In December 2002, the Minister of Broadcasting appointed a working group to review the amount of violence on TV in New Zealand, to determine whether this has affected New Zealand society and, if it has, to make any recommendations that it thought were necessary to address these effects.
The terms of reference gave four main tasks:
- to commission a comprehensive literature review of existing research on the effects of TV violence and to evaluate it in relation to New Zealand, including the effectiveness of methods to measure the incidence of TV violence
- to undertake a limited sampling analysis of TV content that was comparable to surveys in other countries and previous New Zealand surveys
- to evaluate the regulatory tools for controlling the level and nature of violence in New Zealand
- to use the results of the above investigations as the basis for any recommendations on TV violence in our final report to the Minister of Broadcasting.