It was no surprise to discover that they have essentially no evidential support. I was surprised, however, to find poorly conceived, scientifically inadequate, biased and sloppy if not actually fraudulent research. Politicians claim that the scientific evidence that media violence is harmful is as strong as the evidence that smoking causes cancer. Huesmann bases his claim for a similarity on the numerical similarity of the correlations. But in fact the similarity stops there, at the trivial level of two similar numbers.
Smoking is an identifiable and quantifiable behavior.
Lung cancer is a discrete biological entity which any trained observer can recognize and which is the outcome of a series of specific biological processes. Media violence is a social construct that depends entirely on what one group or individual or another defines it to be. Huesmann considers Three Stooges comedies to be violent, whereas most of us consider them to be funny. One of the most glaring omissions in so-called media violence studies is athletic events. Football, hockey and other sports fill hours of air and cable time, yet none of the studies clock children's exposure to their real, not mock, violence.