Whenever someone says something about how “You can’t [activity] safely these days anymore.”, they get the old :dubious: look. I don’t think the world is that different today than it was ‘back then’. Children aren’t being abducted, girls aren’t getting raped, and schools aren’t getting shot up any more than decades ago.
But when someone that agrees with me states this, they seem to always tag it with something like “even though [media] makes it look that way”. Now I’m thinking: Should that comment get the :dubious: too?
Does the media really make it look worse than before or are people wrong about that too?
Violent crime is vastly reduced from where it was in the 1970’s, people live longer, they’re much less likely to die of cancer, etc. Really the only major indicator of American quality of life that I know of that has gotten worse is obesity over the past few decades and real wages for median and lower earners over the past decade or so. So, to the extent that people think they might be worse off when they’re probably better off than any prior time in history, then yeah, the media probably makes it seem worse.
The media causes events to be nationwide or international news more so than before. As a result people hear about all these abductions, rapes, etc. and are scared by them without thinking about the actual likelihood of it happening to them.
There’s another aspect to “You can’t X safely these days anymore.” When I was a kid, if little Billy broke his arm playing tag then Mommy took him to Emergency and got a cast put on, and that was that. Today Mommy sues the parents of the kids Billy played tag with, the school whose playground the game was played on, the city the school is in, etc. etc. etc. So, “You can’t X safely these days anymore” because you may get sued for doing X.
There is far more media than there was 20-30 years ago. 20 years ago there were no 24 hour news channels. Now there is CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CSPAN and others I can’t recall off the top of my head. You also have the Internet where anyone, no matter how uninformed, can jump online and post their opinion on any number of subjects they half understand and they will likely find a chorus of like-minded individuals to reinforce their beliefs.
The “safety” thing isn’t all about the kids being in danger, IMHO, it’s about the parents being ridiculed for putting a kid in any situation where something bad could happen.
When I was a kid (hee hee!) parents did all kinds of things with their children that they would be criticised for today. Teaching kids gun handling, leaving them out in the car while they went into a store, not even knowing where they were when they went out into the neighborhood to play, etc. I remember many times my mom basically said, “Get out. Go play.”
Parents are somehow expected to be totally on top of what’s going on with their kids. Except when their kids shoot up a school – somehow that’s different.
The news media are a big part of the fear mentality, IMO, especially television. Flashing police lights make for flashy news. If it bleeds, it leads. When the teasers for the newscast come on, often as not you’l hear “Find out how your kids may be in danger.”
In the Indianapolis metropolitan area, the tendency is biggest on the local Fox affiliate.
Real wages for median and lower earners never got worse, they just stagnated for a few years. But lately they’ve gotten better. And obesity is a sign that food is a lot cheaper. I always get a kick out of it when someone complains about how poor people are starving. It’s a quick clue that the conversation is a waste of time.
Ok, so the media trumps up violent/scary stories. But that’s only half the question. The other half is do they do it more than they did before? Adjusted for the increase in media, of course.
I agree with part of this, but, trust me: Mommy didn’t sue the playground.
Mommy’s insurance company paid to get Johnny’s arm fixed and wants their money back, so they sue the owner of the playground to get it. It’s a subject on which I’m perennial torn.
On the one hand, my elementary school’s playground is no longer made up of tar and steel (and, really, I mean, sheeeit - whoEVER thought that tar and steel was good in combination with 8 year old collarbones?) . On the other hand, it made people think things like “Little Johnny’s gonna get hurt!”, which isn’t always necessarily a good thing. On the third hand, if Little Johnny knocks out his two front teeth on the steel teeter-totter on the tar playground, maybe he’ll think twice before he does something that’ll put the front end of his car into a tree. But that 3rd hand argument didn’t stop James Dean from offing himself, did it.
Anyone have any stats regarding accidental childhood deaths/injuries through the decades?
I’d have to say that the way news was covered in the past is a lot different than it is today. There was more emphasis on hard news and public affairs and less on “news you can use”-type feature stories. There would still be stories about tragedies, but the emphasis was still on the facts and objectivity, which I think helped to make the events seem more rare, especially since there wasn’t wall-to-wall coverage like there is today. The story would be run, and that would be that.
The 24-hour nature of cable news and the rise of the celebrity “journalists” like Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren means that some stories get much more coverage than they would otherwise deserve. They’re free to cover what interests them, and people pay attention to them because they’re “experts.” And because they’re “experts” and not journalists, they’re not bound by the same rules of objectivity and journalistic ethics that reporters are. So what the viewer gets is a skewed worldview based more on the host’s (and network’s) self-interest and biases than anything rooted in reality.
Of course, this has been studied in academia, and there’s even a term for it: mean world syndrome. The late George Gerbner of the University of Pennsylvania studied the phenomenon and named it.
(The above was taken from Gerbner (1994), “Reclaiming Our Cultural Mythology” available here.)
I posted this in ivylass’s thread earlier today, but I can’t recommend Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear enough. He cuts through a lot of this, and it’s a great and interesting read.
I had to do a research project about hospitals prior to 1900 and I did a lot of research in old newspapers and one thing that surpised me was how much violence there was.
While looking up hospitals of course I had to read all the articles and naturally searching for the hospital names brought up old newspaper articles about violence, because that is where the victims go.
In one example a bunch of teens got drunk and pushed five people out of windows. Another example was 10 teens killing five people on a drunk spree. This was prior to 1900.
So I think the violence was always there. The big difference was that you couldn’t do as much damage.
For example in the old days you may have hated the world but even if you had a gun it shot only one bullet at a time. So in addition to being mad you had to know HOW to AIM a gun. Because if you got mad, fired a shot and missed, the mob would decend upon you and lynch you.
Now you can get an automatic weapon and fire randomly and kill many people without even aiming. So I think it’s not so much that violence is new, from reading the papers the drunken brawls, child abuse and drug abuse were always around. It’s just the result of the violence can cause more damage with modern weapons.
hotcoldhot, prior to 1900, so-called “yellow journalism” was pretty common, if not the norm, and newspapers took definite sides. I bet that if you go back and look at the original stories, you’ll find some common characteristic of each of the people arrested for drunkenness, and if you look further, you may find that the newspaper in question had some bias against that group.
Not long ago, I sat in on a meeting where a candidate presented his research on the depiction of Chinese railroad workers in Northern California in contemporary newspapers. He found that the Chinese were more likely to be portrayed in a more negative light than the white workers who had committed the same crimes.
Your point that more damage can be done with less skill is missing the boat entirely, but it raises another question. Are people more likely to commit such a spree murder for the attention they know they’ll get, or is the attention secondary to some other reason to commit the crime? There are arguments for and against both possibilities.
I think the competition in news is part of the problem. Back when the US had 3 TV networks, the AP, and UPI, if a story didn’t get covered, for whatever reason, no one knew about it. Now, no news source can afford to leave any exciting news out no matter how unnewsworthy. Back in the 60’s, if there was a school shooting, the national media may have just decided it wasn’t a big enough story and that was the end of it as news. Now, that can’t happen-too much competition.
The world is a safer place now. Unfortunately no one knows this. Therefore if my kids go to the playground by themselves, they’ll be the only kids there by themselves: which makes me worry.
I can’t really get behind this idea. There have been only a handful of murders committed with an automatic weapon (like probably less than 5) since their regulation in 1934. Furthermore, semi-automatic weapons have been around forever. Browning made a semi-automatic shotgun in 1900. The technology hasn’t really changed since. In fact, Browning made the same gun until the late 1990s. A very popular semi-automatic pistol today was designed 97 years ago. Newer pistols (light Glocks) might be lighter and/or more durable, but it’s the same thing your great grandfather might have robbed a liquor store with. And. of course the oft vilified AK-47 was designed over 60 years ago. And anyone who thinks you can kill many people without aiming must have a mini-gun or not much experience with firearms.
Now one thing that would interest me would be the real price of gun ownership back in the day. The Colt 1911 was probably a pretty fancy item when it came out. Guns may be getting cheaper, but the idea that killing spree power has increased is nonsense.
Charles Whitman shot and killed 14 people and wounded over 30 more with hunting rifles. Granted, he had been a Marine and presumably had had marksmanship training, but still. That kind of shooting takes skill.
Conversely, George “The Mad Bomber” Metesky set explosive devices all over New York City and wounded 15 people, but didn’t kill anyone.
The relatively high victim count in modern shootings may be a function of opportunity than of skill or type of weapon used; it’s easier to kill a lot of people if they’re in one place.
But surely one is a direct consequence of the other. Currently in Kenya people are going on killing sprees with machetes and bows & arrows, because they are poor. If they were wealthy enough to afford some proper killing implements (such as pistols, shotguns or whatever) then their spree power would improve markedly. Heck, access to a Buick gives even frail senior citizens the ability to mow down a dozen people. Try doing that with a walking stick.