Television: A Good or Bad

TELEVISION: A GOOD or BAD INFLUENCE on CHILDREN?

Television was first introduced to the American public in the early 1950s, as one of the technological benefits that trickled down from wartime advances in radio wave and vacuum tube technology (Carnegie p.483). Initially, only the three major broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, and NBC) provided programming, most of which was either comedy-related or various forms of game shows, in addition to serial melodramas, nicknamed "soap operas" because soap products accounted for so much of their advertising revenue. Even after local television evolved in most entertainment broadcast markets, cable television was not widely available until the early 1980.

As television program options expanded, the medium began to provide content intended to appeal to school-aged audiences, critics suggested that too much television was detrimental because it took the place of more worthwhile use of time, and some even suggested that excessive exposure to violence on television inspired actual violence. On the other hand, modern television now includes educational content as well as channels dedicated to science and nature programming that rivals traditional educational material on the same subjects.

In many respects, one could argue that television is either a beneficial medium with certain potential negatives or a negative medium with several positive elements, depending on one's point-of-view. In general, modern television programming is probably more beneficial than problematic.

Television started out as a high-end novelty item and when it first became widely available to the public, families often watched it together, gathering around it the same way that previous generations entertained themselves in front of the radio. If anything, parents appreciated the fact that television was capable of maintaining children's interest and sometimes used it as a babysitting tool. Much of weekend programming, and, of course, product advertisement featured content for children to coincide with their time at home. Critics pointed out that the average American child was exposed to thousands of sales pitches per year (Macionis, p.127) and suggested that there was an element of exploitation in that use of television.

Some educators worried that school-age entertainment programming competed with both study time and recreational reading, and pointed out that educational content represented only a relatively small percentage of the amount of television programming watched by most school-aged consumers. As a result, many experts recommended limiting the amount of television available to children, probably more as an overreaction than as a function of any rigid studies specifically linking television to poor school performance.

More recently, multi-tasking between television, cell phone, I-pod, and computers with the whole Internet as a distraction from school work has become the norm in American society, so it is unlikely that television could have been as much of a potential problem in that regard as once feared. If anything, the worst problem associated with watching too much television is that it is a passive activity, which when combined with all the time school-aged children already devote to passive entertainment, contributes to the worsening obesity problem in the U.S. (Larson-Duyff, p.412).

As cable television increased the availability of youth-oriented television programming and children spent even more time in front of the T.V., several sociologists made observations similar to those previously published in connection with the amount of advertising absorbed by children in connection with their exposure to violence on the screen (Henslin, p.67). According to them, constant exposure to violence on television, (even if it was mostly fictional), corresponded to increased aggression in person, by virtue of desensitization. It was even suggested that watching the highly caricatured violence represented in cartoons like Bugs Bunny constituted "violence" in terms of its effect on the minds of children.

The most modern incarnation of that concern relates more to computer video games, which may be more plausible because of its extreme realism and the high degree of thematic violence and murderous representations. Several retrospective investigations of actual violence, most notably the Columbine attack of 1999, did identify an interest in violent video games of the perpetrators, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of children exposed to ultra-violent video games, let alone television programming, do not emulate increased violence as a result.