TV Violence: CSI Boss Makes Our Case For Us

In “celebration” of the 300^th episode of the ultra-violent and grotesque crime drama CSI, the show’s executive producer recently boasted about the show’s “most disgusting moments,” while openly admitting that “we did get desensitized…and I believe that the audience did, too.” Speaking to BuzzFeed reporter Kate Aurthur, CSI executive producer Carol Mendelson bragged about the show’s most graphic violence. Naturally, Mendelson sneered at the PTC’s concerns about media violence and delusionally claimed that the show was “never gratuitous” and “never crossed lines;” yet the examples from her show that Mendelson herself cites make the PTC’s case for us. Here are just a few examples of CSI content that producer Carol Mendelson claims “never crossed lines”: -------- After a cheerleader is eaten by cannibalistic killers, investigator Sara looks through the killer’s vomit for proof they ate the girl. -------- Nick is buried alive. In the grave with him are fire ants crawling all over his body. Nick nearly commits suicide by shooting himself to end the pain. -------- Finding a dead woman in a house, Nick steps in her decomposing body. ------- A man in a bowling alley reaches down for a ball without looking. He inserts his fingers in the eye cavities of a bloody, severed head. ------- Elderly women in a thrift store reach into a merchandise bin. They pull out bloody severed heads, arms, and feet. -------- A decomposing corpse is found in a shopping cart in a deserted area. A rat crawls out of the dead woman’s mouth.
Mendelson boasts: “We had read a case about an autopsy, and the coroner had cut open the body. There had been a rat inside the woman’s body that had given birth to baby rats. I wanted to do the whole family of rats [but] I was talked out of it.” --------- This is the kind of content which CSI has been pumping over the publicly-owned airwaves and into every home in America for over a decade – in the producer’s own words, “desensitizing” viewers to violence. And then we wonder why nobody does anything when real-life violence occurs. To learn more about PTC’s Media Violence campaign, click here.