[originaltext] Once again, US network television finds itself turning society

Once again, US network television finds itself turning society’s worst nightmares into a night of entertainment "you’ll never forget."
   The season finale of top - rated prime - time drama "ER" last week centred on the show’ s doctors and nurses struggling to save several bloodied young gunshot victims after an angry father goes on a rampage at a foster care facility.
   A night earlier, "Law & Order" drew the highest ratings of it 11 -year history with a ripped-from-the-leadlines episode about a high school cafeteria shooting and the trial of the teenage gunman, with faux home video footage of the killings.
   And this Monday, a third NBC drama, "Third watch," wrapped its second season with police and paramedics rushing to the scene of yet another fictional high school massacre.
   Media experts chalk it all up to the fierce rivalry of the current ratings "sweeps," combined with TV dramas’ growing tendency to transform news into fiction and the recent spate of real-life school violence making headlines.
   For action and pathos, it is hard to beat the "ER’, scene of emergency physicians scurrying to resuscitate a young girl lying limp on a hospital gallery, with sheets soaked in blood from a gunshot wound to her head, before they finally, somberly, declare her death and snap off their rubber gloves.
   "It’s gripping and it’s disturbing," "Robert Universiy’s centre for the study of popular television, said. Television is kind of the way that the entire collective subconscious of our culture plays out these issues".
   Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books on the mass media, said the line between reality and fiction has be- come increasingly blurred on network TV.
   "Viewers see multiple versions of the same reality, first on news programmes, then on so-called news magazines and then on entertainment shows like ER’ and Law & Order," he said. "Some studies suggest that after a while, people won’t be able to tell where they’ve gotten their information from."
   Dramatic TV portrayal of children as victims of violence, neglect and abuse is nothing new. A famous episode of "Dragnet" in the 1960s depicted a couple who allowed their young child to drown in a bathtub while they were smoking pot.
   It has been nearly 20 years since the real-life abduction and murder of Florida boy Adamwalsh was dramatized on the NBC TV movie "Adam," helping to publicize a case that turned the issue of missing children into a national crisis.
   Now, the horror of kids being gunned down in schools and day care centers is on the public’s mind, the latest grist for networks trying to grab viewers with “unforgettable” episodes of their favorite shows. "We’re a show that has a long history of looking at the criminal justice system as it occurs," said Barry Schindel, executive producer and head writer of "Law & Order." "If we didn’t do the show, people would be asking, why aren’t your characters considering the events of a school shooting?"
   The timing is hardly coincidence. Schindel said a flurry of school violence in southern California and elsewhere in early March caught the attention of "Law & Order" writes-- and probably those on other shows--at about the time they were brain storming ideas for the end of the current season.