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Author
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Category
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Subject
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Content
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1
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For the Strength of Youth
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Lds
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Media
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Depictions of violence often glamorize vicious behavior. They offend the spirit and make you less able to respond to others in a sensitive, caring way.They contradict the Savior's message of love for one another.
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2
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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Because of its sheer size, media today presents vast and sharply contrasting options. Opposite from its harmful and permissive side, media offers much that is positive and productive. Television offers histroy channels, discovery channels, education channels. One can still find movies and TV comedies and dramas that entertain and uplift and accurately depict the consequences of right and wrong. The Internet can be a fabulous tool of information and communication, and there is an unlimited supply of good music in the world. Thus our biggest challenge is to choose wisely what we listen to and what we watch.
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3
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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The choices we make in media can be symbolic of the choices we make in life. Choosing the trendy, the titillating, the tawdry in the TV programs or movies we watch can cause us to end up, if we're not careful, choosing the same things in the lives we live.
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4
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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Often the media's most devistating attacks on family are not direct or frontal or openly immoral. Intelligent evil is too cunning for that, knowing that most people still profess belief in family and in traditional values. Rather the attacks are subtle and amoral - issues of right and wrong don't even come up.
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5
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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Besides making our voices heard, let me conclude with seven things that every parent can do to minimize the negative effect media can have on our families:
(1) We need to hold family councils and decide what our media standards are going to be.
(2) We need to spend enough quality time with our children that we are consistently the main influence in their lives, not the media or any peer group.
(3) We need to make good media choices ourselves and set good examples for our children.
(4) We need to limit the amount of time our children watch TV or play video games or use the internet each day. Virtual reality must not become their reality.
(5) We need to use Internet filters and TV programming locks to prevent our children from "chancing upon" things they should not see.
(6) We need to have TVs and computers in a much-used common room in the home, not in a bedroom or a private place.
(7) We need to take time to watch appropriate media with our children and discuss with them how to make choices that will uplift and build rather than degrade and destroy.
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6
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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We should strive to change the corrupt and immoral tendencies in television and in society by keeping things that offend and debase out of our homes. In spite of all the wickedness in the world, and in spite of all the opposition to good that we find on every hand, we should not try to take ourselves or our children out of the world. Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven," or yeast. (Matt. 13:33.) We are to lift the world and help all to rise above the wickedness that surrounds us.
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7
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M. Russell Ballard
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Lds
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Media
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I believe that the desensitizing effect of such media abuses on the hearts and souls of those who are exposed to them results in a partial fulfillment of the Savior's statement that 'because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.'
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8
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Brad J. Bushman
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Lds
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Media
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According to film critic Michael Medved, the claim that the entertainment industry merely reflects the level of violence in society simply is not true: If this were true, then why do so few people witness murders in real life but everybody sees them on TV and in Movies? The most violent ghetto isn't in South Central L.A. or Southeast Washington, D.C.; it's on television.
About 350 characters appear each night on prime-time TV, but studies show an average of seven of these people are murdered every night. If this rate applied in reality, then in just 50 days everyone in the United States would be killed - and the last left could turn off the TV.
If the entertainment industry is a mirror that reflects the level of violence in society, it is a treacherous funhouse mirror that provides a distorted image of reality. There is far more violence in the "reel" world than in the real world.
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