Media censorship? Uncensored tv a danger to kids?

Answering my own question: we limit tv viewing time. I'm not especially consistant, and they watch either much more tv than our stricter friends, or much less than our friends who are junkies... During the school year, they don't watch after school until they are done with all their homework. We don't watch during the dinner hour (unless we've been gone and happen to be eating late when "The Amazing Race," is on... The little 'uns only watch until bedtime. Dd13 and I watch more mature shows after the little uns go to bed. The tv is in the same room as the computer, so I can "watch with" sorta kinda while being online so I don't go completely mad and turn into a televidiot, a horror to me...

I used to hate reality shows as a real time waster- and was embarrassed that my kids all loved "American Idol," and "Survivor Allstars," but it opened up learning moments for us all where we got to look inside how we came to value what we did and compared it to others...

I do monitor movies. If the violence or sex is necessary to the story plot, I am less upset by it than if it's not. If the plot is interesting, I am more inclined to let it in to our consciousnesses early... Like, I loved "Spiderman," so my ds- then 3 saw it, too, and understood it... but I wouldn't let him see any of the "Terminator" movies although my dd13 has, and did at an early age (ds-now 21 got T2 for a present shortly after it came out- that's pretty violent, but has a complex story which needed the violent action, and I wasn't censoring strongly then.)

I'm rambling now, and since my censoring of media isn't set inflexibly for me, it makes this much harder to answer than how I censor what I say... Basically, it varies from child to child, and my concern is that they will sit and watch tv rather than go off and be active more than a fear that the content will warp them somehow... but I still do censor to some degree, and it's based on what I like to watch... and in some way, I think it might be similarly unhealthy to second-hand smoke (for the mind?) Does that make any sense?

I think your censorship is justified. You are held legally responsible for your children, and on an ethical basis, it would be unacceptable (in my never humble opinion) not to take cognisence of the potential effects of violence and cruelty on your children.

I'm really concerned about how detached children/young people have become from the results of real violence and cruelty. Not sure how to make them understand that real people sometimes die when they're shot/when they have bad car accidents - not get up and appear in another move/t.v. show, but it's worrying. There have been some interesting studies on how some children and young people don't realize that real life dead is DEAD.

I'm not particularly worried about tv/movie/mag sex and sensuality. But the detachment from the effects of violence has me horrified and frightened.

In our home we do watch things that really happed(the coverage of attacks, trials/hearings that result, etc), educational shows about human sexuality and reproduction, and programs about drugs. We've never kept him from watching any of those things when he was little, but then we always sit down and discuss them thoroughly.
I won't let him watch fictional shows on those subjects that are rated higher than PG-13, because they trivialize and glorify them. For instance, he can watch a program that gives very detailed descriptions of human sexuality and reproduction, but he can't watch porn. He can watch news coverage of an attack or a war, but he can't watch something like The Passion Of The Christ. He's watched college lectures on drugs and their effects on the human body, but he didn't watch Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas with me. I do let him watch crime shows with us, but we also discuss real crimes and how they compare/differ from the fictionalized ones.
Then again, he has watched R shows without permission; the same ones that I watched when I was his age(Freddy, Jason, and Michael movies). He loves horror flicks, and we've had very long discussions about how they are just fiction. I didn't think it was such a big deal that he saw 13 Ghosts, because I'd seen the original and thought "how bad could it be", but then I saw it; it held very little resemblance to the original.
My lp did record a show that was pretty sexually explicit(nearly x-rated), and the boy has seen parts of it much to my dismay, so these things can't be completely censored sometimes; my lp doesn't want to turn on the filters because with our system it requires a code to remember and use with each time he wants to watch something "questionable", so we just tell the boy not to watch certain things. He's at the age now where he knows that I do get a little uncomfortable with the notion that it's not too long before he'll be a sexually active individual, and he's taken to making embarrassing comments.