Often I hear people think that video games are bad for children. Causing violence and addiction or other behavior issues. I would like to know if there has been similar accusations in earlier media in previous history?
A book called Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic Wertham came out in 1954. Claiming that the popular comic books of the day were responsible for many of society's ills, including the percieved problem of juvenile delinquency, the moral panic generated was such that the industry formed the Comics Code Authority to self-regulate.
There's pretty much always a conservative backlash to any emerging pop culture.
/u/Brickie78 already mentioned "Seduction of the Innocent" which claimed that comic books were a corrupting influence. Along the same lines pulp sci fi suffered from similar criticisms, especially before Star Trek and Star Wars made it okay for average joe to admit watching/reading sci fi. /u/yoshiK also brought up how just about every new genre of music during the 20th century was basically derided as "jungle music."
As my contribution, the conservative backlash against Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980's was ridiculous. D&D was supposedly gateway brainwashing into Satanism (no really). Everytime a troubled teen committed suicide, it was linked back to his D&D hobby. This hysteria was best captured in the 1982 TV movie "Monsters and Mazes" starring Tom Hanks.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
Trying to clone "Mothers Against Drunk Driving," MADD, BADD was created, "Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons" in 1984. BADD was surprisingly media-savvy, and even made a segment on 60 Minutes claiming that D&D was teenage devil worship.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31885/12-nutty-dungeons-dragons-media-mentions-1980s
Amusingly enough, alot of these crusaders are still around, especially at chick.com. If you're morbidly curious, here's their full argument against D&D, including references to all their supposed case studies, that fueled the media craze back then:
Apparently there is a book, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears by Geoffrey Pearson, which provides some detail. Unfortunately I do not have access to it, but there is a Economist article, We have been here before which quotes at length from it. For example citing the Daily Mail from a 1956 editorial:
It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge.
As you may have guessed, at that time Rock 'n Roll corrupted the young.
In short, yes, there have been other forms of media that have been similarly opposed. One can think of religious fundamentalism/conservatism that exists even today -- some section of the population is not supposed to know how to read (women, often) because it might corrupt their minds and cause them to be disobedient.
Commonly, forms of new media or niche cultures that form around them are cause for concern from the mainstream of a relatively inflexible society. In some societies, prohibitions on dancing take shape to keep the youth from promiscuity. While the US has generally remained a more flexible (even progressive) society as far as cultural forms go, there are still tensions about media content in a variety of forms -- as two posters before me mentioned, this often occurs in the form of battles between cultures themselves (black/white, highbrow/lowbrow).
See Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, for a discussion of Shakespearean plays in 19th century America -- at first Shakespeare was consumed by the working and upper classes alike, but as the century progressed the "types" of Shakespearean plays began to separate along class lines. Producers of "highbrow" Shakespeare began to cater toward more wealthy audiences while "lowbrow" producers tailored their productions toward working-class audiences -- both reinscribing the differences between the "brows" and producing expectations about highbrow/lowbrow that bridged the gap between the two (i.e., a play that took up both highbrow/lowbrow elements came to satisfy no one, and everyone began to recognize those differences and mapped them on to the different classes -- and of course the lower classes had a harder time re-presenting their preference for a type of Shakespeare because of their more limited means of speaking for themselves to a wide audience). To your question, Lowbrow Shakespeare could cause moral panic because it emphasized a sort of sexuality and lack of intellection that "offended" the upper classes.
There are more examples -- "TV rots the mind" is a cliche that speaks to social mores, though perhaps it isn't quite panic-worthy. Burlesque performances did not begin with a negative moral connotation but took one on over time (again mapping onto classes -- see Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness).
(Are video games bad for children? Probably not, in moderation, especially since they give kids an embodied understanding of a technology that is likely to transform and grow in their lifetime. The question of violent content, however, opens up a different can of worms...)
Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" was alleged to have triggered a series of copycat suicides. The Werther Effect is still used in discussing the phenomena of suicide 'clusters'. Here is a brief reference to it in a modern paper:
Shortly after the printing press there were those who believed the printed book was "bad" such as Johannes Trithemius who said
none is so seemly to monks as devotion to the writing of sacred texts http://books.google.com/books?id=qkgXAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA154&dq=De+Laude+Scriptorum+manualium+devotion+to+the+writing+of+sacred+texts&hl=en&sa=X&ei=G20yU43sEMrQyAGDo4H4Aw&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=De%20Laude%20Scriptorum%20manualium%20devotion%20to%20the%20writing%20of%20sacred%20texts&f=false
Or electricity, from this 1889 Nature article. At present our most dangerous pet is electricity—in the telegraph, the street lamp and the telephone. We have introduced electric power into our simplest domestic industries, and we have woven this most subtile of agents, once active only in the sublimest manifestations of Omnipotence, like a web about our dwellings, and filled our atmosphere with the filaments of death. http://books.google.com/books?id=POwXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false
Another book to check out is Robert Darnton's Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Among other things it looks at how printing and popular, so-called "pulp" books were viewed as a moral danger by authorities in France.