Hlaudi is wrong

Asinine comments that violence on TV begets more violence is an insult to the intelligence. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to just Google it

Why don’t government lackeyst do a Google search on the things they intend saying before they blurt them out?

Admittedly, Hlaudi Motsoeneng doesn’t care what people think of him; or, seemingly, about the asinine and trite things that come out of his mouth. His assertion that showing violent protests on TV news leads to more violence is as absurd as it is that he remains in his position, despite the public protector’s and two court rulings which said he was illegitimately in charge.

I asked The Google: “Does watching violence on TV cause people to be violent?” and got a mostly negative answer to the question.

“Watching violence in the media does not cause crime,” summed up the second result, from Psychology Today.

“Violent tendencies reside within the personality, whether or not the person watches programming depicting violence. The television programme, the movie, or the video game do not turn him into something alien to his basic personality,” wrote Dr Stanton Samenow, about “the absurdity of such a thesis”.

The first result, from the American Psychological Association, was a more measured finding, quoting several bodies of research, finding that “exposure to media violence is just one of several factors that can contribute to aggressive behaviour”.

As The New York Times wrote after the horrendous Sandy Hook School shootings in 2012, “what’s missing are studies on whether watching violent media directly leads to committing extreme violence”.

Summing up a “comprehensive review of the literature on media violence” by scientific journal The Lancet in 2005, the paper wrote: “The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitisation toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children.”

The key word is “desensitisation”. If anything, overexposed South Africans are desensitised to the violence we see on SABC news.

The role of violence in computer games, for instance, has formed part of the criticism of