We constantly blame electronic media for negatively impacting children: violent video games cause school shootings, Myspace facilitates stalking, and television leads to childhood obesity. Considering the average American spends over 4 hours a day watching TV, the effects of media warrant serious attention. But what sort of attention? Since the first congressional hearings on television violence in 1952, legislators have engaged in free-speech-versus-censorship tug-of-wars focused on restricting what we don’t want children watching. Meanwhile, too little has been said about what we do want them watching.
The New America Foundation recently hosted a conference called, "Beyond Censorship:
Technologies and Policies to Give Parents Control Over Children’s Media Content."
Panelists avoided government censorship but continued to focus on censorship at the level of individual households, talking instead about tools like TV ratings and v-chips.
They admitted that television, movie, and video game ratings, each a different system, can feel like alphabet soup, and they acknowledged the difficulty of extending ratings to increasing internet and wireless media. They also reported that only 15% of parents use the v-chips now included in almost all televisions. Since children often surpass their parents in technologic know-how, the chip begs analogy to the childproof pill bottles that I unscrewed for my grandmother at age five.
Even if we perfect such technologies, Americans will probably continue to spend a great deal of time consuming media; if we don’t want kids watching the likes of American Psycho and the Playboy Channel, we need to provide alternatives. It’s like junk food. If parents want their child to stop eating junk food, do they empty refrigerator and let their children starve? Hopefully not. They stock the shelves with milk and apples. We will continue to use media, so let’s start stocking the channels with beneficial programs.
The conference briefly addressed children’s programming when a representative from TiVo demonstrated TiVo’s “KidZone.” “KidZone” allows parents to find and queue up children’s shows helping avoid inappropriate content while harnessing TV’s educational potential—provided that quality educational programming actually exists. This is not the only technology using media positively. The Play Station craze, Dance Dance Revolution, has couch potatoes dancing vigorously, transforming inactive screen-time into exercise.
But such innovations are rare and often expensive. Anyone looking for enlightening alternatives to reality TV shows and American Idol take-offs knows the frustration of settling for History Channel reruns.
The Children's Television Act of 1992, the same act that regulated v-chips, requires all broadcasters to air a minimum of 3 hours per week of educational children’s programming. Congress included the mandatory educational programming because they recognized that market forces alone wouldn’t provide an adequate supply of quality programs.
Their support stopped there. As a panelist from PBS reported, PBS has developed curriculum-based programming but lacks the funding to air it. We should be increasing, rather than cutting, the budgets of public broadcasters who bring us the likes of Sesame Street, viewed by 6 million children a week. And if Americans watch 4 hours of TV a day, 3 hours of educational programming seems pretty puny.
Media has as much power to do good as to do harm, a possibility we overlook in all this negative attention. Focusing on the media we want, rather than creating ever more complicated tools for parents, is the real way around censorship quicksand and media's negative effects.
--By Carolynn Molleur-Hinteregger
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