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Americans Say Media Assaulting Morals
This article was written by Katherine Poythress, correspondent for CNSNews.com Sixty-eight percent of Americans say the media have damaged moral values in America, according to a report released Wednesday by the Culture and Media Institute (CMI). The report also concludes that the more a person watches television, the less likely he or she is to believe that the media are influencing the nation's morals. CMI is a division of the Media Research Center, which is also the parent organization of Cybercast News Service. Michael Medved, syndicated radio talk-show host, delivered the keynote address at the conference. "This is one of the most important studies of its kind in years," he said, "because it is one of the first to examine the amount instead of the quality of television Americans are watching." Robert Knight, director of CMI, pointed to television's "seductive effect," which makes a person less likely to believe his or her moral values are being affected.
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Other findings in the report include:
The more a person watches television, the more permissive his attitudes toward sexual issues like sex outside of marriage, abortion and homosexuality are likely to be.
The more a person watches television, the less likely he is to value religious principles and obedience to God. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, said "[Liberalism] is seeping into the culture and it's having its corrosive effect." David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, said he was not surprised by the results of the study. "The real impact that's a little bit more subtle, but very, very pervasive, is the ability of media to shape norms and values. That's why advertisers like their messages in the media, because they know that they can influence us. "I think it's circular," Walsh said about the media's influence. "I think that media is both a mirror of society and an influencer of society. I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both."
But Walsh said it is important to realize that the correlation between watching a lot of television and being less suspicious of the media do not necessarily go hand in hand. "You can certainly say that those two things go together, but you can't say that one causes the other, and they did imply that [in the study], and so that would be, I think, a weakness in their interpretation of the /{CMI/ study," Walsh said. "I think it's an interesting study, to show those connections, but when they make the leap from correlation to cause-effect, they're making a leap that they shouldn't be making," Walsh added. Medved closed his keynote address by stipulating that he was "not trying to suggest that television causes all these problems." But, he added, "it certainly exacerbates them."
© CNS News.com. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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