Street Violence and the Media Essay example -- Argumentative Persuasiv

Violence Imitates the Media In this essay we explore the increasingly app arnt data link between the violence brutalizing teachers and kids in our schools, and the violence which the media regularly serves us through word pictures, TV shows, shock jocks, and other supposedly innocuous outlets. Is it any enjoy that reporters and journalists are picking up the John Paul II formulate culture of death to refer to Americas culture? In the anxious hours next the Columbine spirited School shootings, Americas television screens repeatedly showed a slow-motion film time in which a black-clad, shotgun-toting boy bursts into a classroom and fills his old(prenominal) students full of buckshot. The gunman was teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of Titanic, and the garment came not from a surveillance camera but from Scott Kalverts The Basketball Diaries, the 1995 film said to have been a favorite of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the black-clad, shotgun-toting boys who strolled in to their school one aglitter(predicate) April morning and murdered a teacher, twelve of their classmates, and themselves, leaving behind 51 homemade bombs for the police to defuse. (Basketball) Though The Basketball Diaries was promptly pulled from video stores by the studio that released it, the gigantic-simmering debate over graphic portrayals of violence in the media had long since boiled over. Not that anything new was said-the only difference was the glib immediacy conferred by the shedding of blood. The argument itself remains as agonizingly familiar as a family quarrel Did movies and television make us what we are today, or do they merely show us what we have dumbfound? In the case of The Basketball Diaries, the thing speaks for itself. To watch that horrific clip is to... ...philosophically trained pope is not given to shallow sound bites, and when he speaks of the culture of death, he has in mind a deep-seated, collective nihilism of which illegal drugs, idiot shock jocks, and mindlessly violent movies are mere symptoms. How to break its stranglehold? We all know the answer, but rarely is the doubt frame in so starkly to any of us as it was to 17-year-old scented wattle Bernall. Trapped at gunpoint in the library of Columbine High School, she was asked by one of her attackers whether she believed in God. Yes, I believe in God, she replied, and indeed he shot her dead. It is hard to imagine a more outstanding scene-and harder still to imagine that anyone in Hollywood, least of all Doug Liman, would dare to put it into a movie. Sources Consulted The Basketball Diaries http//www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1995/04/975715.html