Art & Creativity Quote by Hugh Mackay

Mackay’s line is a small rebuke wrapped in a history lesson: every generation panics about the new storytelling machine, then retrofits its fears as “common sense.” By lining up “media violence” with westerns, radio serials, and comic books, he doesn’t deny that images can shape behavior; he questions the lazy certainty with which society claims it can trace a straight line from a screen to a crime scene. The phrase “copycat effects” nods to a real, emotionally gripping anxiety - the idea that violence is contagious - but “easy to exaggerate” punctures the moral drama. Exaggeration isn’t framed as a mistake; it’s framed as a temptation.

The intent is partly methodological (be careful with causality) and partly cultural (notice how quickly adults turn discomfort into diagnosis). His comparison is doing quiet work: it demotes today’s crisis to a recurring genre of crisis, suggesting we’re less rational investigators than habitual worriers cycling through new targets. The subtext is also about power. If “the media made them do it,” responsibility shifts away from social conditions, family dynamics, mental health, access to weapons, and the harder, less televisual causes of violence.

Context matters: Mackay writes from within a long Australian and Anglophone debate about moral panics and the politics of blame. The sentence is calibrated to cool the room, not to absolve media, but to challenge the comforting simplicity of scapegoats. What makes it work is its compression: a single list turns outrage into pattern, and pattern into skepticism.