Displacing blame onto viewers lets media deny televised violence causes harm

Evidence

In disengaging moral self-sanctions from television fare by attribution of blame, media personnel fault the viewers and their social environment for any associated detrimental behavior. Joseph Klapper attributed positive relations between viewing violence and aggressive behavior to preexisting dispositions of viewers. This placed the cause entirely in the viewer. It is not that televised violence fosters aggression, he argued, but rather that viewers’ dispositions drive them to violent programs. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 916

Categorization

• XREF: This is Bandura’s mechanism of blame displacement/exoneration by attribution, directly analogous to claims elsewhere that ordinary people rationalize supporting Islamophobic policy by blaming out-group members’ own behavior.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the complaints-about-immodesty article’s pattern of elites displacing moral responsibility onto the individual consumer rather than the producer.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 916