I believe that today’s television, geared towards my children is better then what I had growing up in the 1970’s. When I was a kid, there were few options when it came to children’s television and most shows were limited to Saturday mornings. So my choice for entertainment or the exchange of any information for the rest of the week was either reading, beating up a weaker sibling or watching adult programming along with my parents.
Because of the improvements in television over the past decades, my children will achieve a higher level of personal transformation at a quicker rate than that of my peers and I. What drives this improvement is that the variety of choices for children has expanded in areas such as role models and public service announcements: not to mention the fact that so many people are overly sensitive and hypercritical about the inundation of children’s commercials without realizing that our government is more aggressive now more than ever, in it’s attempt to educate and hold accountable television stations and networks.
For most of television's early years, Saturday morning shows such as Lassie, Howdy Dowdy and Roy Rogers monopolized the airwaves. It was difficult to find role models that would inspire those of ethnicity or young girls in the viewing audience, even when watching adult situated programming, girls and women looked towards shows like I Love Lucy. As the authors of “The Why of Consumption” S. Ratneshwar, David Mick and Cynthia Huffman (167) have pointed out that although Lucille Ball’s performance was groundbreaking at the time, she did this by portraying a woman devoid of sexuality and basically benign, in essence a person one should not feel threatened by:
In one of the show’s most memorable episodes, Lucy and Ethel begin work at a candy factory – and end by stuffing their clothes and mouths with chocolate, just like children in a sweet shop. Lucy’s comedic persona fit into the 1950’s chauvinistic mindset that relegated women to childish roles as silly creatures in need of a constant supervision, unable to manage money or to understand life in the real world, irrational and subject to emotional whims.
Towards the end of the sixties, television brought people the debut of Julia, a show about an independent black female character. As summed up by Ronald L. Jackson, author of African American Communication & Identities, (265) That even though there was a lot of conflict and criticism over the character’s genial portrayal of blacks, in a time when the country was going through the unrest of the civil rights movement, Julia was a small step forward:
Julia was well received by viewers, after all it was the first Black Family show since Amos’ n Andy – and what a difference it was! Julia showed on a weekly basis that Black people did not all live in the ghetto; that they went to professional jobs every day; that they could have fewer than five children in a household; that they could speak impeccable English; could wear attractive clothes without being a prostitute or royalty; and that they could have dilemmas that had nothing to do with the white folks. Julia was a positive role model.
In the mid-1970s there were even more small steps inadvertently forward, due ironically to a new genre of shows called jiggle television. Shows such as Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman might’ve had women fighting crime-waves in their braless t-shirts or red, white and blue bustier and bikinis – obviously these show were meant to attract male viewers of all ages. Yet, the 70’s viewing audience was also full of women and girls witnessing for the first time on television, sexual beings living determined lives, who were certainly not afraid of being physically assertive, but also striving to manage their destiny on their own terms: with or without a man by their side. This idea was presented in the article “Girl Power gets its Wings,” (par 13).
Though created, produced and written exclusively by men, Charlie's Angels was pitched as a feminist twist on the cop show. The Angels - Jill Munroe (Farrah Fawcett), Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith) and Sabrina Duncan (Kate Jackson) - were the closest Seventies TV got to girl power: pistol-packing, high-kicking, karate-chopping superwomen whose efforts in gender-empowerment went largely unappreciated by all those boys at a funny age who enjoyed the bits where the Angels got wet or wore bikinis, or indeed by the girls who sought to copy Kelly or Jill's flicky hair.
The trend of having stronger and more balanced characters that were female or of ethnicity continued through the eighties with shows like Cagney and Lacey; and in the nineties in shows such as ER and Law and Order; even spilling into this millennium with Grey’s Anatomy; and children’s shows such as Kim Possible, Cory in the House, and That’s so Raven. Authors of an important study, Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Allene Cook observed this very fact in their study titled “TV for kids 11 and under: Prevalence, Portrayal, Appearance” at the Annenberg School for Communication. Smith and Cook, randomly sampled then evaluated 534 hours of children’s television in 2005 in order to portray a typical week of children’s television.
In live-action formats, females occur more frequently in groups than males. However, an almost equal portrayal appears with single-speaking male and female live action characters (ratio = 1.24 males to 1 female).
The research suggests that the “healthiest” balance of male and female representation is found in shows rated TVG. Further, TVG shows depict the highest proportion of non-white, ethnic minority characters.
This by no means suggest that all is fair when it comes to the equal play time of role models for different ethnic groups, girls and women, but there certainly have been tremendous gains in these areas compared to the past of television’s golden era.
Recently I overheard a mother hiss out loud that commercials made to appeal to her children were turning them into spoiled mega-consumers. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. Since the very beginning of children’s television, shows like Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger not only inspired backyards across America with such play like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, they also conveniently had their own line of toy guys or were sponsored by a product like Ovaltine, as Alison Bryant explains in the book “The Children’s Television Community” (11).
The popular radio drama Captain Midnight reappeared on television and was on the air from 1954 until 1956. Captain Midnight was a unique opportunity both to expound Cold War themes and create consumer loyalty to the sponsor. Ovaltine. The Ovaltine Company made it possible for children to see themselves as special by providing for them the opportunity to send in box tops from Ovaltine and receive a secret decoder ring. (Davis, 1995)
All baby boomer parents should remember that children wanting, what other children already have is a normal part of the human experience and one shouldn’t lay all the blame on television commercials alone. At one time in our human history, drum beats and smoke signals were the only way we as a species exchanged information. I’m sure in some of those ancient tribal villages, parents could be found yelling at their children as they were fleeing to safety, “Just because their village has a drum to warn others of looming danger, you think you need a drum?”
Yet, no one ever complains about the inundation of public service announcements, because we know as a society that they work as explained by George Dessart from the Museum of Broadcast Communications.
The ultimate demonstration of the effectiveness of public service announcements came in 1969. Two years earlier, a federal court upheld the FCC's application of the Fairness Doctrine to cigarette advertising on radio and television, and ordered stations to broadcast "a significant amount of time" for anti-smoking messages.
This effectively meant one PSA for every three tobacco commercials. The PSAs proved so effective that smoking rates began to decline for the first time in history, the tobacco industry withdrew all cigarette advertising, and Congress made such advertising illegal after 1971. Paradoxically, yet in further support of the success of the PSAs, with the passage of that law the bulk of the anti-smoking messages disappeared and cigarette consumption rose again for a while. On balance, however, public health professionals credit the PSAs with having saved many millions of lives by initiating the decline in American smoking.
I watched the Disney channel the other night with my kids (which is commercial free) and the amount of P.S.A.’s has gone through the roof compared to when I was a kid. The list from last nights viewing alone, went something like this: beware of stranger danger, racism, reading is fundamental, exercise is important, partnership for a drug free America, the environment, safe sex, and last but not least - understanding that verbal abuse is just as harmful as physical abuse.
The only two public service announcements I remember as a child were: be careful about falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette or you could run the risk of not only burning up yourself, but also your whole household and the people in it. Then of course the public service announcement where there’s a crying Indian in the middle of a trash strewn landfill. Every time that one came on my father would sneer, “Aw Hell, he’s just crying because it’s Sunday and all the liquor stores are closed!” Then he would pass out in his recliner, loosely holding a burning cigarette.
Because of today’s massive amounts of P.S.A.’s, the valuable lessons my children are learning about stranger danger, bullying and the environment are constantly being reinforced.
Today’s children are also benefiting from the fact that our government is more involved now with what children are watching than any other time since the invention of television. As maintained by Newton N. Minow and Craig LaMay from “Abandoned in the Wasteland” (141):
For decades, the word television was not even added to the Communications Act. What little debate went on in Washington about television’s future revolved, as we have seen, around industry battles for competitive advantage. In 1959, only a few years after television sets had penetrated in to more than half of America’s homes, Congress spent more time investigating rigged quiz show than it ever spent on examining how television might be used for public benefit, whether for children or for adults.
Minow and LaMay also argue (10) that things are slowly changing in Washington when it comes to children:
The Children’s Television Act, a small step in the right direction did not become law until 1990. The act marked the first time Congress recognized children as a special audience, and it requires commercial broadcasters to provide “educational and informational” programs for children. Until Recently, however, broadcasters all but ignored the law. After researchers discovered that stations through-out the country were claiming that cartoons and old episodes of Leave it to Beaver and The Jetsons met the law’s requirements, the FCC began a proceeding to make them clean up their act.
For the next generation of children, I see television only as a mere steppingstone, to where our society is truly only now teetering upon, the dawn of the computer horizon. Scientist are already busy at work making a super-fast internet that will all but make the one we know now - obsolete. Minow and LaMay quote executive J.C. Sparkman from Tele-Communication Inc. (149) TCI was one of largest cables operators in the United States until AT&T, which then merged with Comcast, purchased it. Sparkman said:
The things this is going to do for our children, for our children’s children. . .are going to be phenomenal. Think of what it will do for education. Think of how any person in any town, in any community, the smallest or the largest in this nation, can dial up and get any course on any subject they would like to hear about or like to learn about on a moment’s notice.
Although change for the betterment of television has been a long and hard climb, the point is the kids of America are benefiting from a variety of role models, public service announcements and the fact that our government now finally understands that some regulation is just as important as the advancement of technology when it comes to what is being watched and absorbed by hungry eyes whether they be young or old. Because of these positive changes, our children will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in the future, in a way people like myself cannot even imagine, theirs will be a reality where the exchange of helpful information is merely a few finger-strokes away.
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