In an absolutely amazing story, Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went through the research notes that anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham took on his interviews with research subjects for Seduction of the Innocent, his book on the social and psychological impacts of comics—and discovered that he was faking the data. As a report on her work explains:

Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History….

As she pored over his files, she began to recognize the case notes of children referred to in “Seduction,” and typing their quotes into her laptop computer. But when she returned to her hotel room and compared her notes to Wertham’s book, she found numerous inconsistencies. “I thought well maybe I’ve missed something, maybe I typed incorrectly,” Tilley said. So she began photocopying portions of Wertham’s files and comparing them closely to his book. “That’s when I realized the extent of the changes.”

For example, in “Seduction,” Wertham links “Batman” comic books to the case of a 13-year-old boy on probation and receiving counseling for sexual abuse of another boy: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. … It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.’ ”

What Tilley found in Wertham’s notes, however, was that the boy preferred “Superman,” “Crime Does Not Pay” and “war comics” over “Batman,” and that he had previously been sexually assaulted by the other boy – all information that Wertham left out.

The whole thing is a wonderful reminder not to trust an argument just because it has an academic imprimatur—or because the people who advance it get an opportunity to present their ideas to Congress. And if our discussion of gun control continues to include calls to investigate a theoretical link between popular culture and gun violence—Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) is the latest legislator to get on that particular bandwagon—Tilley’s findings should be a cautionary tale for the researchers tasked with the study. I’d hope it’s harder to commit academic fraud today than it was in Wertham’s time.

But given that we live in a moment when 67 percent of Republicans think that violent video games present a “bigger safety threat” than guns according to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, the same kind of incentives to find video games guilty exist today that existed when Wertham went after comics. And even if a rigorous study does emerge from our current debate over guns policy, I’d be amazed if it was publicly accepted. The public doesn’t blame comics or video games for crime and violence because they have strong evidence and day-to-day demonstrations of the impact of that media. They blame comics and video games because they have relatively low levels of cultural capital relative to mediums like film and television, and because it’s easier to think about regulating culture than it is to go after other, more systematic elements of American life.

The good folks at GamePolitics report that a planned effort to get Connecticut residents to turn in their violent video games has been cancelled:

Last week SouthingtonSOS, a group comprised of Southington, Connecticut community organizations announced a violent videogame buyback program, where citizens could deposit violent games into what basically amounted to a trash bin for a gift certificate provided by local merchants. Those game discs would be snapped and tossed in the trash…

The idea of the program was to get parents and children to throw away their violent video games – which some in the small Connecticut town felt were a factor in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December. The program had plenty of support locally including the Southington chamber of commerce, the local YMCA, the board of education, fire department, a number of the town’s officials, the United Way and local clergy.

But in the days following the announcement of the program some experts were critical of the idea; the parenting editor at Common Sense Media likened the collection and destruction of video games to censorship, and Texas A&M International University researcher Christopher J. Ferguson wrote the group warning them that their efforts might cause more harm than good. Many editorial writers and advocates saw the buyback program as the equivalent of an old time book burning. With all that pressure, the group decided that they would not host the Buyback program after all this week.

It doesn’t surprise me that someone would propose an event to destroy video games. The idea that violent media is to blame for real-world violence in general or mass shootings in particular crops up after every spree killing, and it’s been helped along in this case by the National Rifle Association, which has throw popular culture into the debate in the hopes that it’ll be distracting chum to piranhas hungry for scapegoats but reluctant to fight difficult battles to make America safer. And there’s always someone willing to burn books, or melt down records, or snap discs in half in response to a slight.

What disappoints me more is the businesses and other organizations who threw in behind the plan. I understand that people want to do something. But there are more substantive, and creative, ways to help. How about offering those gift certificates to the families of Newtown police officers, or offering counseling, or to raise money for counseling, or offer pastoral care to the families of children were, or still are, students at Sandy Hook Elementary? Blaming the media isn’t just a dodge from meaningful policy solutions. In this case, it’s sad to think of businesses and community organizations focusing their efforts on a showy video game buyback plan instead of finding ways to be of direct service to the families and communities who were harmed by actual violence.

I wrote yesterday about how darkly, sickly hilarious it is that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre decided to try to divert calls for gun control by blaming decades-old pop culture ephemera like Mortal Combat and American Psycho for recent mass gun killings. And after I hit publish on that post, the Hollywood Reporter pointed out an even more pointed hypocrisy: the NRA may hope that everyone blames media violence for inspiring killings, rather than guns for being the instruments of them, but it’s had multiple exhibits celebrating famous movie weapons at its National Firearms Museum, and apparently has no immediate plans to take the current one down.

Media Matters for America, jumping on the case, grabbed an amazing video of Phil Schreier, the curator of the NRA Museum, talking about the exhibit, which has since been deleted from the NRA’s YouTube feed:

Notably, he doesn’t exactly draw a distinction between the guns employed by good, law-abiding citizens, and badass, deeply transgressive villains: guns used for mayhem against innocent civilians are apparently just as awesome as guns used by law-abiding citizens in self-defense or officers of the peace in pursuit of criminals. “We have the Joker’s shotgun, the one that Heath Ledger used in The Dark Knight, a role that he won the academy award for,” Schreier says. “And speaking of Academy Awards, we have the silent shotgun that Javier Bardem used in No Country For Old Men.”

Now, maybe the NRA has reversed itself and decided that it no longer wants to be seen expressing enthusiasm for the Joker’s gun and his deployment of it the week before the preliminary hearings in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, who reportedly drew inspiration from Ledger’s depiction of the Joker for his attack on the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Maybe it’s going to pull the exhibit in accordance with its new principals, and stop selling the catalogue of it, Hollywood Guns, for $14.95 in the museum gift shop. Maybe the NRA’s member companies will have a massive change of heart, and stop licensing images of their products for use in films and video games, on the grounds that no one should see a gun being used to commit violence against innocent people or authority figures who are portrayed as duplicitous in a way that’s framed as admirable, lest they be inspired to commit bad acts of their own in the real world.

Or maybe they’ll ultimately conclude that it’s worth more money to them to keep people showing up at the museums to look at outlaws’ weapons, to keep raking in those licensing fees, and to stop talking about how deplorable pop culture violence is. I’d bet on the latter, more because the NRA likes money than it likes a sober, common-sense assessment of risk.

When the Motion Picture Association of America on December 20 came out in support of President Obama’s efforts on gun control in the wake of the Newtown, the organization simultaneously aligned itself with the productive side of a national conversation and set up a strategic trap that the National Rifle Association walked into the very next day. In a shocking and incoherent press conference that attempted to shift the conversation away from regulation of gun and ammunition purchasing and ownership, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed pop culture that was, in some cases, decades old, for America’s mass gun killings.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Combat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” he said. “I mean we have blood-soaked films out there, like ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Natural Born Killers.’ They’re aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”

The absence of any evidence that Adam Lanza, the alleged Sandy Hook shooter, had consumed any of the cultural artifacts LaPierre brought up would have been enough to render LaPierre’s assertions ludicrous and diversionary. And that’s without taking into account in the question of what impact media consumption does and doesn’t have on the general public’s actions and social attitudes, rather than on people who are mentally ill or who might be predisposed to violence, a subject nicely and soberly summed-up by the media scholar Jason Mittell. But there’s a difference between suggesting that it makes more sense to regulate mass culture than to regulate our access to the weapons that make it possible to translate violent plans into mass killings, and talking about what it would take to shift our mass culture away from violence as a major subject and as a primary way of demonstrating competence and heroism. But the people who try to hide behind the former argument are almost uniformly uninterested in the policies and shifts in the market it would take to accomplish the latter without regulation or abridgment of freedom of speech.

1. Increase funding for public broadcasting: If you want to see more non-violent television on the airwaves, it makes more sense to treat it like an emerging product, like solar energy, that needs to be significantly subsidized until it can build the market that allows it to be self-sustaining. I imagine the NRA and other conservatives who spring to blame violent popular culture for American violence would never get behind massively expanding funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that, rather than trying to regulate Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones, is probably the quickest way to make non-violent popular culture more competitive in the overall marketplace. What about funding levels that would allow PBS to start an HBO-like movie channel, buying the rights to buzzy, relevant films like Margin Call and producing features like Too Big To Fail? How about funding that would support the purchase of more British shows like Downton Abbey, letting PBS take on BBC America, or a foreign language network that would broadcast subtitled shows from Israel, like Hatufim, or Scandinavian noir shows that have become part of the competitive advantage for services like Hulu or networks like Link TV? Or simply funding that would let PBS advertise more of its programming more heavily, building the kinds of audiences that networks can with in-company ad slots? This will never, ever happen. But that it won’t shows how unserious conservative media critics are about building credible, mass-market alternatives to successful, and violent, commercial programming.
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This morning, Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced legislation in the Senate “to arrange for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and violent programming on children.” It’s depressing to see lawmakers rushing after diversions in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when the conversations we ought to be having should be about gun control and mental health treatment, among other structural factors. And it’s even worse when you consider that Rockefeller’s wholly redundant bill has hit the floor of Congress before any gun legislation was introduced.

Part of what makes Rockefeller’s request that the National Academy study video game violence so frustrating to watch is that the Academy’s done just this before. The 1999 Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children Protection Act included a provision that had the Secretary of Education contract the Academy to study the origins of school violence, including “the impact of cultural influences and exposure to the media, video games, and the Internet.” Katherine Newman, the Johns Hopkins professor who lead up that team, wrote in Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, her later book on the subject, that “Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams. Bodies litter the floor in many of our most popular films. Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent. Hence, if there is an effect, children are not all equally susceptible to it.” In other words, finding out why a very small number of consumers are overly influenced by popular culture may be more useful than trying to measure the uneven and diffuse influence of movies, television shows, and games.

And that isn’t the only work the National Academy has done on video games and other media. The National Academies Press has published Deadly Lessons, a study of school shootings, that is non-committal on the question of whether there is a causal link between consuming violent media and violent behavior. Academics have presented literature reviews of the work on media’s influence on children and young adults to the National Academies of Science National Research Council Board on Children, Youth and Families. This is not a question the National Academy needs prodding from Sen. Rockefeller to consider, or that’s been ignored by other research organizations.

But it is a question the National Rifle Association and other gun control opponents would love to see energy diverted to. In a Fox News story about the NRA’s much-delayed press conference that suggested the lobby would seek to shift the debate to culture rather than to weapons bans, an anonymous source was quoted as saying: “If we’re going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let’s also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads.” That’s different from the kind of measured research that might debunk a causal link between entertainment and shootings. But it demonstrates how easily this sort of conversation can be employed as camouflage.

I have no objection to the idea that we should take the time to consider issues carefully and to introduce closely tailored legislation that will best address our policy needs. And at least Rockefeller’s bill calls for a study, rather than, say, banning first-person shooter games outright. But if the lawmakers who represent us are going to rush to respond to urgent social problems to score political credit, it would be nice if they prioritized substance instead of distractions.

In the wake of the murder of elementary school students and their teachers, as well as the mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, Hollywood has struggled to demonstrate sensitivity in its programming and premieres. The Weinstein Company cancelled the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s characteristically violent revenge period drama Django Unchained, which ends with a bloody gun battle at a slaveholding plantation. Though its finale depicted an act of terrorism rather than gun violence (though such violence was threatened, but did not emerge), Homeland put up a title card before the episode began that warned that some images in the show might be disturbing in light of the Newtown massacre. And shows from Family Guy to Best Funeral Ever have postponed episodes until later dates. It’s one thing for networks and studios to observe a mourning period. But the more interesting question is whether the massacre will prompt longer-term changes in the kind of material Hollywood considers both marketable and appropriate.

In a series of Tweets, Time television critic James Poniewozik laid out the problem with these short-term measures. “THR: TLC delaying BEST FUNERAL EVER bc of Newtown shootings. Apparently becomes appropriate again Jan 6,” he wrote in a series of messages. “This recurrent thing, postponing shows bc of sensitivities–I get it. But resist the idea that something is ‘inappropriate’ for like 2 weeks…Either it’s inappropriate in general or it’s not.” There’s something sadly perceptive in the cynicism of that proscribed period of sensitivity. Hollywood’s acting on the recognition that after these increasingly-common tragedies, the members of their audience not directly affected by the deaths are hyper-cautious for a brief period, call for changes in all sorts of culture and policy, and then return to their preexisting level of sensitivity and allow those demands for a different path to peter out. The studios that have pulled or labeled programming or cancelled events are acting like savvy marketers, rather than like moral agents.

This is, of course, their prerogative and purpose as large companies. But just as it appears that President Obama and members of Congress are, for the first time in political memory, renewing the push for gun control legislation, I’m wondering whether some networks may decide to change where the line is for what they’re interested in airing.

It’s been a period of intense cruelty to children on television. On Sons of Anarchy, the children of the main character, Jax Teller, have been kidnapped and in car accidents. This season of Breaking Bad reached a turning point when Todd, a newcomer to the meth cooking operation run by Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, shot a young boy who happened upon the men in the aftermath of a train robbery, though there was little evidence that the child understood what little he had witnessed. When children aren’t the victims of extreme violence, they are often being enlisted in those acts themselves. On Game of Thrones, while Sansa Stark is beaten by grown men and threatened with sexual assault, her sister Arya, on the run and disguised as a boy, kills another child to escape from King’s Landing, and must fight in battle to protect herself. And this season on The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes both witnessed his mother’s own impromptu caesarean section and then killed her to prevent her from turning into a zombie.
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After Adam Lanza shot twenty young children and six of the teachers and administrators who helped educate them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, the massacre renewed the long-dormant national debate about gun control, and sparked a complementary—and in some cases diversionary—discussion about mental health funding and treatment. But it’s also revived another old conversation, about whether video games are too violent, and whether they play a role in encouraging, desensitizing, and even preparing mass killers for their rampages.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the outgoing independent from Connecticut who has long crusaded against video game manufacturers, said in his appearance on Fox News Sunday that “The violence in the entertainment culture—particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera —does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent…Doesn’t make everybody more violent, but it’s a causative factor in some cases.” Obama senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted “”In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot ‘em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

As Annalee Newitz reminds us in a valuable post at io9, there is no conclusive evidence that consuming violent games, movies, or comics leads to violent behavior in the real world. And at the Washington Post, Max Fischer ran the numbers on video game popularity in countries with much lower rates of gun violence, and found no correlation between game play and real-world violence. And there’s something deeply sophistic, in the absence of that evidence, about pivoting away from questions of effective gun control to proposals for video game regulation or condemnation. At least discussion of the mental health care system is part of a reasonable tapestry of efforts, including gun control, that we ought to be considering, if not a substitute for conversations about magazine capacities and the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Blaming video games or any other kind of violent media for causing violence in the real world is a dodge from policy solutions. And it’s a dodge from the conversation we actually need to have about the state of our popular culture, and the profound fears about justice, disempowerment, and the state of civil society that are reflected in it. Video games are easy to target. The things that actually, truly frighten us are much harder.

One of the things I’ve been turning over in my mind in recent weeks is why the renaissance in our television is so specifically concerned with, as NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, “avoiding being violently killed” to the exclusion of other concerns like finding a satisfying place in the adult world, a loving, complimentary partner, doing good, honorable work, or being a good citizen in difficult circumstances. But as much as I feel somewhat burned out by the gouts of violence on my television, it’s true that questions about deploying violence, avoiding it, and its moral and immoral applications, permeate our political culture and lived experience today.

If you’re a woman in the United States, you’re taught from a young age that you have to be careful to avoid having sexual violence visited upon you. I cannot imagine being African-American and considering how to speak to my child about the possibility that his or her interactions with law enforcement may become deadly, or that in some areas of the country, people may feel entitled to shoot them dead on slight, and imagined, provocation. There are people in this country for whom the best way to pay for college is to enlist to be sent to a protracted war that carries with it a considerable risk that they will return maimed or brain injured. We are waging a war from the skies in which our political leadership appears to accept the deaths of children as a reasonable level of collateral damage, and where 17 percent of the pilots who actually have to carry out our drone strikes are considered “clinically distressed” by their work. As many commentators have usefully pointed out, the massacre in Newtown is deeply disturbing in part because the community was not afflicted by a constant blight of gun violence like the one that spread like rot over Chicago this summer. We’ve lived through a political election in which obvious references to the lynching of the first black president were excused away as jokes.
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