Violent reruns: Our faults lie not in our TV stars but in ourselves.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Rant - Brief Article

REMEMBER THE ROTTEN '70s TV series The Incredible Hulk? Based on a Marvel comic, it followed the bathetic journey to the end of night of one David Bruce Banner, who famously got belted by gamma rays and thereafter turned into a musclebound, green-skinned rageaholic whenever he had to stand behind shoppers with too many items in the express checkout line, renew his driver's license, or sit through another Jimmy Carter sermonette on thermostat settings.

According to the latest research on television and violent behavior--as genre of the social sciences that is the rough equivalent of the seemingly unkillable permutations of Scooby-Doo cartoons--it turns out that we're all Incredible Hulks now, especially if we watch more than three hours of the boob tube a day.

This we know thanks to the persistent efforts Dr. Jeffrey G. Johnson of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute presumably, he's on the staff). Johnson and his fellow researchers tracked around 700 kids in two upstate New York counties over 17 years and found that those who watched a lot of television were more likely to be aggressive as they got older.

Over one eight-year period, say the researchers, only 5.7 percent of the participants who watched less than an hour of TV a day committed a "violent act." The figure was 18.4 percent for those who watched one to three hours a day and 25.3 percent for the osteinsible couch potatoes planted in from of the green-eyed monster for more than three hours a day. Even more striking: The study found that watching any sort of programming is enough to unleash the Hulk within. We probably knew this all along, but apparently 7th Heaven enrages us every bit as much as South Park.

Sounding more like a mad scientist than a real one--and brushing aside his own work's catholic condemnation of small-screen spectacle--Johnson told The New York Times, "By decreasing exposure to media violernce, we may be able to prevent million of American from being raped and murdered."

This latest study is, of course, the same claptrap that we've heard ever since TVs be came a common house-hold appliance; it participates in the venerable, centumes-old tradition of vilifying mass culture ranging from...