Manufacturing consensus in a diverse field of scholarly opinions: A comment on Bushman, Gollwitzer, and Cruz (2015)

We appreciate the efforts of Bushman, Gollwitzer, and Cruz (2015) to provide new data describing parents' and professionals' opinions regarding effects of media violence. Unfortunately, we feel it is necessary to call attention to apparent errors and inaccuracies in the way those data are interpreted and represented in their article. The article includes flawed analyses, overstates the extent to which there is agreement that media violence has meaningful negative societal effects, and misrepresents the relevance of the study to an understanding of the effects of media violence on societal violence. In contrast, we call for a climate of research on media violence that better recognizes the diversity of findings and conclusions in an active and growing research agenda and eschews unwarranted insinuations about effects on criminal violence from research focused on aggression-related measures not assessing violent crime.