Springer’s wisdom
: Blogging colleague Joe Territo — who’s cleverly turned his blog into a forum for email interviews with the notable — has Jerry Springer today, talking about youth and violence:
A. I think blaming the entertainment industry for violence among our youth is absurd. If violent movies and television shows were the problem, you’d expect to find the same level of violence in Canada that you do in America, since Canadians mostly watch the same shows and movies that we do. In fact, of course, Canada has a violence rate many times smaller than ours. And the truth is that the vast majority of kids in this country are perfectly capable of distinguishing between make-believe violence and real life. Sure, there may be a few souls who are motivated to violence by what they see on TV or in the movies, just as there is a small percentage of adults who can’t drink liquor responsibly and become alcoholics. But when we tried banning alcohol, Prohibition wasn’t exactly a ringing success.
