Street Violence and the Media Essay example -- Argumentative Persuasiv

Violence Imitates the Media    In this essay we explore the increasingly apparent connection between the violence brutalizing teachers and kids in our schools, and the violence which the media regularly serves us through films, TV shows, shock jocks, and other supposedly innocuous outlets. Is it any wonder that reporters and journalists are picking up the John Paul II phrase "culture of death" to refer to America's culture? In the anxious hours following the Columbine High School shootings, America's television screens repeatedly showed a slow-motion film clip in which a black-clad, shotgun-toting boy bursts into a classroom and fills his fellow students full of buckshot. The gunman was teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of Titanic, and the clip came not from a surveillance camera but from Scott Kalvert's The Basketball Diaries, the 1995 movie said to have been a favorite of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the black-clad, shotgun-toting boys who strolled into their school one bright April morning and murdered a teacher, twelve of their classmates, and themselves, leaving behind 51 homemade bombs for the police to defuse. (Basketball) Though The Basketball Diaries was promptly pulled from video stores by the studio that released it, the long-simmering debate over graphic portrayals of violence in the media had long since boiled over. Not that anything new was said-the only difference was the glib immediacy conferred by the shedding of blood. The argument itself remains as agonizingly familiar as a family quarrel: Did movies and television make us what we are today, or do they merely show us what we have become? In the case of The Basketball Diaries, the thing speaks for itself. To watch that horrific clip is to... ...philosophically trained pope is not given to shallow sound bites, and when he speaks of the culture of death, he has in mind a deep-seated, collective nihilism of which illegal drugs, idiot shock jocks, and mindlessly violent movies are mere symptoms. How to break its stranglehold? We all know the answer, but rarely is the question put so starkly to any of us as it was to 17-year-old Cassie Bernall. Trapped at gunpoint in the library of Columbine High School, she was asked by one of her attackers whether she believed in God. "Yes, I believe in God," she replied, and then he shot her dead. It is hard to imagine a more dramatic scene-and harder still to imagine that anyone in Hollywood, least of all Doug Liman, would dare to put it into a movie. Sources Consulted: The Basketball Diaries  Ã‚  Ã‚   http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1995/04/975715.html