Bibliographical Essay

Media violence remains one of the most hotly debated topics in media, communication and cultural studies. For example, the extent, if any, to which media violence affects or influences viewers has provoked numerous qualitative and quantitative studies.

There is a broad diversity of scholarly analysis of media representations of violence. For comprehensive and critical overviews, from different perspectives, see W. James Potter, On Media Violence (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999); Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver, Media Violence (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2003). Jolyon P. Mitchell, Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) considers not only the role of journalists and producers, but also the responsibilities and responses of audiences.

Critical reflection and narrative descriptions in the numerous memoirs or autobiographies of journalists and photographers who covered conflict include: Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Granta Books, 1998 [1959]); Fergal Keane, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey (London: Penguin, 1995); Don McCullin, Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life's Work in Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); John Simpson, The Wars against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad (London: Pan MacMillan, 2004).

There is also growing scholarly literature relating to media, conflict and war. See, for example, the journal Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from 2008). Some focus on a single conflict or geographical area, while others on various wars. These include: Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1989); Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam, rev. edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer, Media at War: The Iraq Crisis (London: Sage, 2004); Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Broader themes are considered in Colleen Roach (ed.), Communication and Culture in War and Peace (London: Sage, 1993).

Increasingly, scholars agree that many different kinds of violence appear in the media. This has led some to analyse issues relating to form and content. Representative texts include Barrie Gunter and J. Harrison, Violence on Television: An Analysis ofAmount, Nature, Location, and Origin of Violence in British Programmes (London: Routledge, 1998); Barrie Gunter, J. Harrison and M. Wykes, Violence on Television: Distribution, Form, Context and Themes (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003); on the effects on an audience see Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds.), Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate (London: Routledge, 1997); on how different viewers interact with what they see, Philip Schlesinger et al., Women Viewing Violence (London: BFI, 1992) and Barrie Gunter and Mallory Wober, Violence on Television: What Viewers Think (London: John Libbey, 1988). Others interrogate commonly held beliefs about media violence, e.g.

Several authors have reflected upon how violence entertains and how news media are commonly drawn towards spectacularly dramatic forms of violence. Sissela Bok, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). Scholars have reflected upon violence as a form of communication for several decades. See Alex P. Schmid and Janny de Graaf, Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1982). Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, more studies were produced reflecting upon the relationship between terrorism and media. These include Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003) and Pippa Norris et al. (eds.), Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government, and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003).

A recurring concern is about the impact of media violence upon youngsters. See, for example, Edward L. Palmer and Aimee Dorr (eds.), Children and the Faces of Television: Teaching, Violence, Selling (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Some become more polemical or advocate changes in policy or practice, such as Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (New York: Crown, 1999). Some argue that representing violence is necessarily morally problematic or dangerous. From this perspective, viewers need to be inoculated or protected. David Buckingham critically describes this view in Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

In ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research', Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1963), 167-91, Johan Galtung argues the need for an ‘extended concept ofviolence'. Distinctions are now made between the role of different media in making violence visible and invisible, such as domestic violence, that often takes place behind closed doors against women and children.

Several writers argue that what is shown and what is not shown has implications for how audiences react to representations ofviolence. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003); Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999); John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Luc Boltanksi, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Finally, some scholars do not confine themselves to contemporary examples from the so-called modern or Western media, as many of the issues raised by the phenomenon of violence in the media are by no means new. Consider for example Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) and Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004); and for a study drawing on a range of international examples from different periods see Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (New York: Routledge, 2012). Many studies described above illustrate the value of developing a more nuanced approach, demonstrating that violence in the media is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, which merits creative, critical and thoughtful engagement.