Just how risky is TV really?

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Few pediatricians would argue that children watch too much television, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has promulgated some appropriate guidelines for childhood TV viewing times.

On the other hand, in promoting the virtues of reducing TV exposure, we must be sure not to “oversell” the actual risks. There have been a number of studies suggesting that TV viewing can be associated with increased aggressive behavior in children. This has actually led to published suggestions that the public health concerns of media violence approach those of smoking. In this issue of The Journal, Ferguson and Kilburn report a meta-analysis which they performed to assess the strength of the oft-reported link between watching media violence and aggressive behavior in children. They conclude that a combination of publication bias and weak measures of aggression are common in such studies, and the actual effect size for this association is trivial.

Although there still are plenty of reasons to minimize television watching in children, we may want to avoid basing this advice entirely on the risks of promoting aggression. For those who believe that violence in the media has hit some sort of all-time low, it may be useful to read the banquet scene from Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus.