I. TV Violence as a Problem for Social Science

TV violence as a social problem has preoccupied public opinion for at least the past thirty or forty years, ever since the spread of television. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the phrase originated, the market became saturated with television sets by the late-1950s and the early 1960s, and a direct relationship is observable between the expansion of television and the dissatisfaction with violent programming. Media researchers have pointed out that the moral anxiety that has accompanied the spread of television has parallels with similar concerns that greeted the appearance of the popular novel in the mid-19^th century, which was compared to elite literature; or to the phenomenon of the silent film in the early-20^th century which was judged threatening in comparison with the theater. The same fear is discoverable in the evolution of television, which is considered pernicious in comparison with the recently domesticated film. (Sparks, 1992) From its beginnings, then, television has appeared as a medium of communication whose power to mediate modernity in a concentrated form had a shock effect and whose tendency to threaten social order does not seem to decrease with time.

It is from the beginning of the sixties that we begin to encounter debates about TV violence everywhere from the daily press to parliamentary commentaries. This unusual, socially pervasive moral anxiety triggered, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, responses from the different branches of the social sciences: criminology, media studies, applied social psychology and many others. TV violence was thus transformed from a public problem into a question for the social sciences and in this way gained the legitimacy of scientific discourse. The implicit promise of this discourse was that the conflict-ridden social phenomenon was actually as social-technical problem for which rational explanations and effective solutions were available. The end result was that TV violence became a part of the social scientific paradigm, attracting vast sums of money and an army of researchers. (Williams, 1974) If we punch in the call-words "TV violence" in the catalogue of almost any research library, we are likely to get a list of bibliographic references that is impressive or overwhelming, depending on one's perspective. The flood of books and journal articles, that began in the 1960s, continues ever since. According to one estimate, at the beginning of the 1980s, there existed 2,500 English language publications on the topic, a number that has probably multiplied many times since then. (Sparks, 1992) Orientation within this huge literature becomes more and more difficult and guides are increasingly necessary through its labyrinths. It is not accidental that these days every serious piece of research beings with the obligatory overview and grouping of this accumulated material. There has also developed a certain kind of professional consensus about the labeling of the different approaches, such as the "cultivationist school," the "response theory school" and so on. Moreover, the different ideological commitments have also given rise to different categories. Thus, the surveys speak in the most matter-of-fact way about "left-wing realists" or about "idealist hypodermic needle theorists" etc. The extent and unceasing liveliness of this research does not, in itself, explain, of course, what contemporaries saw as the source of the unparalleled danger in the violence that appeared on the television screen. Nor does it explain the basis of the widespread belief among opponents that TV violence engenders not only fear but also imitation; that is, that it threatens social order. In what follows, I would like to survey the most important positions characteristic of the literature on TV violence and then the broader historical and social contexts within which the debate itself occurred.

In the early stages of research, the central question that preoccupied scholars had to do, not so much with the problem of the social existence or meaning of the images appearing on the television screen, as with their direct impact on viewers. Originally, the implicit assumption was that crime stories, which depicted the transgression of social norms, had the effect of weakening collective confidence in society's own values and also of provoking imitation and therefore directly increasing crime. According to the first theoretical approach, the so-called "hypodermic needle model," the sight of crime has an effect similar to a single shot of narcotics, supposedly causing people to lose their normal sensitivities. According to this view, the impact of the transgression of norms in films has a direct influence on audiences, who are liberated from their moral inhibitions and become themselves susceptible of committing crimes. (Sparks, 1992) This apparently self-evident and constantly reiterated connection between the viewing of TV violence and the breaking of norms, however, never been successfully documented. The empirical data is contradictory and limited, despite the size and volume of research on the subject. Instead of firm evidence, there is a long history of trends and explanations, which follow on each other's footsteps and contest each other's assertions. In his survey of the literature in the 1970s, Hall did not discover any evidence of "moral dissolution." The only tangible result that he found in the extensive research is the increase of fear among viewers of crime stories. (Hall, 1978) He emphasized, however, that there were many different interpretations for the cause and nature of this fear and therefore urged caution in the use of the concept. This need for caution is applicable to the very assessment of audience fear as a negative phenomenon. Many see in it the normal psychology of self-defense, whose goal is to keep at a distance and to delimit the self from the object of fear. If, therefore, television violence causes fear, then, it could be argued, exactly the desired reaction set in, a defensive reaction. We can reach a similar conclusion from a sociological perspective, in so far as the acceptance of a normative system is guaranteed, and its transgression sanctioned, by fear. It is understandable that from the beginning, the different disciplines regarded with a certain amount of confusion the fact that the only directly identifiable cause of television violence should be a category as uncertain and tautological as fear. This was, after all, a disappointing conclusion for those ambitious plans with which the studies began. Many argued – as we shall see later – that the examination of violence cannot be narrowed down to the study of fear, for what is involved is a much broader and more complex phenomenon having to do with modern society's normative system. But even if we narrow our attention to the growth of fear, and even if in the case of fear we disregard the fact that there are many other things besides television crime that can cause fear in school, in the family, in the workplace, in everyday life; even then, it does not directly follow that those who are afraid will choose aggression as the sole means for alleviating fear. This was the thesis of the advocates of the injection needle model, and of its subsequent modifications, the so-called cultivation school's emulation theory, which held that it was not the impact of one television program, but the gradual cumulative impact over time that led to the growth of criminal activity. (Gerbner and Gross, 1976) Naturally, it is impossible to exclude aggression, but this can only be one, and by no means the exclusive or even the most common, possible reaction to fear. Proof of this is provided by those studies conducted at the beginning of the 1990s, that failed to find a significant correlation between television viewing and aggression. Moreover, the newer studies did not even confirm in an unambiguous way the previously regarded certainty that there was a growth of fear among television audiences. (Sparks, 1992) The questionnaires regarding crime stories were particularly telling. Audience response studies concluded that there are people who not only fail to react with fear to crime stories, but actually experience them as reassuring since, after the transitional difficulties, the forces of good always triumph over evil. Among others, the ambiguity of the crime story, which depicted a self-contradictory sequence of fear and liberation from fear, actually resulted in playfulness and the liberation of aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand, another group of viewers manifested a directly opposite reaction to the uncertainty of the crime story, reacting with moral outrage. These were the people who, in the name of the "silent majority", demanded stricter censorship in television and harsher laws in society. As a result of these studies, the evaluations of television violence became more nuanced; the universal acceptance that the "cultivation" school enjoyed till then became more circumscribed, and professional opinion saw less and less direct connection between the crime story and the increase of crime. This direct connection was, in any case, always problematic. Hall was justifiably dismissive of those who tried to use the example of commercials as the basis for understanding violence. For if advertisers liked to assume that audiences would immediately rush out after viewing a commercial to buy the advertised detergent; it was equally naïve to assume that after viewing a crime story, they audience would immediately begin to commit crimes.

As a result of criticisms, from the 1980s onward, there developed a noticeable thematic change in the literature about criminology. There were fewer and fewer studies about the "influence" and the "impact" of TV viewing on aggression; instead the emphasis shifted to the way the personal social experiences of the viewers were implicated in the development of fear. According to these so-called "left-wing realists", people's fear of crime was determined, on the whole, not by the media, which play only a secondary role, but by their own experiences. The studies proved that those who encountered violence on a daily basis in their own environment were more likely to be afraid than those who saw violence only on TV. (Sparks, 1992) In other words, it was found impossible to evaluate the world of television without taking into account the experiences of the world beyond television and that both TV and personal experience played a role in the development of fear, but in different ways. Paradoxically, those who experienced more violence in their environment, also watched more TV on the average in order to find reassurance for their anxieties. In contradiction to earlier assumptions, TV violence had a calming effect on these viewers. It also emerged, however, that the direct connection between TV and audience behavior, that was advocated by the so-called "cultivationist" school, also had validity, but primarily among those who watch the TV screen at least for or more hours per day. (Gerbner et al. 1990) Among these, the cause of fear was motivated not by social experience but by the unlimited TV viewing. It also emerged in the course of investigation, that it was important to pose questions other than fear when conducting surveys. It was found that the unlimited viewers were more likely to accept the proposition that the world is a dangerous place, but also more likely than the average person to put a high value on the work of the police. As "left-wing realists" emphasized, through its provocation and quelling of fear, TV reaffirmed the dominant values of society and helped recreate the existing normative order. (Sparks, 1992)

The controversy continues between the two camps. The "cultivationst school," which is sometimes called "idealist," argues that the watching of TV in itself augments a sense of threat in people, and that it is this process that should be the object of study. By contrast, the "left-wing realists" attempt to differentiate "rational" fear based on personal experience, from "irrational" fear supposedly induced by the media. They have dubbed the society-wide, unexplained anxiety that surrounds TV violence a "moral panic." "The real question," writes Hall, "is not how much violence is caused by the media, but rather why we are so prejudiced when faced with violence. Why do we think that the media is the chief cause of violence?" (Hall, 1978) Moral panic is a result of a loss of general confidence in the orderliness of society, he argued, and thus we should explore not the fear itself but the question of who consider TV violence responsible for this and why? According to this view, TV violence is fundamentally not the problem of the viewer, nor is it a social problem that should preoccupy public opinion and scholars. On the contrary, it is an ideological problem about the crisis of modern society, created by politicians, social investigators, and other public figures, that is then projected on to the viewers. This conclusion seems to be supported by the English survey that reported that in a representative sample, only 20% mentioned TV violence as a social problem that concerned them in any way. (Ericson, 1991) The average person considers TV violence and the decline of morals as a journalistic commonplace. All this made it clear that the problem is not a result of everyday experience but is ideological in nature.

The wide spread use of such ideological categories as "idealist" and "left-wing" in the literature about TV violence clearly betrays the deep political implications of the question. It indicates that what is at stake in the controversy is not simply a debate about the problem of fear among scholarly specialists, but the evaluation of the most basic question of modern life. It is worth recalling at this point the broader socio-cultural context of the early-1960s, within which TV violence as a social problem first emerged, for this context was ideologically charged from the first moment. Up till the early 1960s, there was in America a cautious optimism about the spread of TV; most people accepted Klapper's opinion that TV viewing had no negative effect on personal conduct. (Klapper, 1995) It was the head of the FBI ,Hoover, who first brought into question this assumption and it was not long before a senate subcommittee was examining the problem, which was later followed by all kinds of official and non-official studies. Mary Whitehouse, perhaps the most renown conservative interpreter – and in a certain sense, inventor – of the problem of TV violence, formulated its populist criticism in a book entitled Clean Up the TV (1964), which is still often quoted. (Sparks, 1992) She relied on such fashionable empirical social-psychological studies that placed "influence" into center focus, but she also emphasized the connections between TV violence and the anomic condition of society. According to Whitehouse, TV is an index and an agent in one. It is an index in the sense that TV violence brings to the viewers the increasingly general violence of modern society; but is also an agent, in the sense that it contributes to the destabilization, what is more, to the destruction of a "Western Christian values system." Given the fact that TV violence presents "the thinkable as visible, the visible as doable, and the doable as acceptable," reasons Whitehouse, TV violence practically fosters violence. In other words, the central object of her attack was not so much the effect of TV, which she considered a byproduct, as the media that caused and intentionally reproduced the effect. For her, the media was a badly functioning pedagogical too. Representing the "silent majority," the author directed her attacks primarily against the liberal intellectuals heading the BBC, who, according to Whitehouse, practiced "reverse censorship" and rendered ridiculous, marginal, and distorted Christian and traditional values and in this way implicated themselves in the decline of public morals. According to Whitehouse, the elitist directors of television, whose concerns are entirely with the size of their audience, display on the screen the filth and waste of society, and since they are "pathologically" focused only on these aspects, they end up distorting the proportions and actively contributing to the transformation of violence into reality. Whitehouse sees the fundamental cause of TV violence in "liberal permissiveness," which voluntarily and cynically sacrifices the private sphere of the modern world. It is hardly an accident that the populist conservative critique, elaborated by Whitehouse, could have become the political tool of the right wing's ideological "law and order" campaign in Thatcher's England and Reagen's America in the 1980s.

An effective counter-offensive against Whitehouse's position took long to develop. For the phenomenon that right-wing populism described as TV violence was simultaneously discussed in the social theory of the democratic left through the category of "mass society" and "mass culture," as the inevitable product of capitalist society. Left-radical democratic critical theory regarded the products of mass communication as merely a new, modern form of social integration, though which the ruling elites carried through the ideological control of the lower classes. (The democrats tended to lay the focus on the "modern" while the left emphasized the "capitalist".) The left-wing social critique of the Frankfurt School, which remained virtually unopposed till the 1960s, argued that the danger of mass entertainment lay in the fact that the entertainment industry provides the mass consumer with immediate and effortless gratification in exchange for social integration. In this context, even Adorno considered the crime story, most frequently associated with TV violence, as a negative phenomenon. According to him, the crime story challenges the legal order as a condition of normality and therefore, on the surface, seems to perform a critical social function. However, since order and the dominant value system are victorious at the end, the crime story does not expose the social order but only redirects the healthy suspicions and existing tensions in people, substituting consolation and entertainment for criticism. (Adorno, 1967) The position of the Frankfurt School was thus inappropriate for a critique of the conservative position, since it shared its ultimate conclusions, with the difference that it launched its criticism not in terms of an idyllic past, but in terms of a utopian future. To rephrase the problem, while traditional criticism condemned the popular culture of TV crime stories in the name of a traditional value system and religion; the Frankfurt School rejected it in the name of a secular version of high culture. They both shared a vision of everyday life and culture as immoral or at least as anarchic, and contrasted this with elite culture or religion that represented a higher form of social order.

It is the merit of Stuart Hall and his followers, the so-called British Cultural Studies school, to have challenged and reformulated this dominant interpretation of popular culture. They presented the phenomenon not as the expression of the lower classes' egoism, anarchism, or immorality, but rather, as the working classes' everyday subculture. According to Hall, the conservative vision of social order does not represent some already existing higher standpoint, but is simply the modern product of the social impact of TV violence, the moralizing reaction to the real or imagined dangers threatening contemporary society; in other words, its is a fiction. (Hall, 1978) That is, while Whitehouse used the theory of "influence" to support the conservative critique, Hall affirmed the earlier mentioned theory of "moral panic," which rejected the transcendence of values in the name of everyday experience. The conservative position, argued Hall, failed to see TV violence as a complex metaphor about society, which was an integral part of a larger discourse about social order and anomie. Instead, it presented the phenomenon as truth and reified it when it identified it with different empirically defined social and moral agents and causes. Conservatives first abstracted, and then transposed into a moralizing context, the discourse about violence, which was a part of the dramatization of social problems and as such, affirmed values, conjured up dangers. According to Hall, right-wing populism uses this "secondary moralizing narrative" to reinterpret the "primary narrative" of TV violence; that is, with the interpretation of the secondary narrative, it adds its own conservative myth to the original story of violence presented on TV. According to the theory of moral panic, anyone who views the violent actions projected on TV as if they were the result of some fault, mistake, defect or degeneration, initiates an explanatory sequence whose end result is already given. For it there is a problem then, at least according to populism, it must have some direct cause, and if such a tangible cause exists, then it is not only possible but necessary to put an end to it. Since the crime story is fundamentally about the dramatization of some kind of conflict, it is a particularly appropriate object for such a closed explanatory chain. This is the reason why Whitehouse's conservative criticism could become the basis for a simplified, moralizing picture of modern life, which distorts the contradictory history of social transformation and its inevitable conflicts. It goes without saying that this conservative vision of the past history of entertainment as a pure, non-violent phenomenon, is also an ideological fiction. The social history of entertainment shows that violence as entertainment has preceded television by centuries and thus that TV's responsibility in the invention of violence is, to put it mildly, debatable. (Elias, 1989)

By considering the TV crime story as the media product of popular culture, Hall and his followers opened the way to cultural interpretations that have become increasingly common since the early 1990s. At the same time, however, from the perspective of a radical democratic critical theory, Hall is open to serious criticism. He failed to remain consistent to his own program when he interpreted TV violence as a metaphor and thus ended up reifying violence himself. In line with his Marxist background, Hall saw TV violence as the mediated instrument for maintaining class relations and the hegemony of the ruling class.

Is it at all possible to construct a theory of the public sphere that satisfied Hall's justifiable demand that we resist the temptation to reify in the media the anxieties caused my modern life? In the following pages, we shall attempt, on the basis of the existing literature, to sketch out the outlines of a radical democratic model. Its assumption is that a more flexible and nuanced explanation is available if we regard the media not as the instrument of class rule, but as the representative of the public sphere. (Curran, 1991) According to this theory, the primary role of the media is not to impose domination but to bring about consensus; it is to give voice to opinions that are in conflict with each other, that contradict each other, that are, moreover, marginal to the mainstream. It does this because otherwise it loses credibility and becomes incapable of fulfilling its prime function, which is to create legitimacy. The public sphere is not simply the political bullhorn of the established power elite, but a symphony of intermingled voices, created out of initial disagreements, tentative negotiations, and implicit compromises, whose function is to bring about a consensus acceptable to all society. (Although Hall also speaks of a "compromising" and an "oppositional" discourse, he defines these in relationship to the hegemonic powers; that is, the "compromising" discourse implies for society's other groups not the creation of consensus but a forced compromise with the dominant codes, and the "oppositional" discourse the denial of the dominant. Hall, 1996) Consensus does not mean that this or that should be good or bad for everyone, or that everyone has to agree with everyone in everything. It only means that there exist historically and socially acceptable methods for determining the normative order of society. (Alexander, 1990) Consensus determines what is acceptable to everyone, what can be considered universally given, what requires no explanation. At the same time, it makes room for disagreement and thus does not allow differences to threaten the whole of the system. This complex function of the public sphere is performed by the media, as an autonomous institutional order, and by popular culture, in its capacity as a self-regulating common language. According to a radical democratic interpretation of the public sphere, no official viewpoint is able to impose its opinions directly on the media, nor its capable of substituting for the point of view of the average an on the street its own official outlook. From a cultural perspective, the media creates generally acceptable myths about the nature of the world in which we live and about how it works. This symbolic environment that is the world of modern myth permeates reality and, though it does not create a homogeneous world, can nevertheless produce cohesion between different people and different groups. The media brings about common explanations for isolated individuals cut off from each other, without which it is impossible to orient oneself, to plan or to act in everyday life. In this sense, the real differences are not between the various genres, that is not between reality (the true) and fiction (the false); but between the public and the private. (Tuchman, 1978) The public sphere of the media makes events public in order to send some message to the members of the community.

According to a radical democratic perspective, the role of cultural interpretation is to concretely understand the messages of the media and to avoid equally the objectivist theory of television, which speaks of "influences," and the relativist theory, which speaks of unfounded "moral panic." In place of the psychological reification of the former, and the political reification of the latter, it tries to provide a social and cultural analysis of the crime story itself and of the media that transmits it. For the theory of moral panic that Hall represents cannot satisfactorily explain the fact, long known in criminology, that people do not fear most those punishments that are most likely to threaten them, but rather, those that they imagine to threaten them. This discrepancy was explained by theorists of moral panic with the distinction between "rational fears" and "irrational panics." Since, however, there are no criteria that could distinguish between the two kinds of reactions, the rational-irrational differentiation is debatable. Today's cultural interpretation considers it naively realistic to insist that the individual's experiences have to directly reflect the macrosocial trends in order to be considered rational. In certain circumstances, in certain groups, one or another type of crime occurs more frequently than in the national average, not to speak of the well-known unreliability of criminal statistics, which renders the comparison itself meaningless. But beyond this, cultural interpretation also brings into question that axiom of elite scientific culture, that traditional social scientific and statistical observations are more authentic and of a higher order than the images of everyday knowledge or such visions of popular culture as the crime story. Where crime is the object of gossip, newspapers or TV films, it is natural that people's fears, desires, fantasies will play a significant role in the picture created of the phenomenon. Elite culture is only willing to regard this as some kind of mistake or distortion, as if there existed some kind of objective standard, some general truth, concerning criminality, which is independent of people's thoughts and perceptions. From a culturalist perspective, these different expectations represent divergent, loosely related segments of reality, in which the picture of crime as it appears in everyday thinking as well as in such popular cultural images as the crime story enjoy a certain kind of priority over the more abstract descriptions of crime in official and scientific culture.

According to one survey, the Chicago dailies held that 26% of all crimes committed were murders, a percentage that exceeded many times over the actual number of murder cases. When, however, the newspaper readers were asked about the crime rate, their estimates were much closer to the actual proportions of murders committed, which suggests that people automatically differentiate between the actual and reported frequency of events. (Graber, 1984)

Only from the above examples does it become apparent why peoples' greatest source of fear is not what occurs most frequently in statistics. Why people's anxieties about crime is inseparable from other personal and collective anxieties. Why fears are never unambiguous, either in terms of their meanings or their effects, and why they are an integral part of the more general discourse about social order. Why the realities represented by the different scientific and other genres conjure up problems and explanations different from each other. And finally, why the crime story can only be understood in terms of its own idiom, the idiom of popular culture, through which the story is constructed and narrated.

The TV crime story can be regarded as a symbolic environment, whose goal is the creation of a collective identity in the viewers. This is made necessary by the fact that in the modern world, identity is constantly destabilized and its reconstruction is an ongoing process. For the modern individual lives in a world of fragments, which offers only social roles, but no coherent identity. At the same time, everyday culture nevertheless provides people a different kind of identity in which they can see themselves as the arbiters of their own fate. Here, they are not characters determined by outside roles, but vibrant, active figures, so-called social types. It is through the adventures of social types familiar to all of us that we realize our desire to break out of the world of fragments and its accompanying everyday routines and to symbolically transcend its existing boundaries. (Sumser, 1996) Popular culture leads us over into another, stylized world, in which not only the actors, but the places and the temporal dimensions differ from the everyday world. There is, for instance, neither past nor future, only the present; there is no implicit meaning, only what is visible. Naturally, the present dominates in everyday life, as well, but nor is there adventure, drama, or solution for the problems of crime. It is precisely for this reason that the crime story is important, because through the stylization of popular figures, it is capable of giving substance to otherness, adventure, and change and also to move beyond these. There exist, therefore, two universes, one of which is wholly intelligible and logical, and the other wholly contingent and artificial. The problem is that it is the world of the crime story that is human and comprehensible and our everyday life that is chaotic and artificial. In its social types (in the case of the crime story, these would be the figures of the detective, the criminal, the dupe, the victim, the helper, etc.) popular culture simplifies life and people to their most basic functions and deprives them of every anomaly and unnecessary characteristic. This is a black and white world even on color TV, where evil deeds are always committed by evil men, and good deeds by good men. Its rules are in sharp contrast with the fragmented world of everyday roles, where good people can do evil and evil people can do good. As a form of differentiation, we could say that roles are social categories, which are the analytic products of a fragmented world; while types are cultural categories, which are the elements and the sources of myth. It is misleading to oppose these two worlds in such a way as to valorize the experiential world above the fictive one. This is only allowed, argues Sumser, in the critique of social roles, where the stereotypes of a fragmented and alienated world are contrasted with an idealized alternative social world. This kind of opposition between the social and the cultural worlds, however, is not possible in every case, but only under certain conditions. Fiction is fiction precisely because it does not want to appear to be reality. It is not stereotyped because TV drama does not attempt to be a document, but on the contrary, wants to mobilize an archetypal myth. It is not a photograph but a diagram, it is a blue print of life. (Sumser, 1996) This why we can call "super normal" or "ideal normative" those rules that are to be found in popular culture. (Altheide and Snow, 1979)

Referring to the entertainment industry of Hollywood, Gitlin talks about "L.A. liberalism" as the ideology of late-twentieth century popular myth, which uses the life experience and perspective of the humble urban population to build up its message, with the aid of self-conscious marketing techniques. (Gitlin, 1985) The radical democratic interpretation of popular culture differentiates itself at this point from its left-wing interpreters. Under popular culture, Hall understood the everyday subculture of the working classes, and considered the other sections of society as forming a part of the masses determined by the hegemony of the dominant culture; in other words, in an important way, he returned to that conception of mass culture that he had so effectively condemned at an earlier point. (Clarke, 1990) The radical democratic conception essentially broadened this perspective, when it simply identified popular culture with the culture of everyday life, which is independent of social classes. According to this conception, it is the urban individual, the man of the street, the everyday self in all people that forms the imaginary center of popular culture, that is the embodiment and the reference of social harmony. The goal of television is to give expression to the interests, tastes and points of view of this self and the media speaks to the whole community through the everyday culture of this persona. It follows from the role of the lowest common denominator that the most important criterion that the media must satisfy is the hegemony of popularity, simplicity, and comprehensibility.

From the point of view of understanding our narrower topic, the representation of social order, it is of great significance that the everyday worldview of society is defined essentially by the interpretation of the boundaries of the community. (Ericson, 1966) The hegemonic myth is a dependent of the interaction between the dominant center and the deviant external forces that threaten it. The ordinary self is situated between these two forces, and is equally under the influence of both forces. Crime oppresses him but at the same time, destruction carries the promise of change. The center represents protection and order, but also rigidity and conservatism. The man of everyday life vacillates between two extremes and decides from case to case which pole he should approach, but he is always alarmed if either one or the other attempts to exercise complete power over him. People do not like to live in chaos but neither do they enjoy a police state. The crime story – and the other media genres of popular culture – are the stories of this constantly changing situation which, in their simplifications, are understandable by everyone. They not only entertain, but also orient; they are analytic tools that express the little man's actual desires, possibilities.

The basic frame of the crime story is simple; there is always an illegal and intentional murder, which was provoked by jealousy or some other common motive. There cannot be a crime story without a corpse, but no matter how important the corpse may be, it is not enough. There needs to be mystery, a secretive criminal, an anonymous crime, a person innocently accused, a detective and traces.(Kiraly, 1998) In contrast with the Western, where the tensions arise on the boundaries between civilization and the wilderness, in the crime story, it is always the transgression of emotionally laden moral boundaries within the community that are the source of conflict. The greater the distance from reality, the wider the possibilities for the representation of the broadest ranges of crime and punishment. Accordingly, in the soap operas, which take place in situations close to everyday life, the crimes are smaller, usually consisting of family or youthful problems, which arise from interpersonal conflicts. In other instances, for example in spy stories, where the use of force is not inhibited on either side, the scriptwriters are able to give freer reign to their fantasies. These stories are built on "de-realization," the actors use high tech and secret weapons against each other, and they shoot at each other not with guns but with armored tanks. According to the basic rules of popular culture, the crime story simplifies complex issues while personifying them, as the battle between heroes and villains. Sociologically, this constitutes a part of a ritual of norm reinforcement and solidarity. (Klapp, 1954) The heroes and villains create sanctions and the goal of the ritual in the crime story is the restoration of the original state of innocence before the transgression. (Alexander,1998)

The greatest problem of the earlier studies cited is the fact that they failed to take account of the unique generic, narrative and typological characteristics of popular culture. The so-called violence profiles, for example, which were "calculated" by the representatives of the cultivation school, only took into account the effects of open, physical violence, such as murder, bodily injury or pain. The determination of violence, however, is much more complicated than this: it is not a definable event, but rather the relationship between means and ends, in an emotionally defined force field, where rage, irrationality, and hatred fully influence the action. When for example, in the course of content analysis, the number of murders was quantified without discriminating whether the violence occurred in a cartoon, or a comic film or perhaps a documentary, then they completely misrepresented the essential meaning of violence. (Sparks, 1992) Beyond this, the role of style is just as important as that of genre; for our relationship to, and tolerance of, the violence committed by the hero is completely different if the tone of the narrative is heroic, or if the same event is presented in the dry, balanced account of a judge. In other words, it is never a question of violence alone, but rather of how it is presented in popular regimes of representation, what it is used for, and how it is legitimated.

The crime story is not only a production but also a construction, created for influencing a previously targeted audience. Thus, we need to explore not only who says or does what, but also who forces whom, how, for what purpose? The investigators also have to take into account the fact that the scriptwriters of every crime story attempt to scrupulously fulfill the expectations of the audience even on the level of the creation of the story. The makers of crime stories manipulate the tension between innovation and familiarity and the release of this tension according to the kind of audience that they face and the kind of expectations they presuppose this audience to have.

What then is the connection between violence and its special narrative mode? How does the fiction, which lacks a direct truth criterion, create its effect, since a crime story cannot be judged on the basis of whether it is true or not. Aesthetically, it is the seduction and the entertainment function of the story that accomplishes this, making it unnecessary to compare it with reality or to constantly ask if what we see is true or not? The sociological characteristic of the crime story lies in the fact that the story of violence establishes legality. It does this in part by creating a new situation or condition in the course of the action and partly by legitimating this. There is a close inner connection between the stages of the analysis and the categories of the explanation. The function of the narrative is to lead the audience through the stages of the story to an understanding of the message. The fundamental generic rule of the crime story is that the moral dilemma created by the act of violence can only be resolved with the use of legitimate violence. In this way, the viewer is at the same time a part of not only a sociological and moral discourse, but also an aesthetic one, when he consumes, analyzes and enjoys the film. The goal of the narrative of popular culture is to awaken in the readers fear and pity, to create identification, and to convince them through these indirect means.

The logic of the crime story is that our world wold loses its self-explanatory nature, and that we should become insecure. However, in contrast with elite culture, which impels us to the transformation of our earlier self and world, popular culture tends in just the opposite direction, and promises security through a return to the familiar, to what we have already learned to love and to accept. Since, however, in the crime story the initial conflict is already based on a change in our earlier situation, the return to this point is only possible through the unceasing use of violence by the hero. In other words, repetition, closure and violence are in close compositional relationship with each other. (Sparks, 1992)

Television stories of violence provide viewers with information about the good and protection against evil; they lead them from the transgression, to the restitution of norms, from the loss of security to the recovery of certainty, from a horror of crime to the acceptance of punishment, from chaos to order. (Garland, 1990) The solution of the crime story, however, creates resolution for the audience only on a temporary basis, and at the cost of implication in an already existing condition of anxiety and uncertainty. In the choice and presentation of deviance as a theme, the scriptwriter already presupposes that the viewer had previous doubts about the social order, which the film proceeds to reinforce. In this way, the crime story makes into a prime dramaturgical principle the ambivalence of modern society that finds expression in other areas of popular culture as well: its theme is the constant play of forces between anxiety and reassurance.

Despite their apparent differences, the crime story has an inner relationship to another dominant genre of popular culture, the melodrama, which is also concerned with the dissolution of order, but whose dramaturgical principle is the reconstitution of order through harmonious means. The terror film and the sentimental, idyllic or romantic forms refer to each to each other and although their coexistence if full of conflict, it gains its common meaning from the category of the adventure. The question is whether the gentleness of the hero can tame life? Whether gentleness or aggression wins over destructiveness? Whether the villain needs to be opposed with his own weapons? (Kiraly, 1998) In contrast with the moralizing melodrama, the crime story presents an alternating mixture of cynicism and moralizing and, therefore, operates on a much wider register than the melodrama. The crime story gives witness to a loss of faith in the certainty of social order, and to the insight that order is based not on harmony but on the inevitable use of violence, both in the good and the evil camp. As Kiraly concludes, "the virtue of the detective is not the opposite of evil, but rather, evil put to the use of virtue."

We have reached the final section of our essay, where we are once again able to return to a unified sociological frame within which to examine our earlier problem that has emerged as social psychology, media criticism, criminology, film theory and so on. We are seeking to answer the question, why television is appropriate for the depiction of certain morality tales and how its use and interpretation of these tales transforms its audiences? As a starting point, we will choose the explanation provided by criminology, which, in contrast with other areas of the social sciences, has always utilized Durkheim's theories of normative social integration. According to this theory, social order is based on commonly-held beliefs about the workings of the world and about how it should work. Within these collective beliefs, the drawing of moral boundaries has a particularly important place, which outlines the criteria of acceptable behavior and sends a signal to social actors: so far and no further. According to Durkheim, the relationship between reality and ideals is always full of tension, the boundaries require constant classification, and it is through deviance that breaches in the moral boundary become apparent. (Durkheim 1933) In past ages, it was public punishment (hanging, decapitation, stoning, etc.) that played the role of establishing norms and creating community in the group. In the modern world, however, this is an obvious impossibility even for physical reasons. (Thompson, 1995) Durkheim still believed that public holidays and festivals, which recalled the sacred origins of secular norms, still had the power to create cohesion, for the modern reader, it is clear that this has very limited applicability in the case of contemporary society. Sumser, continuing Erkison's thought, put forth the idea that in modern societies the power of normative regulation resides not so much in holidays as in events that thematize and make public the conflict between the official, dominant value system and the transgression of the different deviant norms. (Erikson, 1966; Sumser, 1996) He added, however, that the difficulty, from the perspective of moral regulation of society, lies in the fact that the majority of the events and actions in secular society cannot be categorized either as official or as deviant and therefore cannot provide self-evident moral lessons. There are, in connection with this objection, two distinct problems that need to be answered. The first is how to dramatize and make visible for everyone the dominant and deviant norms that had become unrecognizably intermingled in the realm of everyday life? The second is how to appropriate in modern societies the demonstrated social values. Both these tasks have to be accomplished without the possibility of physically bringing together the members of the community and exposing them directly to an actual clash between the desirable and deviant norms in the context of a ceremony of ritual punishment, such as a hanging. According to Sumser, the crime stories address precisely this difficulty and provide a successful solution for it. It allows us to witness, within a short space of time, the transgression of social norms and also the accompanying punishment that brings about the process of normalization. Films, unlike earlier forms of media, make it unnecessary to render the conflict realistic. The visual information is sufficient, because the effect of the vision makes it possible to experience the primary event and to undergo the inner purification ritual without necessarily being physically present. The crime stories of modern mass entertainment can be regarded as a certain kind of public moral drama, that provides examples for every member of society and makes possible emotionally intense exposure to generally valid norms that are appropriated through the concrete instances of deviance. It is not only the lack of a traditional, concrete public sphere that makes this phenomenon necessary, but also the lack of a coherent, all-embracing value system in modern societies, which no longer associate values with principles but with "situations." (Douglas, 1971) Thus, the process of influencing happens through the presence or lack of presence of particular examples in the normative structure of stories and also through the applicability of the advertised values to reality. No matter what the content of the moral story may be, its concrete examples can only become the basis for general norms for a brief period of time. The reasons for this is that there always exists a tension between the actual situation and ideal values and the demand for social order necessitates the constant reformulation of crime stories. It is this process that makes it impossible to talk in the abstract about the content of crime stories, which need to be examined from case to case, to see how relevant a particular story is to a situation.

According to Durkheim, punishment is definition and identification at the same time; it is a guardian of the values of the community and also a means of renewal of the commitment of the members to the collectivity. In spite of its heuristic power, Durkheim's theories have found frequent and many-sided opposition. Among these, the most important sociological critics can be divided into two camps. According to one, Durkheim blurs the distinctions between traditional and modern societies, which, however, represent different levels of complexity in social organization, and for this reason are not comparable with each other. In the case of maintaining social order in unusually heterogeneous societies, the significance of crime and morality is much less important and much more fragmented than in traditional societies, where this is the primary form of social integration of the community. The other objection questions the equation sign between archaic myths and such contemporary moral tales as the crime story. In opposition to traditional myths, which express the homogeneous values of society, and which unambiguously parallel society's stories of crime and punishment, the mystical metanarratives of modern narratives can at most be found implicitly in the stories. Moreover, they often define values in a self-contradictory spirit, so that the narratives themselves give expression to a fragmented world. This is probably why Foucault thought, in contrast with Durkheim, that the social role of punishment in the modern world cannot be the symbolic expression of revenge, but rather of technological correction; or that the goal of punishment is not eliciting ideological self-critique in the form of confession and stories, but of an attitude of submission and docility. (Foucault, 1990) After the popularity he enjoyed in the 1980s, it now appears, nevertheless, that Foucault's standpoint was overly technological in character. (Garland, 1990) Parallel with the refined technical innovations of the prison and of disciplinary society, described by Foucault, it seems that the traditional moral patterns continue to flourish along with the modern renovation of collective beliefs and symbols. Garland also brought to our attention that the audience has an important role along side the hero and the villain, that it is precisely the popularity of TV crime stories that prove the importance of spectacle and the moral story in the reformulation of norms even in modern societies. The maintenance of moral sensitivity and loyalty toward public values fulfills an integrative function in modern societies and this includes the nourishment of collective emotions as well as the satisfaction of a desire for the sight of vengeance. Since the disappearance of public punishment, it is the media that gives daily expression to deviance for the moral instruction of the community. (Ericson, 1991) The different forms of TV violence, which is the symbolic composition of extreme situations of deviance, satisfy this need in an entertaining way. They accomplish this, moreover, in such a way as to allow the themes of the crime story to change from time to time, along with the form of the media that conveys the stories. Its effectiveness can be explained to a large extent by this high degree of mobility and adaptability to new situations.

Television as a particular form of the media, and TV violence as a particular genre, do more for the modern appropriation and the unceasing renewal of the social order than its critics would dare to admit even to themselves.