" Do you know anything about Centerwall? Odd name."

Odd, but not easily forgotten.  I was surprised when I read it, for I remembered from my days in the academic criminology biz.

In 1993, the neo-conservative journal "The Public Interest" published an article by Centerwall in which he argued that television was responsible for much of the violence in the modern world.  There, or perhaps in another iteration of the same ideas and data, he claimed that children's exposure to TV accounted for something like half the murders in the U.S.

The quality of the data wasn't the sort that would hold up well to scholarly criticism (but then again, Irving Kristol never let the lack of good evidence get in the way of a neo-con ideological statement), and I doubt that many criminologists take Centerwall seriously.  The link with his bit on VN, aside from a willingness to publish conclusions based on flimsy evidence, seems to be a certain conventional moralism, a Michael-Medvedlike tendency to wring hands over the threats to our moral and physical security lurking in popular culture.

Jay Livingston