Bill Clinton: “What you said about the candy, that makes a point about what I think is important about the television violence study.…”

“What you said about the candy, that makes a point about what I think is important about the television violence study. It seems to me--and what you said about the hours--it's not so much--and I know a lot of people in the media who produce these programs get very defensive. They think they're being unfairly attacked. They talk about there's always good content, often a good moral to the story of some of these things. But it's the cumulative impact of it. I don't think they see it from the parents--perspective of the parents. It's not that our kids couldn't handle this program, that program, or the other program. It is a total impact of hour after hour after hour, day after day. And the candy thing you mentioned made the point to me that--what it means is that people began to think of things as normal that we should never accept as normal, so we began to accept a level of violence in our society, that it's normal. It's not true. And that's the thing that bothers me. We have to go back. Now, one of the things that we've really worked hard on in our administration is trying to help communities reduce the crime rate. And I think we ought to--we need to keep at it until we go back to a time when people think that violence is abnormal, not normal; when crime is the exception, not the rule. And I think that it's much harder if kids--like 5 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 15 years, they're dominated by this notion that it's a violent, brutal world, people do whatever they can get away with doing. [The Vice President mentioned the estimate that a child would witness 20,000 simulated murders on television by high school graduation, and then asked if anyone had ever had to comfort a child whose sleep was affected by what they saw on television. Several participants answered that they had, and one complained that even if the programming was acceptable, the commercials could be a problem.]”