Television and Violence: A Symposium - Introductions

This Symposium on Television and Violence was developed as the first in a series to be offered under the auspices of the Joseph Kushner Distinguished Professorship in Civil Liberties Law, held by Professor Leon Friedman. We have gathered today to discuss television and violence because it is a topic of current interest, a new concern. Some of us are old enough to remember similar distress expressed in the 1950s, primarily by private persons rather than the government, over violence in comic books. Throughout that decade the debate came to focus on the effect of violence in television.

Recently, as you all know, there has been renewed public debate on this kind of issue.