Most people don't know what they know about violence from personal experience. Most people s perceptions about a supposed increase in youth and school violence are skewed by the mass media s sensationalistic attitudes in presenting incidents such as Columbine and Paducah. But Montgomery said this pattern of over-representing certain acts, such as the school shooting in Littleton, Colo., is consistent with other patterns in news of crime and violence. Many people would have us believe that we are becoming an ever more violent society, but these opinions are often just that. They are not supported by any hard facts or data.
Children form basic values at a very young age based primarily on family influence.
If juvenile crime and violence were a function of watching television, then incidents of violence and crime would be more evenly distributed across demographic and geographic boundaries according to the availability of television. As a matter of fact, the rates vary greatly from community to community, class to class. For the media, being more responsible means taking care with both depictions of violence and discussions of violence as a social problem. For the pundits, being responsible means acknowledging that blaming the media can be a dangerous game as well as a zero-sum game. He shows through serious social studies that not only is youth violence not increasing, it is in fact, on the decline.