The toxicity of television

The Times featured a typically forthright piece from philosopher Roger Scruton last month, in the wake of an Australian report recommending that children be banned from watching television until they are two years old "because it can stunt their language development and shorten their attention span." Scruton applauds the recommendation, but argues that it doesn't go far enough. "As a threat to the nation’s health, [television] stands far higher than alcohol, drugs or tobacco," he argues, "and the worry is that it may be too late to do anything about it, since the addiction is all but universal." Scruton concedes that "there are TV classics, and forms of innocent entertainment ideally suited to the screen" as well as educational programmes of value—but notes that this "is not how television is used." People cannot, in other words, be trusted with so powerful a medium. It is not used responsibly, sensibly or moderately, and so it does great harm.

I'd love to be able to retort that there are still plenty of good things on television, and that it's all about how people use the technology at their disposal. Scruton, however, is writing about what people actually do. And here the evidence seems hard to ignore, especially when it comes to younger children, for whom the "there's always the off switch" argument doesn't apply. I usually feel pretty robust about our ability to endure—and even extract considerable value from—so-called cultural dross; and the description of television as an addiction does seem to me worryingly loose, in comparison both to behavioural problems like excessive gambling and physical dependencies like drug addiction. This month, though, I'm at a low ebb so far as television is concerned, and this is partly because I've recently reviewed Superfreakonomics for our current issue.

Plenty has been said about the Superfreakonomics take on climate change, but the data I found most amazing within it seems to have attracted very little comment thus far. That data is the authors' investigation of the effects of television on crime rates in America (read an excerpt here). Television was first introduced across the US during the 1950s and 1960s, according to a more-or-less arbitrary schedule, unrelated to wealth or any other single factor: some areas got it, and some didn't, dependant on little more than the vagary of local geography and antenna reach. The authors thus compare children born in the same city who did or didn't have access to TV in their early years to assess what kind of influence it may have had.

The cut-off between the age groups that grew up with and without TV in their early years varies widely even across individual cities, which makes their conclusion all the more startling. For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in their first 15 years, the authors found a 4 per cent increase in the number of property-crime arrests in later life and a 2 percent increase in violent crime arrests. According to their analysis, the overall impact of TV on crime in the 1960s was an increase of 50 percent in property and 25 percent in violent crimes.

They don't offer any explanation for the causes underpinning this data, and my immediate reaction was that there must be a hidden variable. But I'm stumped as to what that variable might be. Can it really be that television sets—showing nothing remotely violent or offensive by today's standards, and offering only a few hours of programmes a day (and those largely watched by families en masse in the living room)—damaged society so fast and so deeply? I suspect not, partly because in the current era of ubiquitous screen-based media violent crime has now been in steady decline for more than a decade. But I remain uneasy. Forget mobile phones, radios, records and telephones: domestic electronic screens represent perhaps the biggest mass social change in history, and the weighing of their effects is an ongoing task that, it seems, has some frightening lessons to teach.