TV Literacy

Four Key Points to remember as You Watch TV
Watching TV with your Children
Whats wrong with sex on TV!
The Alcohal Industry's Comeback

Four Key Points to Remember as You Watch TV:

1. TV Programs Are Created to Achieve Specific Results
   Just like building a house, a TV program is constructed to send certain messages. Help children understand that TV shows are pretend-not real. Explain that even if a TV show seems real, the events have been altered for the viewers.


2. People Interpret What They See on TV in Different Ways Depending on age, gender, and life experiences, children will get a wide variety of messages from a television program. Watch TV with them and discuss important issues, such as how conflicts are resolved or how people are stereotyped.


3. Television Violence Takes Many Forms Violence may be portrayed as realistic, funny or even thrilling. Discuss with children what is real and not real, funny and not funny, harmful and not harmful in cartoons and in other programs. Slapstick humor may seem funny to some while violent to others because viewers rarely see the negative consequences.


4. Television Has an Underlying Economic Purpose Most television is supported by paid advertising. Explain to children that advertisers want TV viewers to buy their products. Ask children to think about why certain commercials often appear during certain programs, for example, toy ads during cartoons. Also, discuss how the commercials make products look great, perhaps even better than they might be in real life.

Watching Television with Your Children        [Top]

“In many young people’s homes, the TV is a constant companion. Two-thirds (63%) live in homes where the TV is usually on during meals, and half (51%) live in homes where the TV is left on most of the time, whether anyone is watching it or not.” —The Kaiser Family Foundation, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year-olds—Executive Summary, 2005


Benefits
Television programs can serve as windows into different cultures and different parts of the world. Television programs can inform, educate, and entertain. As a result of the Children’s Television Act of 1990, broadcast networks now show at least three hours of educational programming each week. Educational and informational programs are often identified by an E/I icon in the corner of the television screen.

Whenever you see this icon on the screen, you can know that the show is more likely to offer some educational benefit to your family—and you might want to take a closer look. VCRs and DVRs (digital video recorders, which allow you to record from your television to a hard drive–based digital storage system) can be used to preview shows to ensure they are what you want your child watching. They also allow you to watch with your child those shows that are on when you are at work, or to save your favorite adult programs until after your child is in bed.


Risks
Many parents are concerned about their young children watching television programs that have content more suitable for older children, or about their older children watching programs that are more suitable for adults. Parents need to be aware that many programs may contain language they do not approve of, violence (perhaps in cartoon form), sexual innuendo, or discussions about sex. Consider making the rule that there will be no televisions in bedrooms.

If your child has a television in his or her bedroom, it is much more difficult for you to know what he or she is watching. The advertising and marketing industry is becoming increasingly sophisticated in the ways it tries to influence consumers, including children. Rather than watching television commercials, mute the commercials and use that time to talk to your child about the program. What is going on in the story? What will happen in the end? Are the characters real people?


Ratings
Television ratings indicate which ages a television program is appropriate for and provide content labels alerting audiences to higher levels of violence (V), sex (S), adult language (L), suggestive dialogue (D), or fantasy violence (FV). The ratings are voluntarily agreed to by the broadcast and cable television networks and are assigned episode by episode. Therefore, the same program might carry a different rating each week depending on the content of the specific episodes.

Ratings appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen at the beginning of all broadcast programs and many cable programs. To find a program’s rating before the program airs, check the local newspaper listing, the TV Guide, the on-screen cable guide, or the network website.


The V-chip
Most televisions purchased after July 1, 1999, are equipped with a v-chip, which parents can use to block programs based on age-based rating or content labels. For example, if you don’t want your child watching programs rated TV-14 (not recommended for children under 14), you can set your v-chip to block all TV-14 programs. To block only TV-14 programs with higher levels of violence, select TV-14-V.

Blocking a rating blocks all higher ratings as well (blocking all TV-14 programs also blocks all TV-MA [mature audience only] programs). By blocking a rating or content label, you are not restricting your own program options, just your child’s. You can temporarily deactivate the v-chip by entering the code you chose when you first selected your v-chip settings.

What's Wrong with Sex on TV?        [Top]

When your kids turn on the TV tonight they'll be twice as likely to see sexual content as they were less than a decade ago. A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found just that: the number of sexual scenes on television has doubled since 1998.

Perhaps even more disturbing, 70 percent of teens' twenty favourite shows contain sexual content and almost half of them depicted sexual behaviour. Overall, two-thirds of the shows on TV include talk about sex and more than a third actually depict sexual acts.

Should we be worried about this? Yes, but not because sex is bad and kids should not know anything about it. The reason for concern is how the media portray sex. TV and video games do not feature sex as an important part of human nature. They feature it as a form of recreation that is without risk and responsibility.

Consider this fact: Only 19 percent of American teenagers report they have good communication with trusted adults about sex and sexuality. That means the overwhelming majority of kids do not. So where are they getting their information and their attitudes about sex? Why, from the media, of course. This is not my opinion - this is what the teens themselves tell us.

A survey published in 2003 revealed that 75 percent of American teens believe that media portrayals of sex influence their and their peers' beliefs and behaviours. Another study in 2004 showed that teens who watch a lot of sexually-explicit media are much more likely to be sexually active. We have inadvertently delegated sex education to the media. That's pretty scary when you think of the lessons about sex that your typical TV sitcom or video game provide. Worse yet, they seem to be exactly the opposite of the lessons we want our kids to learn.

So what's a MediaWise parent to do? Two things: the first is that we need to start communicating with our kids about sex and about sexuality. Sex is about biology. Sexuality is about biology, psychology, values and spirituality. Communication on these matters can't involve lecturing, scare tactics or demands. It has to be done through listening and honest sharing. The only way kids will learn the values we want them to learn is if we take our children seriously and let them know what we think and why.

Secondly, we need to be watching what our kids watch. There are some shows which should be out of bounds. And when sex does appear on TV in ways that we don't agree with, we need to let our kids know that we notice. How else will our kids know the difference between the people on the screen and the ones who love them in real life?

The alcohol industry's comeback        [Top]

Currently, the alcohol industry essentially regulates itself, with voluntary guidelines to curb youth advertising. Many believe, however, that the self-imposed rules are weak. For example, until recently, the beer and distilled spirits industries called for no advertising on programs with a 50 percent or greater youth audience, but in practice that standard only ruled out 1 percent of the programs tracked by Nielsen—187 of 14,359 programs in 2001.

"The industry's own guidelines are so permissive that, in practice, they amount to no limits at all," said David Kessler, M.D., former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and now dean of the school of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "It is like a promise not to drive faster than 125 miles per hour—that doesn't slow you down much. These industry codes do little to protect youth from ads that promote alcohol consumption," said Kessler, an advisor to CAMY.

In response to criticism, the beer and distilled spirits industries changed their codes in September 2003 to restrict ads where the youth audience is 30 percent or more. Because this still permits advertising where the youth are disproportionately represented in the audience, the Institute of Medicine recommended that the industry move toward a 15 percent threshold monitored on an ongoing basis by the Public Health Service.

Finally, so-called ''responsibility" ads—those placed by the industry to encourage drinking responsibly and not drinking and driving, or to discourage underage drinking, have been questioned. CAMY analyzed the industry's responsibility advertising on television in 2001. Alcohol companies placed more than 87 product promotion commercials for every ad about not driving after drinking, or not drinking before age 21. Spending on responsibility ads totaled less than 3 percent of the industry's TV advertising budget, according to CAMY analysis.

In 2001, the alcohol industry spent a total of $811.2 million on televised advertising for its products, compared with $23.2 million on responsibility ads.

"I think parents would be really surprised if they took a look at their kids' magazines and saw how many beer and alcohol ads there are," Darlene Ortega said. "I know the companies have ways to control their advertising, and who they advertise to. But they don't. You have to ask: why are youths seeing more of these ads than adults? And what can we do to stop it?"