A publication entitled “Taking Charge of Your TV: A Guide to Critical Viewing for Parents and Children” is available from the Family and Community Critical Viewing Project, an initiative sponsored by the National PTA and the cable industry to teach television viewing skills to parents, teachers, and children. It suggests ways parents can talk to kids about what they are watching, which not only makes television a less passive pastime but transforms it into a learning tool. We can ask children why characters act as they do and help them to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible acts. We can get them to talk about how the families on television are different from theirs and from other families they know. We can relate television to real-life situations. When Roseanne and Dan fret over bills because Dan’s business is going under, for example, we can explain to our children that sometimes parents need to figure out ways to make sure they can meet all their responsibilities.
Used wisely, television can help children to distinguish between fantasy and reality—precisely because the fantasy it projects feels so real to them. Identify aspects peculiar to “TV land” that may seem obvious to an adult but aren’t necessarily clear to a child. For instance, when watching a thirty-minute drama or sitcom, point out that it’s not realistic to solve a problem in the span of a half hour. Explain that this is how writers and directors adapt to scheduling needs and discuss how the situation might have played out in real life.
There is another option parents might consider: Just turn the televisions, video games, and VCRs off—for an evening, a week, a regular day each week. When I made this suggestion in an interview with Woman’s Day, readers responded enthusiastically. Some parents, fed up with not only depictions of violence but the excessive influence of television in general, wrote to say they had already tried out the idea.
Imagine what might happen if we all turned off our televisions for an entire week. The quiet—and the other activities we could take up—might be habit-forming.
Here and there, parents are banding together and discovering their collective strength. The South Florida Preschool PTA monitors children’s programming on the Miami television stations, with members volunteering to watch programming for one- or two-week blocks to determine whether the stations are complying with the law.
The Children’s Television Act of 1990 limits the amount of time the networks can devote to commercials during children’s programming. It also directs the FCC more broadly to review, as part of the licensing procedures, whether stations air shows that “serve the educational and informational needs of children.” In three years, the Florida group found, the networks failed to meet the law’s requirements. In their 1995 report, they noted that Miami commercial television stations were devoting only 1 percent of total programming time to educational programs for children.
The Miami group is among the many parent and consumer groups urging the FCC to enforce its regulations and to strengthen them, by requiring the networks to air more educational programming. In 1951, twenty-seven hours of quality children’s programming aired each week. The President and FCC Chairman Reed Hundt would like to see the FCC require each network to broadcast at least three hours a week. As of this writing, the FCC has not yet taken action on this proposal. In response to public petitions, however, Westinghouse, which has recently purchased CBS, has voluntarily made such a commitment. The FCC’s decision will not affect cable stations, since they are considered exempt from government regulations because they do not use the public airwaves.
The advent of cable television has dramatically expanded offerings available to children, for better and worse. Channels like Disney, Discovery, Nickelodeon, and A&E are staples of Clinton family viewing. But only 65 percent of American households now have access to cable, and the demographics of the remaining 35 percent includes a disproportionate share of the nation’s children. As with many other social changes of the past fifty years, the children hardest hit by the negative impact of the media, television in particular, are those in low-income families.
That’s why public television, which has consistently provided educational programming for children, deserves our tax dollars and charitable contributions. Shows like Sesame Street entertain while they teach math and reading. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? makes learning geography fun and exciting. With the help of music videos and special effects, Bill Nye, the Science Guy transports science out of the classroom and into the world. Many “hit” educational shows are creations of the Children’s Television Workshop, which was founded in 1968 to explore television’s potential as an educational medium.
In May 1995, John Wright and Aletha Huston, professors of human development at the University of Kansas, released the results of a four-year study on how television influences the academic skills, school readiness, and school adjustment of low-income children. They found that preschoolers who watched as little as twenty-five minutes per day of educational children’s programs like Sesame Street did significantly better on standardized verbal and math tests when they started school and consistently spent more time on reading and other educational activities than did children who watched primarily noneducational cartoons and adult programming.
Educators, community leaders, church groups, and others can join in the effort to demand support for public television and better commercial programming. They can also organize boycotts of gratuitously violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise offensive programming. One household won’t have much of an impact, but a village or two can make or break a Nielsen rating percentage point, and ratings are TV’s most critical barometer for making programming decisions.
Teachers can play a part, both directly and indirectly. First and most important, they can do their best to make reading fun. They can also assist parents in helping to educate children about how television manipulates them and undermines values like compassion and kindness that they are learning at home, in their place of worship, and at school.
Journalists and news executives have responsibilities too. When violence is newsworthy they should report it, but they should balance it with stories that provide children and adults with positive images of themselves and those around them, taking care not to exacerbate negative stereotypes. To report the truth in a thoughtful manner, mindful of the potency of the written word and the televised image, is to be not only a good journalist but a responsible citizen.
Acknowledging that commercial television is driven by the need to make a profit does not let executives and programmers off the hook. As Newton Minow said in a 1995 keynote address to a conference of Children Now, a leading nonpartisan, nonprofit organization for children: “In an ideal world, the people who work in television would have to take an oath like the Hippocratic oath: ‘Do no harm.’” How could they uphold it? They could begin by asking themselves if they would allow their own children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and neighbors to watch the shows for which they are responsible. They could form their own advisory panels—preferably of parents—who could be counted on to put children’s interests ahead of financial ones.
Journalists and broadcasters tell me they have been talking among themselves about these issues and looking for ways to fulfill both their professional and public responsibilities. At their annual Family Conference, held this year in Nashville, Al and Tipper Gore brought together broadcasters, children’s advocates, advertisers, researchers, and parents to discuss the media’s impact on children and families. Oprah Winfrey has decided to steer her show in a more positive direction. One television station decided not to carry the more lurid talk shows, and another is considering dropping them. A few local TV stations have decided to abandon the tabloid approach and get back into the news business.
There may be monetary as well as moral rewards for such choices. When he was a news director at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, John Lansing realized that the more his station’s local news coverage resembled an entertainment program, the weaker its connections to its community were becoming. He decided to conven
e town meetings to allow the station to reacquaint itself with the expectations of its viewers. As a result, the news operation dropped its tabloid-style coverage, and WCCO became a pioneer in “family-sensitive viewing,” reducing or eliminating descriptions and images of violence during designated early evening hours. Even so, WCCO has managed to maintain its first-place market share.
Numerous journalism associations and programs encourage balanced and open-minded reportage. One such organization is the Casey Journalism Center at the University of Maryland, which awards fellowships to reporters, editors, producers, and news directors. The recipients get the chance to participate in conferences and meet with experts on these issues. The intent is to encourage thoughtful, in-depth, well-documented reporting.
Television could take a cue from the several newspapers that have developed children’s beats and long-term reporting projects focusing on family issues. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, for instance, has added a new “family section” that runs every Saturday. So far, it has run stories on children’s television viewing habits (along with tips on how to make TV watching a more constructive activity), on ways grandparents and grandchildren can spend time together, and on building stronger families (accompanied by personal stories about people in the region). The section also includes a regular family finance column, with information on everything from the cost of buying a family pet to how to take a family vacation without breaking the bank.
Television, movies, video games, and music are here to stay and will continue to be influential in shaping opinions and behaviors in the years to come. As parents, we must be willing to reassert our authority over what enters our households. As creators and consumers of the media, and as citizens of the village, we must be willing to join with one another to press for improvements in what our children see and hear. A single act has little impact, but millions of decisions—to turn off television sets or to reject certain movies or CDs or video games—give us the voltage to send a message to advertisers and programmers that will reach them loud and clear.
Every Business Is a Family Business
The Golden Rule does not mean that gold shall rule.
BARBARA REYNOLDS
My father distrusted both big business and big government. When I was growing up, he never tired of quoting President Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex and the dangers of concentrated, unaccountable power in anyone’s hands. I thought of him during a trip I made to South America in October 1995, when I happened to hear a reference to the words of an earlier President, Theodore Roosevelt. I was to give a speech to students and faculty at the University of Chile in Santiago. When the rector of the university introduced me, he referred to remarks that Roosevelt had made in the same hall eighty-two years before. The former President, he said, had warned against the excesses of unchecked corporate power.
Intrigued, I tracked down a copy of Roosevelt’s speech and was struck by how relevant his message remains today:
By allowing, with no control, this concentration of enormous enterprises in the hands of a few…many evils have arisen…. We must recognize that the great corporations have established themselves, and that we must control and regulate them, so that big business does not obtain advantages at the expense of the smaller. Moreover, we must insist on the principles of cooperation and the mutual sharing by employer and employee in the gains produced, so that the future prosperity of the great corporations is divided in the most equitable way among all those who participate in creating it.
Roosevelt’s words reflected the popular view that would dominate much of this century. As the private sector grew, people assumed that the excesses of unbridled competition had to be restrained by government. As a result, consumers have been protected by antitrust laws, pure food and drug laws, labeling, and other consumer protection measures; investors have been protected by securities legislation; workers have been protected by laws governing child labor, wages and hours, pensions, workers’ compensation, and occupational safety and health; and the community at large has been protected by clean air and water standards, chemical right-to-know laws, and other environmental safeguards.
Doubtless, mistakes were made in drafting some of these laws and in writing and applying the regulations that put them into effect. But on balance, it is hard to quarrel with the results. Over the course of the century, our environment has become cleaner, we have become healthier, our workers safer, our financial markets stronger. Now our economy, still the world’s most powerful and productive, is on a roll again, with small-business formation, exports, and the stock market all at record levels, more than seven and a half million new jobs created in less than three years, and the combined rates of unemployment and inflation at a twenty-seven-year low.
In an era in which it has become fashionable to blame many of our nation’s ills on government, however, our public debate seldom turns to the impact of economic forces on American families and children. Those who do raise the question are likely to be accused of insufficient devotion to the free market system. Yet if we care about family values, we have to be concerned about what happens to those values in the marketplace.
Like my father, I support capitalism and the free market system. But I also know that every human endeavor is vulnerable to error, incompetence, corruption, and the abuse of power. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous aphorism about democracy, capitalism is the worst possible form of an economy—except for all the alternatives.
There is built-in tension in a free market system like ours, because the same forces that make an economy strong—the drive to satisfy consumers’ demands by maximizing productivity and profitability—can adversely affect the workers and families who are, after all, those very consumers. While we want to encourage competition and innovation—hallmarks of American capitalism—we need to be aware of the individual and social costs of business decisions. In every era, society must strike the right balance between the freedom businesses need to compete for a market share and to make profits and the preservation of family and community values. If either is undermined, the consequences will end up costing us all more in the long term, materially and otherwise, than we can possibly gain in the short term.
In this book I have talked about the responsibilities of individuals and institutions for the future of our children and the village they will inherit. No segment of society has a more significant influence on the nature of that legacy than business. We live in an era of what political scientist Edward Luttwak calls “turbo-charged” capitalism, which is characterized by intense competition; breathtaking technological changes; global financial, information, and entertainment markets; constant corporate restructuring; and relatively less public control and influence over the private economy.
This combination of changed circumstances poses new problems for families and communities, and for the children who grow up in them. Business affects us powerfully as consumers, as workers, as investors, and, more broadly, as citizens of the society it helps to create and as inhabitants of the environment it has a strong hand in shaping. Our circumstances therefore require new and thoughtful responses from every segment of society, particularly from business.
OUR ECONOMY grows as it gives consumers more and better products to choose from, at competitive prices. On the whole, this system has been a boon to us, not only allowing us to live comfortably but providing more Americans with jobs. But one of the conditions of the consumer culture is that it relies upon human insecurities to create aspirations that can be satisfied only by the purchase of some product or service. If all of us said today, “Okay, I have enough stuff. From now on I will buy only the bare necessities,” that would be a disaster for our economy. But spurred on by cultural messages that encourage us to feel dissatisfied with what we have and that equate success with consumption—messages fueled by the advertisements that constantly bombard us—we face the far more likely danger of allowing greed to overshadow moderation, restraint, and the stability that
comes from saving and investing for the future rather than satisfying short-term desires.
The threat is greatest to our children, who will inherit that future and the values that shape it. “As a society,” writes David Walsh in Selling Out America’s Children, “we Americans of the late twentieth century are sacrificing our children at the altar of financial gain,” and, in Walsh’s phrase, to the lure of “adver-teasing.” Those of us who believe in the free market system should worry about what we are in danger of becoming: a throwaway society sustained on a diet of unrealizable fantasies, a society in which people—especially children—define self-worth in terms of what they have today and can buy tomorrow.
Walsh documents the careful calculation—and hundreds of millions of dollars—that go into advertising campaigns directed at children, whose desire for instant gratification and lack of sophistication make them easy targets. Children parked in front of the television for hours on end are particularly susceptible, and advertisers know it. After the Federal Communications Commission repealed regulations that limited the amount of time that could be devoted to commercials during children’s television shows in 1984, the number of commercials again increased, and program-length commercials—shows that revolve around toy-based characters—exploded.
The Children’s Television Act passed by Congress in 1990 again set limits on commercial time during children’s programming, but compliance has not always been strictly enforced, although the FCC is trying. “Kids today,” observes FCC chairman Reed Hundt, “can identify more cereals than Presidents.” Nor is the drumbeat to buy, buy, buy confined to commercials; advertising permeates children’s lives. Even their sports heroes have become walking (and slam-dunking) advertisements for everything from Nikes to Pepsis to Big Macs.
It Takes a Village Page 25
