We live in an era completely dictated by the media. From print to television, we can't escape the latest Hollywood scandal or the most popular Disney show. However, as the amount of television we watch increases, we are faced with the same nagging question. Does the media influence our behavior? My entire childhood I was taught that television would rot my brain and teach me to be a poor human being. Now we see this argument all the time, an outraged group of parents preaching about Miley Cyrus or Family Guy. America lives with this perpetual struggle between censorship and morality, but can we really blame all our problems on Seth Green? As a society we would like to believe that people are never fully responsible for their actions. Throughout history we have always put a driving force bigger than ourselves behind everything we do. When we see a story on the news about rising rates of teen pregnancy or school shootings, we would like to think it's all because of the media. That the sex and violence we see on TV involves crude and merciless acts. No one wants to believe that little Johnny down the street could do THIS, but little Johnny wasn't suddenly changed by thirty minutes of Comedy Central. Chances are, Johnny already had some issues to deal with. Because television, newsprint, and music are so readily available in our culture, the media seems like the perfect scapegoat for all our problems. However, when we observe violent or animalistic behavior, we cannot look at just one part of the equation and expect to solve the entire problem. We can think of an example where we look at two children growing up in America. One child comes from a wealthy, stable family, while the other comes from poverty and a broken home. These two guys can...... middle of paper......the first and fastest way to solve the problem is censorship, but what would that really look like? Cut, change and lose more than half of America's source of entertainment. When we talk about censorship we're not just talking about crime shows and music awards, we're talking about blacking out our news, eliminating segments from the history channel, creating a complete fantasy world that says nothing bad can ever happen. This is precisely when we treat the media as television, when we eliminate them as an outlet for our anger, the blame spills over to other things. After analyzing television we will enter the dark age of book burnings, it seems extreme, but if we can't find things to blame in television we will turn to other sources. The idea of ​​censorship may have good intentions, but by slaughtering the American media we are killing our basic rights to free speech.