[Corporations] FW: Teenage Wasteland:Critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of mass media.

[Mike Spears]

Teenage Wasteland
Critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of
mass media.
http://www.reason.com/0402/cr.ch.teenage.shtml
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February 2004

Teenage Wasteland
Critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of
mass media.
Carl F. Horowitz

Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America¹s Children, edited by Diane
Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
267 pages, $29.95

Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, by Alissa Quart, Cambridge,
Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 239 pages, $25

Hollywood has become to the right what big corporations are to the left.
When it comes to criticizing popular entertainment, the two targets
coincide, and the differences between left and right dissolve. I vividly
remember the ghastly sight of Jesse Jackson and Bill Bennett appearing
together on CBS¹s Face the Nation a decade ago, united in their eagerness to
protect vulnerable youth from cultural pollution.

Two new books, one mainly from the right and the other from the left,
reflect this bipartisan view of America¹s young people as victims of mass
culture and mass marketing. But both also contain hints that kids are not
empty vessels waiting to be filled with evil desires -- that in fact, they
and their parents can counteract the antisocial messages decried by critics
like Jackson and Bennett.

Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America¹s Children must be
understood in the context of the Federal Trade Commission¹s September 2000
report on the entertainment industry¹s allegedly deceptive marketing
practices. Congress ordered up the study immediately after the 1999 massacre
at Columbine High School, largely because the two killers reportedly had
played the video game Doom and seen the film The Matrix shortly before their
rampage. 

Despite the FTC¹s lukewarm conclusion that violent depictions might have a
harmful effect on minors, The Wall Street Journal and other alarmed
guardians of morality latched onto the report, along with a joint statement
from the American Medical Association and other health organizations
condemning media violence, as an excuse to ratchet up their culture war.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) denounced Hollywood¹s "culture of carnage."
He and his allies insisted that the debate about the relationship between
fictional and real-life violence had been settled; now was the time for
action.

The contributors to Kid Stuff, a collection of 11 essays, do want action,
but first and foremost they are empiricists. And the data come flying fast
and furious, occasionally making some inescapable points. Media, to a
certain extent, do act in loco parentis. The average American child spends
some 5.5 hours a day interacting with media (including the Internet), a
figure that rises to seven hours by age 18.

Many of the contributors to Kid Stuff insist that movies, TV shows, and
video games not only assault kids with sex and violence but induce them to
imitate what they see on the screen, ultimately causing them to lose their
moral compasses. 

Syracuse University historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn sees America awash in a
culture of moral obscenity. Popular culture routinely strips people of their
humanity, she argues, tediously detailing content analyses showing, for
example, that "children who watch an average amount of TV see 8,000 murders
and more than 100,000 other acts of violence during their elementary school
years." She adds, "By renting just four videos -- Total Recall, Robocop 2,
Rambo III, and Die Hard III -- a child would witness 525 deaths." Iowa State
psychologist Craig Anderson, in his review of 32 studies on violent video
games, concludes that repeated game playing heightens aggression and reduces
pro-social behavior among both children and adults.

Such concerns fly in the face of two realities. First, youth crime has
dropped sharply in the last decade. From 1992 (the year Mortal Kombat
debuted) to 2000, arrests for serious juvenile crime fell by about
two-thirds, while the number of children carrying guns to school dropped by
half. As for sex, a recent study by the Kaiser Foundation (one of the
leaders in the cultural cleanup crusade) revealed that the percentage of
high school students who had engaged in sexual intercourse declined from 54
percent in 1991 to 46 percent in 2001. Hollywood may not deserve credit for
those trends, but it clearly cannot be blamed for increases in sex and
violence that have not occurred.

Second, declarations about the baneful influence of popular culture gloss
over the dearth of evidence supporting a causal link between watching
portrayals of violence and engaging in violent behavior. As scholars such as
University of Toronto psychologist Jonathan Freedman and University of
Southern California sociologist Karen Sternheimer have shown, the
experimental studies the alarmists like to cite may hinge on self-fulfilling
prophecies, with researchers prodding subjects into giving the "right"
answer. Furthermore, it¹s not clear how the stimuli and measures of
aggression used in the highly artificial setting of a laboratory relate to
viewing and violence in the real world.

The epidemiological studies are also seriously flawed. Critics of violent TV
often cite the work of Seattle psychiatrist Brandon Centerwall. In a 1992
Journal of the American Medical Association article, Centerwall noted that
the white homicide rate in the U.S. rose 93 percent in the three decades
following the introduction of household television sets. For him, this trend
demonstrated the corrosive effects of TV. Oddly, Centerwall did not
distinguish between violent shows and other kinds of programming, and it¹s
not clear what he would have found if he had. SUNY-Albany sociologist Steven
Messner has found that metropolitan areas in which violent TV programs
attract especially large audiences have lower rates of violent crime.

Centerwall also failed to note that the homicide rate barely changed from
1945 to 1967; the big increase started in the late 1960s, suggesting that
something other than TV was at work. Two University of California at
Berkeley criminologists, Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, tested
Centerwall¹s thesis with data from other countries, and they found no
consistent pattern. The murder rate remained constant in Italy and declined
in France, Germany, and Japan following the introduction
of TV.

Two other favorites of the culture warriors are Leonard Eron and L. Rowell
Huesmann, psychologists at the University of Michigan whose research played
a crucial role in the passage of "V-chip" legislation, which requires that
TV sets include devices enabling parents to block shows based on network
content ratings. Eron and Huesmann¹s most memorable moment came in testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, when they showed that a
preference for violent TV at age 8 correlated with the seriousness of
criminal convictions by age 30. This claim was based on a sample of three
cases. 

Since the evidence in Kid Stuff tends to be selected for its usefulness in
an indictment of popular culture, it¹s little surprise that many of the
contributors are eager to restrict kids¹ exposure to TV, movies, video
games, and music. But they generally prefer that Mom and Dad serve as the
regulators. "Why are [parents] so intimidated by the V-chip?" wonder the
editors, Diane Ravitch and Joseph Viteritti, research professors of
education and public policy, respectively, at New York University. Anderson,
the Iowa State psychologist, commends a San Antonio news reporter who
admitted to him that she throws out any video games containing violence that
she finds at home, regardless of whether they belong to her son or one of
his friends. Anderson supports a unitary entertainment rating system, which
in practice probably would be less draconian than useless. Parents already
have a wealth of information about the suitability of programming for kids;
hard as it is for media critics to believe, many parents just don¹t put much
stock in ratings.

None of the contributors overtly calls for censorship. They frame their goal
as balancing First Amendment values with protection of children. Yet this
pose seems disingenuous, nowhere more so than in the book¹s concluding piece
by Newton and Nell Minow. It was the former, as chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy, who described network
television as "a vast wasteland."

Surveying today¹s wasteland, now pockmarked with the likes of Jackass and
World Wrestling Entertainment, he advocates enhanced federal regulatory
authority over broadcast and cable TV, increased V-chip use, and campaigns
(including lawsuits) by media watchdog groups to force networks to devote
more programming to "the public interest." He and his daughter applaud the
Parents Television Council¹s efforts to shame and boycott offending networks
and advertisers. "It¹s time to give the censorship charge a rest," they
write, "and force the people who produce outrageously violent and sexually
explicit material to admit that it is not about freedom; it is about money,
and as long as they think they can make some, they will continue to produce
it." 

Despite its undercurrents of authoritarianism, Kid Stuff does offer some
pleasant surprises. The contributors generally avoid projecting malevolent
motives (beyond a desire for profit) onto the entertainment industry. A few
authors, especially Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin and
University of Toledo psychologist Jeanne Funk, make an honest effort to
explain the market forces that shape media culture, understanding the
futility of completely shielding children from it. "A child, even a
vulnerable child," Funk writes, "is not just a sponge that unthinkingly
soaks up media messages. Research on media literacy suggests that talking to
children about their media experiences can alter the impact of media
violence."

Even that formulation assumes that media violence is a bad influence, albeit
one that can be countered by moral immunization. In Killing Monsters: Why
Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence (2002), Gerard
Jones had the temerity to suggest that media violence, far from traumatizing
kids, might be therapeutic. The idea of violent entertainment as a positive
influence gains support from the comments of a New Jersey teenager who
objected to a post-Columbine Harper¹s article criticizing violent video
games. "As a Œgeek,¹ I can tell you that none of us play video games to
learn how (or why) to shoot people," he said. "For us, video games do not
cause violence; they prevent it. We see games as a perfectly safe release
from a physically violent reaction to the daily abuse leveled at us." The
culture warriors who contributed to Kid Stuff should have spent some time
talking to consumers like him.

Alissa Quart, a freelance journalist who has written for The Nation, did
just that. In Branded, she observes that if mass media are convincing youth
to do anything, it¹s not to kill or copulate but to shop. Quart¹s analysis
bears a strong imprint of leftist media critics such as Thomas Frank and
Mark Crispin Miller. There are intimations here and there of capitalism as a
cabal, but the book rings true in too many places to be dismissed as an
ideological rant. The thirtyish Quart went out and spoke to "tweens" (7-
to-14-year-olds) and teens -- lots of them. Although a bit too old to pass
as a native, à la Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, she knows their
vernacular and their anxieties.

Quart argues that during the past decade or so America¹s youth, egged on by
their parents, have become wedded to consumption as personal identity: You
are what you buy. In their desperate pursuit of peer acceptance, she avers,
young people more than ever are suckers for mass advertising¹s pitches for
the right (read: expensive) brands. Teenagers, Quart notes, spent $155
billion in discretionary income in 2000. Knowing where the money is, many
companies hire youths as market trend spotters; the magazine Teen People
alone has deputized some 10,000 kids in this capacity.

The retailing, publishing, film, and sports industries are increasingly
focused on getting young people to associate consumption of hip brands with
social acceptance. Greater affluence combined with the need for acceptance
has led to rapid rises in plastic surgery, breast enlargement, steroid use,
and anorexia, all manifestations of what Quart calls "self-branding."

The book¹s chapter on higher education, which describes the cutthroat
competition to get into a small number of elite institutions, best
illustrates where Quart hits, and misses, the mark. Childhood, she argues,
is becoming one long entrance exam. Not any college or university will do;
all that preparation will be a waste if a son or daughter is destined for no
better than a good state university or even a highly ranked but semi-obscure
private four-year college such as Grinnell, Bowdoin, or Oberlin. When
$30,000 to $40,000 a year in tuition, fees, and room and board is on the
line, only the Ivies, and a few other prestige universities such as
Stanford, Northwestern, and Duke, will suffice.

Parents may be even more obsessed than their kids with the status conferred
by the right college. A prominent college tutor/counselor describes her
clients¹ attitude this way to Quart: "My kid has to get into Harvard or
Princeton or I will kill myself." Children, taking their cue, see higher
education as a logo identity. They select extracurricular activities (often
inflated or invented) with an eye toward pleasing admissions officers. A
child these days doesn¹t take French or cello lessons out of enjoyment; he
takes them because years later they will look good on a college application.
Tom Cruise¹s strategy to get into Princeton in Risky Business -- running a
brothel out of his parents¹ house -- seems honest by comparison.

Quart¹s dissection of status anxieties is brilliant, but her focus is
restricted to academic overachievers bred by upper-income parents. One
suspects that her hand wringing is akin to traditionalists¹ laments about
the "epidemic" of childlessness that in fact characterizes a relatively
small stratum of higher-income professional couples in their 30s. Moreover,
Quart doesn¹t admit that, up to a point, getting kids to compete is
necessary. The demand for the most desirable slots in any endeavor
inevitably exceeds the supply. Parents naturally want the best for their
children, whether in the form of a wardrobe, an education, or a wedding. If
they (and their children) are spending more money on these things than ever
before, maybe it¹s because they have more to spend.

In a sense, Quart is a descendant of a tradition begun in the mid-19th
century by Marx and Engels on the left and Matthew Arnold on the right, the
soi-disant voice in the moral wilderness excoriating the base appetites of
an emerging commercial culture. But in another sense she¹s a realist. Far
more attuned to markets than such contemporary critics of crassness as
Benjamin Barber and Wendell Berry, she writes with empathy and insight about
the dark side of the branding game, the taunts and rejection directed at
those who consume the "wrong" things.

Students marked by classmates as dorks and losers may resort to vengeance of
the sort seen in Littleton, Colorado, and elsewhere. And let¹s admit it:
There is something decadent about people whose conversation and behavior
revolve almost entirely around acquiring material things and other badges of
status, all the while pitying the poor souls down the pecking order. Such
people, of course, rarely will admit being slaves to fashion. Bill Buckley
remarked many years ago that even George Babbitt didn¹t approve of
Babbittry; he merely practiced it.

Youth themselves must take the initiative to get off the consumption
treadmill, Quart argues. "Do It Yourself" culture, that public square
populated by punks, Goths, hippies, and other castoffs, is her ideal way to
air grievances and conduct transactions, with activities ranging from music
file sharing to high school plays to thrift store shopping. Where the Kid
Stuff authors generally prefer to rein in untutored youthful desire through
a combination of media self-policing, closer parental supervision, and
government oversight, Quart would decommodify desire by creating
anti-branding platoons. Although she certainly would object to such a
characterization, deep down she¹s a left-libertarian, blasting away at
Edison Schools while defending homeschooling.

Both of these books suggest that young people need better emotional
equipment to deal with the opposite tugs of individuality and belonging.
Teenagers, like everyone else, want to be themselves but dread being left
out. Most lack the maturity to resolve this tension on their own, especially
when they¹re experiencing sexual desire (and rejection) for the first time.
That¹s why parents should provide more guidance, beginning with their own
firsthand observation that youth is fleeting.
----
Carl F. Horowitz, formerly a housing and urban affairs analyst at the
Heritage Foundation and a correspondent for Investor¹s Business Daily, is a
domestic policy consultant in the Washington, D.C., area.


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