MED4104 - Directed Study Week 4

This week in the lecture we discussed media regulation, 'Censorship', effects and moral panics. We looked at moral panics around media and regulations; moral panic is a widespread public fear that evildoers are attempting to destroy the fabric in our society, Stanley Cohen's work really launched this phrase. It is assumed that the media has direct effects on peoples behaviour, for instance, making audiences depraved from references to sex and violence through media thus, depoliticising audiences. This is where regulation comes into place, to protect vulnerable groups from these media effects, for example, censorship is in place to protect children from being exposed to this and also adult embarrassment. People who are for censorship believe it upholds morality held in society, citing moral panic and social behaviour, those who are against say it imposes standards rather than reflects them. 

For this weeks reading I found a journal article that looks specifically at censorship as a regulation 'Channel 4 and the Red Triangle: A case study in film curation and censorship on television' by Justin Smith. This article discusses channel 4's attempts at using a symbol of warning rather than censorship. The main issues of concern addressed in this article are, channel 4 showing films on TV that include sexual scenes and violence that certain viewers come across unknowingly. Channel 4 had to 'Ensure that programmes on channel 4 contain a suitable proportion of matter calculated to appeal to tastes and interest' (Smith, 2014: 487). Channel 4 wanted to find a way to go around this without breaking any regulations, Isaacs said "I came up with the notion of the red triangle" (1989: 122) the red triangle was a symbol that was used to tell viewers this programme contained either strong language, violence or sexual scenes, this triangle was a warning sign that remained in the corner of the screen throughout the programme. This sign provoked controversy, effective publicity and considerably higher audiences, however eventually this came to an end and channel 4 lost the battle of freedom over censorship as '92% wanted more information about programmes' (Smith, 2014: 493) and felt 'Text-based systems provided the best detail about programme content' (Smith, 2014: 493). 

Looking at the political context and the development of TV regulation in terms of censorship, we can see there has been a massive development in what is now acceptable to show on TV. Censorship is still in place for the same reasons however, sex and violence have come along way on TV and is now seen as quite ordinary, although some programs can be more graphic than others, audiences are warned that they may be affected by what they are about to see. Looking at the set readings; Bignell suggests that 'Bad language, sexual scenes an violence are considered to be outside the norms of behaviour' (Bignell, 2004:231) he believes regulations maintain standards of political neutrality. Nelmes states that 'Rather than reflecting standards, it imposes them' (Nelmes,1999: 48) he also believes that sexual scenes and violence through TV shapes social behaviour. Also looking through the Long and Wall textbook I can also see the effects and influences stated 'Because television seems to offer so much sex, violence, swearing and so on, and is ever present in the home, so society follows its lead' ( Long, 2012: 295). Overall from all readings we can see that without regulations in place TV/media is then to blame for society's behaviour and for creating negative effects.

References:

Bignell, J (2004). An Introduction to Television Studies, London: Routledge. pp 229-252

Long, P and Wall, T (2012). ‘Producing audiences: what do media do to people?’ IN Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2nd Edition), London: Pearson. pp 274-299

Nelmes, J (1999). An Introduction to Film Studies, 2^nd Edition, London: Routledge. pp. 48-53

Smith, J (2014). Channel 4 and the Red Triangle: A Case Study in Film Curation and Censorship on Television. Journal of British Cinema and Television. 11(4), pp 481-497.