Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations

13 A social drama: media violence controversies and anti-violence campaign groups

Annette Hill

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

The role of anti-violence campaign groups in relation to media violence controversies has received little attention in the discipline of media ethics. It is my intention in this chapter to outline the problematic ethical situation that emer ges when we look at the way in which British anti-violence campaign groups tar get media violence as a moral and environmental hazard. Media violence is perceived to be both hazardous to vulnerable victims, such as children, and to the cultural environment as a whole. Films such as Child’s Play 3 (Jack Bender 1993) or Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone 1994) are labelled as evil and depraved; ...