Violence and the Media

James Hamilton, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Duke University
DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism
November 17, 1997


	I want to deal with media violence and then I hope to have a dialogue with you all 
because I have found in the past that sometimes journalists have a different reaction to 
violence in the media than readers or consumers. So I would like to hear your responses 
to my talk on this. 

	My Ph.D. is in economics, and for about five years I did research on pollution-- 
particularly about how companies reacted to information about the amount of toxic 
pollution they generate. About five years ago in Congress, there was a bill that would 
have required the Federal Communications Commission to compile a list of what 
programs are violent on television and what advertisers are supporting those programs. 
As I started to think about that legislation, I began to view TV violence as a problem of 
pollution. Economists would view both television violence and pollution as really the 
same phenomenon. In both cases you have private decision makers, people within firms, 
making decisions that don’t fully take into account the negative impact on society of their 
products. 

So, for instance, if you are looking at toxic air pollution, you might have a decision 
maker making decisions about whether to install a scrubber on an air emission facility. 
And he or she might not take into account the health damage generated by the toxic 
pollution unless they are led to that through some sort of liability system or through some 
government regulation. You can have the same analysis about people’s decisions to 
program violent television or to sponsor violent television, because under the current set 
of property rights that we have in the United States, people who sponsor or program 
violent television don’t take into account the full negative impact of their programs on 
society. 

Now, the hidden assumption in there is that violence on TV is harmful, that violence 
on TV creates violence in society. If you step back and say, “Why is TV violence a 
public policy issue?”, I think that there are really two responses to that question, one of 
which is answered by the research on “does violence on television cause violence in 
society?” And the second answer relates to the fact that politicians are reelection-oriented 
and TV violence is a helpful issue for reaching certain voters. I will talk a little bit about 
both of those questions. 

	If you look at the research literature on television violence, there are really three 
negative effects that have been identified. One is the question of whether consuming 
violence leads you to be more aggressive or leads you to commit crimes down the road. 
So the first negative effect you would be worried about would be aggression or 
commission of crime. The second one would be desensitization. Does viewing violence 
on television make you less sensitive to violence? And the third negative impact is what 
is sometimes called the “mean world phenomenon.” This is most often associated with 
the consumption of news programming, and the notion here is that the more violence you 
see in news programming, the more likely you may be to view the world as a mean place, 
to have personal fears for your safety, to take action such as locking your door or buying 
additional locks for your home. The communication researchers have called that the 
“mean world syndrome.” 

	Now, if you step back and ask, “What does the research have to say about each of 
these three effects: aggression, desensitization, or the ‘mean world syndrome’?,” I think 
that you can make the following statement: Children who consume violent television 
programming show short-term increases in aggressive behavior in the lab. That is 
something which you can definitely prove--that if you show two sets of children different 
types of television programming, one which is violent and the other which is not violent, 
the children who have been exposed to the violent television programming are more 
likely to push and hit each other. In research after the experiment they are more likely to 
behave violently towards dolls in the experimental lab. So that’s how you can measure 
violence in a lab. 

Violence in a lab is not why we care about TV violence as a public policy issue, so 
you might say, “What else can the research show you?” Research also shows that, or, I 
should say, suggests that, in the long run, exposure to violence teaches children scripts of 
behavior which can lead them to be more violent as they grow older. The experiment that 
I am thinking of here is where researchers went to a part of New York where there’s not a 
whole lot of social mobility (upstate New York) and they looked at a set of children when 
they were eight, when they were eighteen, and when they were thirty. They interviewed 
the students, they interviewed the teachers, they interviewed the parents about what types 
of programs the children liked to watch, whether they were violent or not, and got the 
children’s assessment of who was violent in their class. You get children and you ask 
them questions like “Who punches?, Who hits?, Who acts aggressively in line?”-- things 
like that. What the researchers found was that what people were watching when they 
were eighteen had no effect, no predictive effect, on how violent they were at eighteen or 
thirty. It was what they were watching at eight that predicted their behavior later in life. 
This is consistent with the notion that children learn scripts of behavior when they are 
young, and are less and less susceptible to media messages about violence as they grow 
older. 

	There is always the nagging question of causation: it’s also possible that you may 
have [innately] aggressive children who behave aggressively and who like aggressive 
entertainment. So, if you don’t control for innate aggression, you may be seeing a 
correlation but you may not be able to prove causation. And that is always the problem 
with these types of field surveys. How well did the researchers control for the innate 
level of aggression of the children? It is very difficult. One thing they did try to do in the 
study that I just mentioned, was try to control for the type of family background, which is 
one of the other factors often associated with aggressive behavior. 

	Another area of research--which to me is another part of the picture--is, “What 
happens when you introduce television to an area which has not had TV before?” There 
are two different places to look at this. One is South Africa. South Africa was an 
interesting experiment. For political reasons, over-the-air free broadcast TV was not 
introduced in South Africa until the early 1970s. What researchers had found in America 
and in Canada was that when TV was introduced in those places, you had about an eight- 
to ten-year lag, and then an increase in the murder rate, which would be consistent with 
children learning scripts of behavior and being influenced by TV, and then having the 
results of that. When TV was introduced in South Africa, the researchers said, “We have 
an experiment here. What’s going to happen eight to ten years down the road to, in 
particular, the white murder rate?” They looked at the white murder rate because they 
were trying to extract away from political violence and the violence of the government 
against the populace. So they found that eight to ten years after the introduction of TV in 
South Africa, you saw the same jump that you had seen in Canada and the United States 
in the murder rate. Again this was consistent with children learning scripts and then 
acting out on them later. 

	Another example is a city in Canada that, because it was in a deep ravine, wasn’t 
able to get TV for a long time. They finally put an antenna up at the top of the ravine and 
so they could get TV. The researchers went there. They monitored what happened to the 
children, and within one to two years they saw children behaving much more 
aggressively after they had been exposed to television. 

	So, does TV cause aggressive behavior? I think that you can make a strong 
argument that it causes short-term increases in aggressive behavior among children in the 
lab. That’s what we can measure, so you can definitely make that statement. All of the 
other types of research could always be subject to what researchers call “omitted variable 
bias,” which means, basically, “Have you controlled for everything that you’d like to 
control for when you are making your statements?” The laboratory evidence of short-
term increase in aggression among children is convincing to me. When I add it up with 
the South African evidence, when I add it up to what happens when television was 
introduced in the Canadian town, and when I look at the other types of research dealing 
with adolescents and adults, to me it indicates that we know the direction but we don’t 
really know the magnitude of this effect. I believe that TV does cause violence in society. 
There have been about 400 studies that actually used human data [that show this]. . . . 
And, most people read that as saying that there is some causation. But the whole problem 
here is, what’s the magnitude?

	The second type of research revolves around desensitization. And here the main 
thing to remember is that the context of violence really matters a lot. Recently the Cable 
Television Association and the broadcasters funded competing studies on “How would 
you define or measure television violence?” The cable study did something pretty 
interesting. They looked at their research and they found that if you go into the 
laboratory, what you would find is that the way a violent act is described has an impact 
on whether children imitate it, or how aggressive children are after they consume it. And 
what they found is that acts which go unpunished, acts which are justified, and acts 
which do not show pain or suffering are more likely to be imitated, along with acts 
committed by attractive perpetrators. So it is the context of the violence that matters. 

One thing that may be depressing for some of you in TV news is they found that 
children are more likely to imitate realistic violence. I thought this was a pretty 
interesting study. They took a set of fifth and sixth graders in America and they showed 
them a fight scene. Half of the students saw it as part of a movie and half of the students 
saw the same fight scene as part of the local news. Then they monitored how the children 
behaved afterwards in recess and they found that the students who had seen the fight 
scene as part of the local news were more aggressive because, in part, when they 
debriefed them afterwards it appeared to be more realistic to them. So the context 
matters, the realism matters. If you actually look at local news programming, which is 
something that I have done in a chapter of my book and talk on a little bit later, actual 
violence is very rarely shown. If you look at clips dealing with crime, about 1.5 percent 
of those crime clips deal with the actual violent act--shown in the act. Though children 
may be stimulated to violence if they see violence in local news programming, they 
rarely see it in local news programming. The other thing is that children rarely watch 
local news programming in America anyway. They get maybe a 1 rating in average for a 
local news show here, because at 6 or 7 p.m. they are showing sitcoms, which draw in 
large numbers of children. 

	So those are the things that research would talk about--stimulation of aggression, 
desensitization, and the mean world syndrome. So, if you cared about how society 
functions, that might be one reason why TV violence is a public policy issue--you might 
think the world would be a better place if there was less TV violence or, more 
specifically, if fewer children were exposed to television violence. The other reason why 
it is a popular public policy issue is because of politicians seeking reelection. And, in 
fact, if you go and look at the disputes over television violence, a lot of them came to a 
head in 1996 when you had a Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, who 
explicitly used the television violence issue as a way to appeal to cultural conservatives 
in the primary. If you read Bob Woodward’s book The Choice, he describes how Senator 
Dole explicitly used TV violence--he made a speech in Hollywood attacking TV violence 
as a way to appeal to cultural conservatives. 

On the other hand, you have President Clinton, who used the issue in a general 
election to appeal to married women, because this is an issue in particular that women 
feel more strongly about than men. And so you have politicians who are seeking 
marginal voters contending with Hollywood, which is seeking marginal viewers. That 
conflict is, I think, one of the reasons why you see this as an issue that generates conflict 
between industry and government. 

	If you think about TV violence in terms of marketing, first of all you might ask, 
“Who watches violent television programming?” Males, 18 to 34, are the number one 
consumers of TV violence followed by females, 18 to 34, and then males 35 to 49. So, if 
you ask who is the market for violent television programming, the strongest determinant 
is age group, those 18 to 34, and then the next strongest determinant is gender, males. But 
the fact that females 18 to 34 consume it means that if you look at what is advertised on 
violent programming, it’s not just products that are aimed at males, because females 18 
to 34 are really the most highly valued demographic in broadcast television. In part, this 
is because many of them are making purchase decisions in households. So, if you look at 
[the amount of money you can make selling ads if you attract] females 18 to 34 to your 
program, it is a fairly substantial amount. 

There is big segmentation in the market if you look, for instance, at movies. What 
you find is that people need to establish brand names. It isn’t news to those of you in the 
media that the organization that you work for tries to establish a reputation. What I did 
was look at how fifty channels used movies over the course of a year; so I was looking at 
12,000 movies, and what I found is that there are predictable patterns. People really carve 
out and use violence as a competitive tool. For instance, HBO, at 9:00 p.m., used to have 
a strategy that they called internally “testosterone Thursday,” where they would take a 
violent movie and show it because they knew that NBC was showing Seinfeld, a very 
popular program about nothing (that’s how they describe that program). HBO realized 
that there would be a set of males, 18 to 34, who would rather watch the violence than 
Seinfeld, and so they put on a low quality, 1-star violent movie, and they developed the 
expectation that if you wanted that type movie you could find it every Thursday night at 
nine o’clock. 

TNT and TBS, Turner-controlled channels at the time, also used this method. You 
would have Saturday Nitro, which was showing violent movies on Saturday night. Now 
they have a program called Movies For Guys Who Like Movies. And again, you use 
violence as a way to attract particular audiences. I have also looked at what happens 
when you have Monday night football on ABC, which is a show that is going to attract a 
high number of males, and what you find is that some networks respond by offering low-
violence shows in order to attract people who are not going to be watching Monday night 
football. And actually I saw another programming change after I completed my analysis, 
which is that when ABC is showing Monday night football now, ESPN, which is owned 
by the same company, shows figure skating. You definitely see programming and 
counter-programming using violence as a competitive tool. 

	So if you felt that TV violence was like pollution, you might say, “What do we do 
with pollution? What sort of policy instruments do we use to deal with pollution--could 
we use them to deal with TV violence?” One of the major ways we deal with pollution in 
America is through liability, but that is not a successful tool for dealing with television 
violence, primarily because of the First Amendment. The First Amendment says 
Congress shall make no law governing freedom of the press. What that actually means is 
courts will let you make laws dealing with the freedom of the press, but they have to have 
a compelling government interest, they have to be narrowly tailored, and you have to be 
able to prove that your policy instrument actually does something good. 

People have tried liability suits. For instance, in the 1970s there was a major 
television movie in which a young girl was raped with a broom handle, and a week later 
there was a copycat crime where some teenagers did the same thing to a young woman. 
Her parents sued NBC, and they were not successful because the judge said that if we 
ever got into a world where we used liability to curb imitation of a crime, there would be 
such a chilling effect that people would be afraid to tell many different types of fictional 
stories. So, liability is something that we use in pollution and something that we don’t 
really use to deal with television violence. 

	Taxing. Some people in the United States try to use taxes in order to reduce 
pollution. One of the states recently has tried to deal with this with “ultimate fighting 
events” on TV. I’m not sure whether you who are from abroad may ever have seen an 
ultimate fighting event. It’s basically a no-holds-barred fight where people can actually 
be seriously injured. Some states have banned it, and other states like Missouri have tried 
to put a tax on pay-per-view events that deal with ultimate fighting. But I don’t think 
taxing is going to be ultimately a solution to this. 

	Zoning. That’s something that we do in America a lot. You have a polluting 
facility, you try to shift its location to a part of town where it’s not going to have a strong 
impact on residence. And senators and representatives have tried to do this with TV 
violence. We do it with indecency in America right now. A government regulation 
describes when you can be indecent on the air. You can be indecent on free over-the-air 
broadcast TV or radio in America as long as you’re indecent between 10:00 p.m. and 
6:00 a.m. So that’s a kind of a “zoning” regulation, where you try to shift the indecency. 
Senator Hollings from South Carolina has proposed similar legislation that would say 
that you can be extremely violent on television, but you can only be violent between 
10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. That reduces the exposure of children and it also reduces 
substantially the number of viewers you can get who are adults. It’s a way to reduce the 
exposure but it also reduces the market. 

You could try to use the fact that TV broadcasters are licensed right now in America. 
Over-the-air broadcast TV stations get a license in return for a promise to broadcast “in 
the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” That’s a fairly flexible term. It was 
originally borrowed from railroad regulation, and over the decades it has been interesting 
to see what the FCC defines as “in the public interest.” People recently have said that 
maybe you could attack the use of violence through the licensing provision, but so far 
that has been unpopular because again it raises the First Amendment issues. 

	To me, the most effective way that you might deal with “TV pollution” is through 
information provision. The EPA has developed many different programs where you try to 
release information on polluters and see how their behavior changes. What you have seen 
over the last couple of years with the legislation involving the V chip is a notion that 
maybe if programs were labeled, parents would act on that information, and so you 
would be able to shield children from exposure. Broadcast TV people have been 
extremely reluctant to label their programs, in part because of advertiser backlash. I have 
found in my own research that if you put a warning on a prime-time network broadcast 
movie that says “viewer discretion is advised,” or “due to some violent content, viewer 
discretion is advised,” that lowers the number of children who watch it by about 14 
percent, which is about 200,000 children. So you do have some intervention in viewing 
by parents if you label. 

That has no impact, by the way, on adult or adolescent ratings. If you look at the 
Nielson figures, adults are not affected by this. Children are protected through parental 
action. But then, why wouldn’t you label if you were a broadcaster concerned with your 
profit? The answer is, I have found, that who is willing to advertise on your movie 
changes. Other things being equal, if you put a viewer discretion warning on a movie, 
advertisers for products aimed at females, aimed at older people, and aimed at families 
with children are less likely to advertise. This is because they have to worry about the 
damage to their brand image. 

There is a backlash phenomenon. That means that products that are aimed at males, 
people without children, and younger viewers are more likely to come in and pick up 
those advertising slots, and sporting companies are also more likely to advertise if you 
put the label on. But there is also an overall slight drop in the number of paid 
advertisements on a movie if you put the viewer discretion warning on. So there is a 
profit-maximizing reason for somebody to resist labeling, independent of the fact that it 
might offend your world view. You might be ideologically committed to the notion that 
you have an entertaining product, and just as I wouldn’t want the government to make me 
say, every time I give a lecture, that I am an economist, some creative people don’t like 
to be forced to label. We can talk a little bit later about the V chip and labeling. 

	The final thing I want to do before I start taking questions is try to convince you 
that local news coverage follows the same sort of economic incentive in America that 
entertainment programming does. So many of the things that I’ve talked about in terms of 
a market for television apply to local news programming. I looked at every story on fifty-
six different stations in nineteen different markets for one month, November 1993. Those 
of you who use LEXIS, an electronic database, know that it now has an abstract of local 
news broadcasts so you can actually see what types of stories are covered. So I had about 
14,000 stories in this sample and what I have done here is shown you what one market, 
Miami, looks like in terms of how crime is treated [See Table 9.7]. The reason I chose 
Miami is because it’s the home of the local news station with the “worst” approach to 
crime in America, WSVN. What you can see here is that there is a wide disparity in how 
crime is treated. 

First of all, it is not true that every station reacts the same to incentives. But that’s 
what you would expect. Some stations want a high-crime brand image. Some stations 
want a low-crime brand image. So if you look at WSVN, 35 percent of their stories deal 
with crime. That’s about the national average, believe it or not. Over the fifty-six 
different stations that I looked at, on the average about one-third of the stories dealt with 
crime and a third of those crime stories dealt with murder. So that means that, on the 
average, each program that you watch you are going to get at least one murder every 
night. But the “high-crime station” differs in how it treats crime. If you look at WSVN, 
about 16 percent of its teasers--“coming up next”--deal with crime, and if you look at its 
top five stories, two-thirds of them deal with crime versus about one-third at another 
station, WCIX. And if you look at the [number of times the] top story deals with murder, 
about 20 percent of the top stories on WSVN did, but none did on WCIX. 

	High-crime stations that are found across the country also deal with crime stories 
themselves in a different way--they are more likely to show you the details of crime. 
About 32 percent of the crime stories on WSVN dealt with the details. They were less 
likely to talk about the trial--only 5 percent of the time--and they were much less likely to 
give it a context by focusing on statistics. And if you look at body shots, i.e., clips that 
actually show you the body, WSVN had the highest body count of any station that I 
looked at for that month--fifteen.

	Yes, WCIX is the lowest rated. WSVN is often the highest rated. Although that 
doesn’t necessarily hold across all parts of the country. For instance, if you look at this 
decision of how much crime you are going to show in your newscast and you look across 
markets, it is not dependent on the number of crimes in a city. You can also see that all 
the stations in a particular city have the same amount of crimes to include, but they may 
react differently in making their “brand” position decisions. Are you trying to attract 
viewers who are interested in crime or are you trying to attract viewers who are not 
interest in crime? I found, for instance, that if you look at markets the crime rate doesn’t 
tell you how much crime is going to be in local news. 

As far as the ratings for all the national nightly news broadcasts on CBS, ABC, NBC
--which I would call the “hard news demand” in an area--the greater the demand for hard 
news, the less crime coverage. The more popular Cops [a show on Fox that deals with 
crime] is in your market, the more likely you are to cover crime [in your newscast]. So 
it’s a function of audience demand. If you go down and look at the news table here, you 
will see (and this is something I found across the country) that the high-crime station is 
also the high-accident station (13.5 percent of WSVN stories dealt with accidents), and 
the high-crime stations were less likely to cover things like local government or business. 
They are less likely to cover government in general except for one thing: the high-crime 
stations had the most government military stories, they bring in more footage from 
different parts of the world. Also the high-crime stations are more likely to have more 
sound bites stories, so it’s a faster-paced broadcast with more use of accident teasers and 
things like that. 

You could say, “Maybe these people differ in what they think is news. Some people 
think crime is news. Some people think local business is news or local government is 
news. And it’s not driven by profit.” But, if that were your assessment, what would be the 
explanation for the fact that the high-crime stations also tend to have a faster-paced news 
clips? There is a correlation between content and style that I think is a strong argument 
that what we see is driven by profit. One other thing that you could do that I have done is 
look at the importing of crime stories from all across the country into your local market. I 
actually ran a statistical model [that showed] whether you thought Michael Jackson’s 
alleged child molestation case merited mentioning in your newscast. What I found is that 
you could explain by market factors, such as local ratings for Melrose Place, whether a 
local news editor felt that Michael Jackson’s story should be in the local news or not.

	So when I look at this evidence, what I find is that local news is simply like other 
products. It is market driven. Right now local broadcasters, get their licenses for free in 
return for a promise to broadcast “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” In 
the 1980s the FCC said, “Let’s totally deregulate. We are going to define the public 
interest by what the public is interested in. We aren’t going to have any higher 
expectations or different expectations, so local news should just as much be driven by 
advertiser demand as any other product.” And I think that’s where we are today. 

Media Fellow: You said that usually, in most societies, studies show that eight to ten 
years after the introduction of TV there is an increase in the murder rate. Were the 
children being influenced by watching violent movies and that sort of thing? Because you 
said that they weren’t really watching local news, but other violent content . . .

James Hamilton: It was interesting, because in the evidence from South Africa, or 
the evidence from the Canadian town, you can really only make causation statements 
about the impact of television. You can’t differentiate between television and violent 
television, because they’re exposed to all sorts of TV.

Media Fellow: If I heard it correctly, you said that as a rule children don’t watch the 
news?

James Hamilton: Right. Suppose you were trying to figure out what TV news 
children consumed? For children two to eleven, according to Neilson’s ratings for the 
dinner hour, maybe a sitcom would get a 6 and local news would get a 1. If you were 
doing a cost-benefit analysis of what is most harmful for children, local news might not 
range up there if you were just looking at exposure in terms of their rating. In fact, if you 
look at the programs that children are most likely to watch, that have the highest rating, 
they often are prime-time adult shows. But again, even within that, there is lots of 
variation. In fact, one of the things that I looked at in this sample was ratings for adult 
programs among children. Law and Order is a very popular television show in the U.S. 
that sometimes deals with violence. Its producer has been very adamant in saying, “I deal 
with violence in an appropriate way,” and he is offended by the rating of television 
programs. But if you actually look at children, Law and Order has the lowest rating with 
children age two to eleven among all the other prime-time broadcast shows. So, if you 
were worried about whether it does or does not handle violence appropriately, one thing 
you might want to look at is how many kids are even watching it. If you look at an 
“Arnold [Schwartzenegger]” movie--Total Recall, for instance, broadcast on ABC-- that 
would average about 1.4 million children in the audience for 9:00 p.m. 

Media Fellow: What about cartoon movies?

James Hamilton: If you just counted violent acts, cartoons are as violent on a 
violent-act-per-hour basis as most violent adult programs. So, the question would then 
be, “Does ‘Road Runner’ cause violence?” And actually, when I talk about TV violence, 
I generally get three questions: “What about the ‘Road Runner?’”, “What about 
Schindler’s List?”, and “What about Japan?” Those are the three questions. 

So what about the “Road Runner”? Violence in cartoons does tend to stimulate 
aggression in the laboratory among children, and younger children (children under 7) are 
less likely to see cartoons that are unrealistic, and so they have a problem with fantasy 
violence. That’s one of the reasons why advocacy groups pressure the television industry 
to differentiate children’s cartoons with FV (fantasy violence). So that’s one of the 
indicators that is currently used. 

The second question is, “What about Schindler’s List?” Schindler’s List is often used 
as an example of what I would call a “plus positive.” People say, “Well, Schindler’s List 
has violence, but we wouldn’t be concerned about it if we were parents, some parents, 
because we would want children to be exposed to the lesson from that movie.” Parents 
differ on that, but if you ask yourself how much of the TV violence that you see in 
movies has the quality of Schindler’s List--that’s something I tried to do statistically--
what would that mean? How many movies are 4-star movies, which is what Schindler’s 
List is, and how violent is it as indicated by TV Guide’s content indicators? You will find 
that four-star violent movies count for maybe 3 percent of all violent movies that are 
shown on cable, basic cable, premium cable, and over-the-air broadcasts. If you asked 
would I be concerned about the showing of Schindler’s List, I’d say I still think it should 
be labeled so that people know that it contains violence.

Media Fellow: What about Japan?

James Hamilton: What about Japan? The notion is that Japan has violent television 
but Japan doesn’t have our murder rate. I think that really that question goes back to that 
magnitude--how much of an impact does TV violence have? If you asked me what I felt 
the top five causes of crime in America were, I would not list television violence. But if 
you asked me do I think that we should be concerned about the marginal impact in 
America of TV violence, I would say yes. Especially because the expression of violence 
in America is much more lethal than it would be in Japan because of our availability of 
guns.

Media Fellow: I’m interested in the marketing of violence. You made some 
statements about advertising decisions that are made based on whether or not the 
advertiser wants to be associated with violence or does not want to be associated with 
violence, and that’s sort of disturbing. What I’m wondering is, is that somebody’s job--I 
mean, is there somebody in New York who sits there as a consultant for a company and 
sort of shops around for the programs? And how do they do that? How do they know if 
it’s going to have enough violence or, you know, the right audience, and how do they 
know if it’s not what they want to be associated with? How do they do that job, if there is 
such a job? 

James Hamilton: First I’ll start with the FCC. We talked about how you would 
define violence or how you would define indecency. At the FCC there is somebody who 
is called the “national nanny.” His name is Bob. I’ve met him. Bob’s job is to listen to all 
the indecency complaints. And so if you were going to make an indecency complaint, for 
instance, against Howard Stern, you’d have to record [the segment you were complaining 
about] over the air or videotape it and then send it in, and Bob has to listen to it. So there 
is somebody in the government right now who worries about what’s indecent.

 The government has not had to define violence, so there is no “Bob” for violence, 
yet, in the government. In Senator Hollings’ legislation, for instance, which would have 
shifted violent television programming to 10:00 p.m. or later, it says the FCC will define 
what is violence. So the legislation leaves open what violence is. Now, I think that there 
are very good definitions of violence created by the studies funded by the cable 
broadcasters and by the over-the-air broadcasters, so you can define violence, I think. But 
there’s no person in the government trying to do that right now. 

In the private sector what you are worried about is “eyeballs”--who’s going to be 
watching you--and you’re also worried about backlash. What the advertisers have done--
the advertising agencies--they created a company which prescreens prime-time network 
broadcast television so that they are not surprised [by what’s in it]. They get detailed 
reports on the content of programs. It’s all a part of the information that’s not released to 
the public. So, when the networks say, “We couldn’t describe our content,” they’re 
dissembling, because they do describe it or it is described in the market. It’s just not 
released to the public. All prime-time broadcasts, in general, go through this agency, and 
they give reports to companies. And, for example, some buyers of this service might be 
airlines, so they wouldn’t want to advertise if there’s an air crash in the program. . . .So 
there are many different types of sensitivities, but there is a market for that information. 

How do advertiser worries affect the market? Well, if you look at something like 
NYPD Blue, which is a program that carries special warnings--not for violence, but for 
language or adult situations--when that first came on, there were about 30 markets out of 
the 210 TV markets in America that didn’t carry the program for fear of backlash and 
fear, in particular, of the American Family Association. The American Family 
Association does keep track of violent acts on prime time and does publish a list of 
advertisers. The advertisers don’t want to be on the American Family Association list. At 
least, some of them don’t, depending on who they are trying to sell to. 

What happened with NYPD Blue is that ad time was selling at a 45 percent discount-
-lower than it should have been, considering the people who were watching it during the 
first year. Because of the controversy. Controversy lowers the advertising rate. But when 
the controversy dissipated, what I found last year is that it was selling for market rate for 
the people that it was attracting. It was very popular among eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-
olds, which includes the most valuable demographic. So the first year that NYPD Blue 
was on the air, you had advertisers buying time at a discount. The people who were 
advertising were the ones who had less to worry about from backlash. Maybe because 
they were aimed at younger people. Maybe because they were aimed at males. Maybe 
because they were aimed at people without children. Some of the national advertisers 
were willing to buy time on NYPD Blue, but they said specifically, “You cannot show 
our ads until the third quarter, because by that time we think the controversy will have 
dissipated.” 

So advertisers are very explicit, and if you think about why, for an ad on a prime-
time broadcast movie when I was studying some of these things back in 1993, there was 
a $200,000-dollar investment for 30 seconds of ad time. So because of the amount of 
money that’s involved here, you are going to go through these calculations of what list 
you might show up on. Who might target you? 

Media Fellow: [On the average, hasn’t TV been getting more violent?]

James Hamilton: It depends on what type of TV you are talking about. If you are 
talking about the TV network, the free TV, and you looked at the percent of shows with 
violent drama like detectives or action adventure, things like that, that had its last peak in 
the mid-1980s, which ended with shows like Miami Vice. So if you look at free TV, it’s 
less violent today if you go by this definition. But then you have to bring in the fact that 
there are now lots of people who are looking at basic cable, and basic cable is more 
violent than over-the-air broadcast TV. So it’s a difficult question to answer about overall 
the average hours of television specifically for violence. 

In marketing, people do worry about what’s in a show down to the word level. In 
fact, if you look at syndicated TV programs, some viewers probably know that if you are 
a TV programmer in America, you get a lot of your profit down the road, when your 
program is shown in the future on syndicated television. And so one of the things that 
you worry about is, “What would be the market for my TV show two or three years down 
the road?” Because you can resell your TV show to an independent television station that 
can show it at six or seven at night. 

	I found articles that describe how some comedies say [they] won’t use words like 
“Newt,” which might be funny today because it reminds people of Newt Gingrich, but 
two or three years from now that would not be as funny. . . . Or “Noriega.” That was 
another word that was hot for a while and then people said, “We’re not going to use the 
word “Noriega” because it won’t be funny two years down the road.” So people do worry 
about it on the per-word basis when they’re developing a plot. 

Media Fellow: Do the people who are producing television programs for syndication 
think about global marketing as well? I mean, are they sort of simplifying the themes and 
the action, finding perhaps that violence is more universal than other complicated 
themes? So does that have any impact on the violent content and on the content in 
general? 

James Hamilton: Yes, it does. What I found in my research is that, if the program is 
violent, it’s more likely to be exported abroad. But the interesting thing, too, is that this 
means that the type of violence we consume in America can be a little bit higher quality, 
because I can spend more money if my program is going to be marketed abroad. So there 
is some interaction. But yes . . . the answer is yes. 

Media Fellow: [Can you talk about how the V chip fits into all this?]

James Hamilton: Sure. It’s in the legislation, the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The 
law says that every TV within two years has to have a “V chip,” which is technology that 
would be capable of reading a rating. But the legislation did not say that the industry had 
to develop a rating system. Because if the legislation said to the industry, “You have to 
label yourself,” that might have been a violation of the First Amendment. So what the 
legislation said was that if the industry had a rating system, then the rating has to be in 
the TV signal. This legislation says if the industry is rating, then you have to put a rating 
in your signal. It also says if there is no industry program, the FCC would appoint a 
commission to develop a ratings methodology, but the legislation didn’t say that the 
industry would have to use the FCC’s methodology. There was nothing that would force 
the industry to use this methodology except for public opinion. 

	So what the industry did was they stepped back and they said, “Well, look, if we 
don’t rate ourselves, the FCC might develop a method. We couldn’t be forced to use it, 
but for public relations purposes, maybe we should develop a rating system so the 
government doesn’t do its own, and by the way the government is talking about 
auctioning off our licenses and we also want a second channel for free.” Right now there 
is a shift to digital broadcasting in America, and in order to make that shift easier, free 
over-the-air broadcast TV stations are going to be given a second channel for free. This 
was potentially a 70-billion-dollar question. If the spectrum had been auctioned, the 
government could have gotten potentially 70 billion dollars from the industry. 

So when the industry says, “We want to avoid the government’s developing this 
rating, and we want to avoid doing anything that would offend Congress, given the fact 
that we are about to get a 70 billion dollar giveaway,” it says, “Okay, we’ll develop our 
own rating system, and maybe it will be age-based. TV-Y, Y-7, that will tell people if 
you have a children’s program about whether it’s appropriate for people who are above 
or below the age of seven, and maybe for adult programming [we’ll use] TV-G, -PG, -14, 
or -MA.” So G-rated programming is appropriate for a broad audience, TV-PG may not 
be appropriate for younger children, TV-14 may be appropriate for fourteen-year-olds or 
older and TV-MA is for mature audiences. “By the way,” the broadcasters said, “we’ll 
never use that mature rating because none of our programming is ever really at that 
level.”

 If you look at first year’s almost-implementation, Schindler’s List was the first 
program to get a TV-MA rating on free over-the-air broadcast TV. TV-MA applies to 
some of the premium shows that you will see, and there is one basic cable cartoon that 
now is regularly getting a TV-MA label, but you rarely see this. And what the child 
advocacy group said was, “This doesn’t tell what the content is. If you look here you 
don’t know whether it got this rating because of violence, sex, or adult language.” And 
the reason that the industry didn’t want to give you a lot of information is because of 
advertiser backlash. Because, imagine the different reactions to these two different 
statements. 

I found that the number one advertiser on violent, theatrical movies, on network 
broadcasting was Pepsi. So if you were Pepsi, what would you worry about? Would you 
worry about somebody being able to say Pepsi advertises on programs that are 
“inappropriate for 12-year-olds.” Or would you worry about the statement, “Pepsi 
advertises on programs that have graphic violence and sex”? You’re probably going to be 
more worried about the brand-name damage from that. 

So the over-the-air broadcasters say, “This is what we can live with.” By the way, 
some cable channels, especially HBO, have a lot more content information and they 
always have. For instance, HBO (Home Box Office) uses a system that informs about 
graphic violence, violence, mild violence, rape, and sexual content--they are willing to 
give you a lot more information because they don’t have any advertisers. There is no 
advertiser backlash to worry about on the premium cable channels. So they are willing to 
give you more information. 

	So the child advocacy group said, “If you really want to help parents you need to 
give people more information.” And because of the 70 billion dollars on the table, the 
broadcasters stepped back and they blinked and they said, “Okay, we will do this, except 
we will give you a rating so that you can see something that was rated TV-PG, V and S.” 
Now again it’s interesting--we still don’t know, if you just saw this, exactly the level of 
violence. If you actually look at the definition of this TV-PG, -V, it’s supposed to have 
less violence in it than TV-14, V. Now, they could have made it a lot easier. They could 
have called this graphic violence and they could have called that mild violence, but again 
they want to give you as little information as possible to reduce this advertiser backlash. 

So everybody’s on board except for NBC. NBC has said, “We’re just going to use 
the original age-based rating system. We are not going to use the expanded rating system 
that provides content indicators for sex, violence, adult language, or suggestive 
dialogue.” Why would NBC do this? NBC tends to under-label its programs more than 
ABC or CBS. What I mean by that is, if you look at a conservative research group that 
rates television programs--and there are some groups that do that--they are more likely to 
rate NBC’s programs as objectionable relative to the rating that NBC gives itself. If you 
thought about a program as objectionable according to the conservative family group, the 
family group would be more likely to give the show a TV-14 and the industry would be 
more likely to give it a TV-PG. So NBC is more likely to under-label, and it is charging 
higher ad prices than ABC or CBS shows that are under-labeled. So if you look behind 
the First Amendment rhetoric, the bottom line is NBC may have a profit maximizing 
reason to refuse to label.

Media Fellow: What does the research literature say about the impact of indecent 
programming on children? 

James Hamilton: [To do that research] you can imagine the form you’d have to ask 
parents to fill out that would say, “We’d like to expose your children to something that’s 
indecent.” So we don’t have this research, and the interesting thing is that indecency is 
actually in the communications legislation so, unlike other types of issues where lawyers 
have to make an argument about whether there’s a compelling government interest in 
protecting children from violence, which is what people are doing now, Congress settled 
this question in the early communications legislation from the 1930s, which said that 
broadcasters could be fined for indecency. So indecency concerns often come from that 
legislation rather than from the lab. 

Another issue is, “Who cares about sexual content?” There’s a difference between 
Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Republicans in survey evidence are more likely 
than Democrats are to say that they are offended by levels of sex rather than violence. If 
you were a representative and worried about your marginal voter, Republicans have a 
slightly greater incentive than Democrats do to talk about sex rather than violence. 

Media Fellow: Let’s go back to the question of why should we care about this. I 
think in the beginning when you were telling us about the correlation versus causation, 
you made a pretty good case for the fact that violent television programming may have a 
serious impact on the impressions that young children have and how they behave later in 
life because of those impressions. So we can say that we should care about children being 
exposed to violent television programming. But I don’t think you’ve given us much 
information about why you should care about anybody else who is exposed to violent 
television programming. I mean, is there a case to be made that we shouldn’t have violent 
programming on television because it hurts women, or because adults misbehave after 
they watch violent television programming, or any of that? And if there’s not, then why 
don’t we look back at zoning again and just talk about how to avoid having children meet 
violent television programming in some kind of time frame? 

James Hamilton: I would interpret your question, in part, as, “If you were going to 
do a cost-benefit analysis, should Walker, Texas Ranger be on the air?” Okay, Walker, 
Texas Ranger programming has Chuck Norris starring as a kick boxer who gains justice 
through kick boxing. And this is often named as one of the ten most violent programs on 
broadcast TV by UCLA, which was hired by the broadcasters to develop a relative 
ranking of violent programs. So here you have a violent program, often on Saturday, at 
10:00 p.m. So the question is, “Well, what are the benefits of Walker, Texas Ranger? 

First of all there is the “utility”--the economist’s term for happiness-- of adult people 
who like to watch Walker, Texas Ranger--they just prefer to consume it. It’s entertaining. 
And the research literature indicates that they might be more stimulated to aggression, 
but the magnitude of it is much lower than for children. Okay, well, the interesting thing 
would be, how do you measure aggression in adults in the lab? 

We said with children you can see who is punching and hitting and at recess who is 
beating up on the doll. They check adult aggression in the lab two different ways. They 
give you a series of questions to try to measure your level of aggression or frustration, 
one of which is, “If you are in the check-out line at a grocery store in the express lane for 
ten items or more, do you count the number of items of the person in front of you?” [If 
so], that is seen as an indicator of aggression. And they measure in the lab whether your 
answer to these questions is affected by whether you just saw Chuck kick somebody.

 So that’s one way you can measure it. The other way is . . . actually there are three 
ways. There’s the survey, and then there is the shock experiment, testing whether you’re 
willing to shock a third party in a psychology experiment. You aren’t really 
administering the shock, but you think that you are. And the other way you can actually 
measure this (some people have done this over at the med school) is to look at your 
hormone levels and other things in your blood and your urine, because it turns out there 
is a physiological reaction to watching violence--although the interesting thing here is 
that it depends on the gender of the victim of the violence in the TV program. If you are a 
woman, you are more likely to respond to violence with increased levels of blood 
pressure and stress hormones if the victim is female, and for a man [they go up] if the 
victim is male. 

So if you’re talking about how you would measure things, you’ve got the utility of 
adults here. Now, the fact that this is free TV makes it difficult to put a dollar value on 
the utility. I mean, it’s not a market where we’re charging you a price. On the cost-
benefit analysis, we usually use the price that you paid to measure your utility, but that’s 
tough. We can’t do that here. 

	Benefits: Freedom of expression. Some people will not watch Walker, Texas 
Ranger, but they get utility knowing that we can live in a country where other people are 
free to watch it, so that’s one of the other things. . . .There’s utility of children from their 
consumption--and when you’re doing a cost-benefit analysis, by the way, you don’t take 
into account the jobs that are generated in Hollywood or anything like that, because we 
just assume that, if there wasn’t Walker, Texas Ranger, everybody could get another job 
in another program. So, you’re basically measuring your benefits by the value that people 
place on human consumption. 

	Then what are the costs? Well, it’s going to depend on the context of the violence, 
because we’ve said if you show the crime was punished, that’s going to affect whether 
you actually get more crime or whether you get more “mean world syndrome.” So if you 
show Walker, Texas Ranger, and it’s seen by a certain number of children, can you get an 
expected number of crimes that come from them?--the answer is no. Research can’t 
really tell you that. 

Media Fellow: Okay, but if you believed that it did [cause crime] based on some of 
your studies, and you wanted to do something about it, would the most effective solution 
be having it on at 10:00, or 11:00, or a different time? Or is it most effective to start 
censoring television? I think you get really strong arguments against censoring content.

James Hamilton: That’s in part because one of the things you need to specify is what 
value you place on the happiness of adults who watch violent shows. Because you do 
have a set of people who say what you want to do is reduce programming, because 
shielding children is important, but I think that violence on television says something 
about the nature of the society that we live in. And so, if you look at the people who are 
motivated to participate in consumer boycotts, for instance, and families who hold 
religious values, the impact on children may not be motivating them. It’s an “existence 
value.” What I mean by that is, just as there are some people who gain utility from 
knowing that we live in a society where people have freedom of expression, there are 
some people who gain utility from knowing that we live in a society that doesn’t allow 
violent television programs. 

This is parallel to the debate we hear about pollution all the time. If you talked about 
the Grand Canyon and you asked, “How do I value the Grand Canyon?”, part of it is by 
the use of the Grand Canyon. Part of it is just by knowing that the Grand Canyon exists. I 
get happiness knowing that there’s something beautiful like the Grand Canyon that 
exists--we call those the existence values. They play a big role in this debate, too.

Media Fellow: Have we done very much zoning in this country that regulates the 
violent content of programming during certain hours?

James Hamilton: No. No. It’s only indecency that is regulated. There was something 
in the mid 1970s called “the family viewing hour,” which was between 8:00 and 9:00 
p.m. The chairman of the FCC brought in the presidents of the three major broadcast 
networks at that time and said, “I would really appreciate it if you made the hour between 
eight and nine safe for children in terms of violent and sexual content.” They went back 
and got the national association of broadcasters to develop a code of behavior that would 
say, “We will not show inappropriate programming for children between 8:00 and 9:00 
p.m.” 

Now, there are a couple of issues here. One of which is antitrust. When you have 
people getting together in a room agreeing about their product, it could potentially violate 
antitrust rules and the television industry in the 1980s and 1990 said one of their defenses 
is, “We can’t do anything about violent TV because it would violate antitrust laws.” 
Senator Simon got a law passed in Congress that said, “We will exempt you from 
antitrust. You can get into a room and talk about TV violence and we won’t prosecute 
you.” That has now expired, but Janet Reno had said, “I will not prosecute you if you get 
into a room and do this.” So the antitrust excuse is out the window. 

But what happened with the family viewing hour is that the writers guild in 
Hollywood said, “You know, when you got everybody together in a room and you said 
that the chair of the FCC wanted family programming, basically what you were doing is 
you were making a federal regulation, and we have a whole set of things that govern how 
federal regulations can be made in America called the Administrative Procedures Act. 
And because you didn’t follow that, this should be struck down.” And it was. So right 
now we don’t have any zoning. The only thing that you do find, however, is that the 
natural flow of the young adult audience determines when you’re going to see violence. 

Media Fellow: [How about violence in the print media?]

James Hamilton: You’re under less pressure because your media is less accessible to 
children. What’s driving TV violence is concern about children. The notion is that 
children are going to be less likely to be exposed to things in print. There’s been less lab 
research on print because of that. If you’re worried about a nine-year-old being 
influenced by reading, the assumption is that nine-year-olds are not going to be 
influenced as much by print as they will TV. 

Media Fellow: [You don’t seem to see publishers worrying about complaints about 
violent content.]

James Hamilton: One reason that you might care less about complaints is that you 
don’t need a license from the government, whereas the broadcast TV station is always 
worried about that. It’s very rare to see a license ever revoked. But the small probability 
of a really bad thing can still influence your behavior. So, because you’re worried about 
that, it can influence your content. 

[Discussion about print media.]

Media Fellow: [Is there evidence on how the pressure to entertain affects television 
and its viewers?]

James Hamilton: In the TV medium we have more pressure to entertain than you 
would in print. One of my favorite lab studies looked at CBS news coverage of poverty 
during the Reagan administration. You could basically cover poverty two different ways: 
from an individual basis, where you do a story about an individual poor person, or in a 
thematic way, where you talk about statistics. You showed people identical newscasts, 
except one of them had a poverty story told from an individual person and the other one 
had a positive story told in terms of statistics, then you gave them questionnaires. 

What you find is that the people who saw the individual poor person are more likely 
to think that poverty is a result of individual character failing than from the operation of 
the market or the operation of government policies, so they were less likely to hold 
President Reagan accountable for poverty as a political issue. But if you see it in terms of 
statistics, you believe that society has more to do with poverty than character failing and 
you are more likely to hold the president accountable for that as a public policy. And 
then, if you say to yourself as a journalist, what would you rather do if you were on TV, 
tell a story with numbers or try to talk to an individual poor person in America on the 
local news, the individual poor person would be the [the preference in entertainment 
value]. So the angle driven by the entertainment demand creates a different political 
response. 

Media Fellow: [Will there be more violent television shows in the future?]

James Hamilton: I think it’s going to increase. You’re going to have people who are 
showing more and more violence. Those shows may not be consumed by many people, 
but it’s going to upset people because people often will reason from the most violent 
material that they have seen on TV and use that as an indicator of how violent television 
is. So people often will say, “Oh, it’s getting much worse.” But I think it’s hard to 
actually back that statement up if you look at the number of violent acts per hour that 
people watch. The most violent channel type, premium, has the lowest consumption right 
now. So it’s difficult to say whether on average people are watching more violence, but 
you can make the statement that some of the shows are increasingly more violent. 

Media Fellow: [How do you think the V chip will work?]

James Hamilton: I think that it really will lower the cost to parents of shielding their 
children from what is violent, because right now you have to know what is on, what is 
violent, when it is on. With the V chip you can set it to block out programming, and once 
you set it then the programs are blocked. Now there are always going to be problems 
with these things. You might have wanted your child to see something like Schindler’s 
List that is blocked out because it is violent, but things like Schindler’s List I think are 
very rare in television programming. 

Media Fellow: [Won’t there be a temptation to have more violent programming once 
the V chip is safely in place?]

James Hamilton: Anytime you have something that promotes safety, which is what 
the V chip does, you always run into a problem that economists call “moral hazard.” 
Have you ever seen a Volvo, the big boxy cars that are supposed to be safer? The 
question is, if you’re in a big boxy car, are you going to now drive a little bit more 
aggressively because you know that if you get into an accident, you’re going to be safe? 
That is the problem with any sort of safety device. There’s always going to be some 
incentive to back off now that you’re better protected. 

Media Fellow: The film industry already has a rating system where they spell out 
whether a move has sex or violence or bad language in it. Is the resistance by the 
television industry purely because they know that it will deter advertising? 

James Hamilton: Yes, it’s primarily advertiser backlash that they are worried about. 

Media Fellow: The film industry doesn’t really have as much concern about 
[advertisers]?

James Hamilton: That’s right. There’re a couple of differences. The main one is the 
advertiser support. Film doesn’t have to worry about it. Film, by the way, doesn’t really 
give you a whole lot of information. Film gives you the age-based rating, but if you then 
try to figure out why it got the rating, it is difficult. It is true that in the 1990s they have 
offered additional explanations for why it got the rating, and that is published in Variety. 
You don’t see much in the advertisement itself very often about why it got particular 
ratings. The other interesting thing about the film industry is that if you look across 
country about who participates in the ratings of movies, the only requirement for the 
MPAA is that you be a parent. The set of parents that they pay to watch the movies 
doesn’t take into account any of the literature on what might be harmful to children. It’s 
more basically passing the test--would a sample of parents find this offensive or not. Not 
whether it’s damaging to children. 

Media Fellow: Of all the different policies and recommendations for regulating 
violence on television, which one do you think could be most effective?

James Hamilton: I think that a rating system that’s detailed, like the one that we have 
now, with a V chip, which will eventually be in TV--right now the FCC is holding two 
inquiries. One is asking, “Is this rating system acceptable?” The legislation said that it 
was up to the FCC to determine if the industry’s rating system was acceptable. If it’s not, 
the FCC has to develop its own methodology. I think this system will be found to be 
acceptable. 

And then the FCC has to decide what the architecture of the V chip is going to be. 
And that’s an interesting political battle, because when the children’s advocacy groups 
signed off on this rating system, they also agreed to support an architecture which only 
supports one rating system. We could’ve been in a world where you would have an open 
architecture for the V chip, and you could have many different groups contending, and 
the V chip would have to be compatible with many different rating systems. But the 
industry wants one rating system--the one that it designed. So I think that that’s going to 
be one of the next political battles. Is the V chip going to be able to handle multiple 
ratings or just one rating system? 

Media Fellow: And then how long will it take from the time that they agree on the 
rating system for the V chip to be available? 

James Hamilton: Well, right now you could buy a blocking system that would 
almost simulate the V chip. But the problem is, you would have to do a lot of 
programming because it can block out particular hours or particular channels. The actual 
V chip would be extremely low cost, probably less than $1.00 per TV set. The TV 
manufacturing industry says it will be ready in probably eighteen months to two years 
after the architecture is agreed upon, and it hasn’t been agreed upon yet. 

Media Fellow: [Do your children watch violent television?]

James Hamilton: It’s interesting, I’ve given a lot of interviews to journalists on this 
topic of TV violence. Ninety percent of the time people ask me do I have children and 
what do they watch. I don’t have children. I hope to someday. But I think it’s interesting 
that when people have written stories about my research, they have to do it through a 
human interest or entertainment angle. So the drive from their readers is not to focus on 
what the results of my research are--it’s to see whether I’m hypocritical or whether I 
follow up on what I’m doing. 

One thing I’d like to say about this topic. I don’t want you to at all feel like polluters. 
There are also lots of things that the media doesn’t take into account that are positive 
externalizers--like the information that you may provide about public affairs that actually 
can improve the functioning of democracy. So just as there are some things that the 
media do that generate negative effects, there are some positive things. I’ve spent an hour 
and a half talking about the negative effects. But my next project is the positive effects. 

Media Fellow: What is your next project?

James Hamilton: My next project is to try to look at public interest obligations with 
digital TV and other media. Right now what we do is fictional. What we say is that we 
are worried about the public interest content of television. But that was all deregulated in 
the 1980s when the chairman of the FCC said that TV is just a toaster with pictures. What 
works for the toaster market works for the TV market. I disagree with that, but I’m 
worried that some of the policy proposals that are out there try to impose certain content-
type requirements on broadcasters.

Moderator: Any more questions before we close? Thanks very much, Jay. 

James Hamilton: Thank you.


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