Newtown shooting is business unusual in Hollywood

The recent terrifying event in Newtown, United States where a gun man killed 27 people among them 20 children has raised questions on gun control laws where the President has called for change. Apart from that, the incident has also subtly introduced debates about television violence where interestingly, following the shooting, Hollywood, the greatest entertainment machine in the world, has employed self-censorship (business unusual) of violent content fearing that it could be insensitive with the news still fresh in the minds of audiences.

Cable networks like HBO, TLC and NBC either postponed or cancelled airing programmes with violent content. The Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York even canceled the screening of Tom Cruise's violent new movie, “Jack Reacher”. The argument being that, in the wake of national tragedies, entertainment companies in the US ritualistically assess the content of their programming to ensure it is not offensive.

However, the Newtown incident is a new challenge to media scholarship in the United States which dates back to the early theories of media effects that centered on whether or not, in deed, television causes violence. The latter position was dismissed in audience research giving too much credit to the intelligence of the audience as opposed to the power of media content to influence audiences. Media scholars must now go back to the theoretical drawing board to methodologically investigate various hypotheses regarding the validity of claims held about the relationship between television and violence in the society. 

Luckily, with the advent of new media, there are new ways of investigating media, particularly television, content for violence which, traditionally, has been centered on audiences, the technology itself and content. For example, the three dimensions in new media such as interactivity, demassification and asynchroneity can be used by scholars to follow-up individual audiences as opposed to mass audiences (demassification) to examine how they interact with technology such as cable networks and utilize programming (asynchroneity) and the potential effects of such habits. It will be interesting to see whether the ‘time worn’ bullet theory will be given a new lease of life in the new hypotheses that will emerge and possibly new media theories in the wake of the Newtown event.

For now, Hollywood’s response to the shooting largely supports the premise that television does influence the audience and its content can sometimes be offensive. Violent programming has a significant effect on the audiences and may be the sources of societal violence as evidenced in the July 20 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting in Colorado US during a mid-night screening of the movie “The Dark  Night Rises”. Even though the suspect was being examined for mental illness, he confessed to have wanted to kill people and law enforcers found a Batman mask in his apartment. Batman is a fictional comic book and 1986 character of the television series “The Dark Nights Returns”.