"As John Frasier argues in ‘’Violence in the Arts’’, the complexity of mediated violence is immense, and it can and has fulfilled numerous and varied functions: ‘violence as release, violence as communication, violence as play, violence as self-affirmation, or self-defense, or self-discovery, or self-destruction, violence as a a flight from reality, violence as the truest sanity in a particular situation, and so on’ (1974: 9). That is essentially Martin Barker’s argument when he writes, ‘There simply isn’t a “thing” called “violence in the media”’ (199: 10). Barker has further noted that the expression ‘media violence’ is ‘one of the most commonly repeated, and one of the most ill-informed, of all time…’’There simply is no category “media violence” which can be researched’ (1997: 27-28; emphasis in original), which is why Barker argues that seventy years of social-scientific effects research has been largely useless: It has been constructed on the faulty logic that there is some such all-encompassing category as ‘media violence’ that can contain everything from movies, to television shows, to comic books, to newspaper photographs, to video games, to televised news reports and documentary footage."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Violence_in_media