No, the marketing imperative shapes the world that is presented on television, and that shaping begins with infancy. A child today, for the first time in human history, is born into a home in which, as you mentioned earlier, it is no longer the parent who tells the stories, or the school, or the church, or the community. And in many cases around the world, it's not even programming from the native country, but essentially a handful of global conglomerates that basically have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell. That is the great human transformation of the past hundred years. It's pretty well been proven, although we don't read about this much in the newspapers, that violence on television really has an impact, particularly on children.
Violence is always an expression and demonstration of power.
That is the way we set up a power structure. For every ten violent characters on prime time, there are about ten or eleven victims. For every ten women who are written into scripts to exert that kind of power that basically white males in the so-called prime of life get away with, with relative impunity, there are nineteen females who become victimized. For every ten women of color who are written into scripts to show that kind of power, there are twenty-two women of color who become victimized. As we grow up in this culture, unconsciously and unwittingly, we develop a calculus of risk that defines our sense of power, our sense of security.