violence researcher Rowell Huesmann has said: "Serious aggressive behavior only occurs when there is a convergence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors such as neurophysiological abnormalities, poor child rearing, socioeconomic deprivation, poor peer relations, attitudes and beliefs supporting aggression, drug and alcohol abuse, frustration and provocation, and other factors" (Huesmann, 1998; Huesmann & Taylor, 2002; http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/ctvout.2001.ver12_pdf.pdf).

Huesmann and another colleague have also written: "Nowhere have we ever indicated that media violence is the only or even a major cause of violence among youth. All indications from the meta-analyses mentioned above are that television can account for 10% of youth violence. This means that 90% is caused by other factors." [http://www.abffe.com/mythresponse.htm]

So why not put equal or greater energy into combating these other factors, rather than focusing on constitutionally protected expression?