Little Brother is Watching You

What are the two most violent things screened on television?
Forget the late night episodes of CSI (insert any US city here). If you want to see something truly shocking, disturbing, violent or riddled with bad language then television news or live sport is as good a place as any to start.
Take the very unfortunate incident last week of Ukranian swimming coach Mikhaylo Zubkov in a violent poolside brawl in Melbourne at the World Swimming Championships.
Live on TV at 6.30 at night families tuning in to see the world's greatest swimmers in action - what you would have to consider a "safe"family viewing - were treated to extremely disturbing vision.
One of the most disturbing parts of the incident for television viewers was that it was live which means that no-one could know what would happen next yet it was being screened without protection into homes at a time which is in the G classification zone.
Of course the great out for broadcasters is that news and live sport are exempted from classification under the code provided "the licensee exercises care in selecting material for broadcast having regard to:
2.4.1.1 the likely audience of the program; and
2.4.1.2 any identifiable public interest reason for presenting the program
material."
You'd have to wonder exactly what care is taken in broadcasting unedited live television footage of a volatile situation. In reality exactly none. Which is the problem. The incident, in itself, did not end up being too bad but no-one could have known the result.
But the frightening thing is the trend. With the increasing number of surveillance cameras and the fact that we all now carry devices capable of capturing video and still images the possibility of disturbing footage being captured and broadcast is higher than ever before. Indeed the television stations are falling over each other to get their hands on our footage and the most "attractive" footage to broadcasters seems to be the most violent footage.
All of us with children should be very alarmed. The more of this kind of footage children see, the more likely it is that they will succumb to wicked world syndrome. If you see this happening all the time on television it's not a big leap to start believing that's all that's happening all the time outside the square box.
Our children deserve better. Horrible things do happen in the world every day and for their own protection our children do need know that horrible people capable of doing horrible things are out there.
They just don't need to be deluged with it and the danger is that that's what is going to happen unless we give real thought to what happens to all that footage being collected by all those cameras all over the place.