TV's Influence

So after class, I got back to my dorm and not five minutes later did I find a rather gruesome article about a 17 year old boy in England who murdered and dismembered his girlfriend. So what makes this relevant to this blog, you may be asking? He was obsessed with the hit TV show "Dexter," which for those of you who don't know the story, is about a "forensic expert who is secretly a serial killer." In the fashion of what he saw on the show, he killed his girlfriend in a completely horrifying way.

Now, I'm not saying that "Dexter" shouldn't be shown on TV, or that crime shows should be banned. I myself love them, among obviously millions of others. I'm also not saying that this show caused him to kill the girl, but I definitely don't think it's a mere coincidence. It makes me think of "Catcher in the Rye" in relation to the murder of John Lennon - it's not like schools decided that the book couldn't be part of the curriculum anymore. The media - book or TV - is not the source of the crime, the person is. That being said, it would be fair to say that neither of the people who committed murder were mentally healthy. What is a dark, entertaining show to us that we know is morally wrong, could appear to someone who is not healthy in that sense, as something completely normal and rational, as weird as that seems to us. I know that this is a very controversial subject, and it's much more complex than I'm putting it here, but what I'm trying to get at is this: TV isn't the issue, but it can definitely influence the issue. We have to be careful about what ideas we are putting out into the world.