Violence in TV: Analysis of Children´s Programming

Abstract

The concept of Public Service has recently suffered a big transformation. After loosing its educational and positive connotations what remains now is its negative dimension: child protection. The present article shows the first results of an exhaustive and longitudinal research over the television content broadcast during the special protection hours. Focus has been paid to violence infractions. With the classic methodology for this type of content research analysing over 8,100 hours of visual work and codification. The results offer the data from comparative description of infractions on every network: programs, people involved on violence acts, period of time and so on. It also shed some light on the evolution over the last four years of television content from a comparative perspective. The article concludes with the resulting data showing how during the last two years, with a stricter self selection of content by networks, has not alleviated the level of infractions, and violence is still used by networks to increase their share. The final remark is that it seems as if TV channels are victims of their own behaviour when making a choice of content selection. The highest number of infractions are found, in all networks, public or private, on the programming with which they identify..