Children spend so many hours watching television, playing video games and the like, that media use could qualify as their full-time job, a recent study shows. The Kaiser Family Foundations found that the typical American child spends more than 38 hours a week as a “media consumer” in a home that averages 3 TVs, 3 tape players, 3 radios, 2 VCRs, 2 CD players, a video game player and a computer, as well as newspapers, magazines and comic books. Children are less likely to live in a home with just one television than in a house with five or more. The study is based on sampling of 3,155 children ages 2-18, and is the first to take into account not just television but the full spectrum of media.
Supervision is often minimal or nonexistent. Half of the children surveyed do not have any parental rules limiting their time in front of the television or the kinds of programs they may watch. For children 8 and older, 61% said they watch what they want, when they want. [Sentinel, 11/18/99]
Boys To Men
The following are excerpts from Children Now’s recent research. These key findings are from a national poll of children and a content analysis of the most popular television programs, movies, and music videos.
Expectations
• Children see men on television as leaders and problem solvers, funny, successful, confident and athletic.
• A majority of children say that men and boys on television are often portrayed as focused on the opposite sex; as one boy said, “His main goal is to get the girl.”
Violence and Anger
• Some level of violence appears in over half of the sample of televisions shows and movies most popular with adolescent boys.
• Almost three-fourths of children describe males on television as violent and more than two-thirds describe men and boys on television as angry.
• One in five male characters employs some form of physical aggression to solve problems.
What Girls vs. Boys Consume
• Boys between the ages of 10-17 are more likely than girls to watch television daily, (81% vs. 75%) play video games (40% vs. 18%) and use the Internet (15% vs. 10%)
• Boys are more likely to watch sports on a regular basis (33% vs. 7%) and enjoy cartoons daily (36% vs. 27%) and girls are more than twice as likely to watch talk shows (25% girls vs. 10%)
• When asked to choose 3 television role models, 80% of boys choose male personalities, while only 16% chose a female. Conversely, 57% of the girls choose males and 59% choose a female role models. Further, 43% of the boys choose only males, while only 25% of the girls choose only females.
Overall top 3 role models: Will Smith, Bart Simpson, and Tim Allen.
• 49% of the children polled watch music videos daily.
• Sixty-two percent of the characters in music videos are male 54% white and 42% African-American. Males are nearly three times as likely as females to appear in videos with a primary theme of social protest or bravado, while females are four times more likely to appear in videos featuring a primary theme of love/romance.
• Over one-quarter of the videos include some degree of attention to female breasts, legs or torsos. Almost two-thirds of videos feature females as props, characters who are used by the central performer in the course of his/her actions or who appear as background. While female props are likely to be semi-nude (25%) as to be dressed in revealing clothing (25%) male props used in 40% of the videos tend to be fully clothed most of the time (75%).
Sports Media
Boys are five times more likely than girls to watch sports programs on a regular basis. Ninety percent of our nation’s boys regularly or often watch televised sports programs, with their accompanying commercials. With its fundamentally male “cast”—athletes and anchors, coaches and commentators—sports programming sends uniquely powerful messages about masculine behavior.
One of sports coverage’s dominant messages is that the most aggressive athletes are rewarded. This message was found most often in NBA games, comprising 40 of the 66 examples from our sample. The NFL had 15 examples, Extreme Sports and Major League Baseball both had 4 examples. Sports coverage emphasizes the notion that violence is to be expected. Athletes who are “playing with pain” or “giving up their body for the team” are often portrayed as heroes.
• Commentators (77% white males) consistently use martial metaphors and language of war and weaponry to describe sports action.
• Sports commentators continually depict and replay incidents of athletes taking big hits and engaging in reckless acts of speed and violent crashes. Extreme Sports, appearing 21 different times during the sample week, promoted its road racing show as “rip-roaring weekend of macho mania—a wild and reckless road trip.”
• Games are often promoted by creating or inflating conflict between two star athletes.
Children Now’s excellent project will help educators debunk these messages and aid those in the industry to take responsibility for their influence over children today. [Children Now, 1212 Broadway 5th fl., Oakland CA, 94612, (510) 763-2444, email: children@childrennow.org, web: www.childrennow.org]
Television Study on Gender
An examination of the top-rated entertainment series among the top 100 programs of the 1998-1999 prime-time season found women’s employment at a standstill. Women comprised 31% of producers, 24% of executive producers, 21% of writers 16 % of editors, 15% of creators, and 3 % of directors. There wasn’t a single female director of photography working on any of the programs considered in the 1998-1999 season.
On screen the story is much the same. Women accounted for only 38% of all characters in the 1998-1999 season; the same percentage reported by George Gerbner in his study of the 1990-1991 season.
Viewers are more likely to see a female alien or angel in prime-time TV than they were a female Asian or Latina character. 78% of the females are white, 16% were African-American, 3% were other-worldly (aliens, witches, etc.), 2% were Asian, 1% were Hispanic and 3% were Native American.
31% of the male characters but only 20% of the female characters held powerful jobs, (e.g., doctor, lawyer, business owner). While 15% of the female characters performed traditional female jobs, only 1% of the male characters enacted similar duties. Once again, this year’s study found a relationship between the number of women working behind the scenes and women’s presence on screen. For example, when a program had no women executive producer, females accounted for only 36% of characters, when a program employed at least one women executive producer, females comprised 41% of characters.
“The results of this study add to a growing body of evidence that gender diversity behind the scenes translates into greater gender equity on screen. With women accounting for only 21.5% of all behind-the-scenes workers on programs considered, gender diversity remains far from a foregone conclusion. Rather than achieving “critical mass,” as some in the industry have optimistically noted, “gender inertia” seems to have set in, keeping the number of women low on screen and behind the scenes.
[Reel News, Nov./Dec. 1999] for more information contact: Dr. Lauzen, School of Communication, SDSU, San Diego, CA 92182.