Media Violence and Aggression

Tom Grimes (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Grimes spent 12 years in broadcast journalism, which included work at WCBS-TV and ABC News in New York, and as news anchor and news director at KERA-TV in Dallas, Texas. When Grimes entered the academic profession in 1986, he became a research fellow and faculty member at the Mass Communication Research Center, which is located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Grimes held the Ross Beach Chair in Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University from 1991 to 2007 Grimes is the author of 43 research studies, some of which have appeared in journals including Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Health Communication, and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and in anthologies of research, such as Communication Yearbook. He continues to work professionally, pro bono, for Kansas Public Television. Grimes also holds a non-paying appointment as adjunct professor of Clinical Child Psychology at The University of Kansas's Clinical Child Psychology Program. James A. Anderson, Ph.D. (University of Iowa), Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Communication and Community in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is the author/co-author/editor of 17 books. His more than 100 chapters, articles, and research monographs are in the areas of family studies, cultural studies, media literacy, organizational studies, communicative ethics, methodology, and epistemology. Professor Anderson has been recognized as a "Master Teacher" by the Western States Communication Association and was recently given the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Broadcast Education Association. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He is an active consultant in university administration, distance learning, and applied technology. Lori Bergen, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the A. Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University. She was formerly Associate Director of the Miller School, where she teaches mass communication ethics, reporting, PR writing, research methods and media literacy. Her research about newspapers, journalists, children and television violence appears in Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Health Communication, Human Communication Research and Mass Communication & Society. Bergen served on the national press staff for a 1980 presidential campaign, worked for newspapers and magazines in Kansas and Indiana during the 1980s, and continues to work as a public TV journalist, contributing public affairs reporting for Kansas Public Television. She received a Kaiser Family Health Foundation grant to produce a documentary on health care in rural communities, and was a fellow of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Program in Journalism Excellence. Bergen was a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Education for Journalism and Mass Communication in 2002-2003, and was head of the organization's Professional Freedom and Responsibility Committee and the Newspaper Division.

1. Setting the Stage 2. A Short History of the Concept of Effects 3. The Epistemology of Media Effects 4 The Social Scientific "Theory" That Never Quite Fit 5. Is it Just Science? 6. The World According to Causationists 7. The Biggest Cultural Variable of All: The Child 8. The Role of Psychopathology in the Media 9. The Attempt to Make an Idology a Science 10. To Legislate or Not to Legislate Against Media Violence

"The authors take strong issue with the notion of convergence as it concerns media violence research and painstakingly examine the major pitfalls in extrapolating results from experimental settings to real world behavior...they also lay out a strong case for why any truly meaningful social policy cannot be derived from the extant literature on media and violence." -JOURNAL OF MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY "The authors of Media Violence and Aggression: Science and Ideology, Tom Grimes, James A. Anderson, and Lori Bergen, are determined to leave no stone unturned, no perspectives unexplored, no names left unnamed of those in the field with whom, on both empirical and theoretical grounds, they strenuously disagree. It is an engaging book that needed to be and is up close and personal. In so doing, they have produced what may be the most comprehensive critique and rebuttal to date of the omnipresent media-violence and aggression argument." -JOURNAL OF MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY -- Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D. "Media Violence and Aggression is a thoughtful and sophisticated work that dismantles the core assumptions of the media violence hypothesis piece by piece...This book makes several core contributions to the discussion on media violence effects above those seen in other critical works." -- Christopher J. Ferguson "This notable book analyzes the epistemology of the theories, the methodology of the research findings, and the construction of concepts of childhood vulnerability. The authors also examine in detail the ontological problem of causation, tear apart empirical research into the pathology of violence, and dissect the effort to force science to fit ideology. Indeed, it should be read and agonized over by all scholars in the children and violence arena." -- Susan Tyler Eastman * Communication Booknotes *