life

Do sports figures have a special responsibility to model behavior for others?

Adulation may create a burden for some athletes, but many take seriously the challenge to help youngsters develop appropriate attitudes about life.

Olympic diver Greg Louganis tells the story of a 10-year-old he encountered smoking a cigarette. Surprised, he asked the youngster, Why do you smoke?"

"Because you do," the boy replied.

That was the day Louganis quit.

Many people occasionally feel an urgent desire to escape, at least temporarily, to some media-free zone of living. This is not a fantasy exclusive to an age of television and radios blaring on beaches and in parks.

The old song "Tea for Two" looked forward to a place with "nobody near us/to see us or hear us/no friends or relations/on weekend vacations/we won't have it known, dear/that we own a telephone." But in everyday life this is only wishful thinking. A media-free zone is hard to find. Every arena of our lives is touched by and shaped by mass media.

The Home

The home is often regarded as the most private place in a person's life. It is not surprising that it is the battleground of greatest concern about the invasion of the media.

The newspaper was an early intruder, once it became a domestic rather than a business-oriented article. The telephone came into the home, too, bringing with it, in the early days, the possibility of neighbors listening in on the party line to private conversation. Today the party line is gone but wiretapping remains and telemarketing and telephone surveys grow as invaders of domestic privacy.

The radio in the l920s and television in the 1950s served as a family hearth. But increasing affluence and miniaturization of television sets have enabled families to own more than one television and to place then as easily in the kitchen or bedrooms as the living room and den. What is an invader to some, a psychological burglar that penetrates the very walls of the home, is nonetheless a source of company to others. The presence of the television or the radio in a room offers a background noise of human voices and sounds that, especially for people whose privacy has become a form of isolated torture (the invalid, for example), affords a substitute "social" life.

The telephone offers a different model of the media. Here the person at home normally feels connected rather than intruded upon. The telephone ring nevertheless has become imperious: people will drop all else to pick up a ringing phone.

If the telephone is invasive, it is also protective, and for many people, it seems more vital than a lock on the door. For them, the telephone is the link to hospital, fire department, and police. It is the tie that keeps grandparents close at hand and children within reach. It brings the relevant personal world close. It can also be used as a mass medium and organizing tool through the "telephone tree" technique so many volunteer groups use.

The mailbox, like the telephone, affords both connection and invasion. In personal letters, people have a kind of intimate communication that even a telephone does not afford. However, increasingly sophisticated forms of direct mail marketing have taken advantage of this, mimicking the personal letter in advertisements that address us by name, asking us to contribute money to a candidate or to subscribe to a magazine or to buy a new gadget. But people can take advantage of new sophistication, too. Movements of every cause and persuasion, for instance, have combined the advantages of home computer technology to keep mailing lists up to date and to quickly get out letters to respond to political events.

The Automobile

Different media are oriented directly to the car driver. The radio is most obvious, even to the point where radio broadcasters name the late afternoon, "drive time." Other media aim at car travelers, too, especially billboards. (For urban commuters, railroad stations were one of the earliest major locations for advertising, and buses and subways today remain vehicles of advertising as well as transportation). In recent years parking meters in some cities, as well as benches at bus stops, have sprouted advertising placards.

The car itself is an expressive form. At least for teenage boys, often connoisseurs of automotive design, cars are a whole language of statue and stance and posturing. For those of us not literate in this language, cars still send messages via bumper stickers.

The Workplace and The School

At work and in school, direct social hierarchy is so powerful that it overwhelms any sense that the "media,'' as a separate institution, have intruded. However, these sites, too, offer evidence of media influence.

In the workplace, multimedia international programs and in-service training tapes and films are growing in importance while the introduction of computer technology offers not only a new node of work but a new and sometimes oppressive form of record-keeping and surveillance.

In schools, the shadow of television in the home falls over the classroom, where teachers are aware that children are deeply affected in their abilities to learn and pay attention by their TV habits. Everyone agrees that they are influenced by the tube, but there is no consensus, and scarcely any hard data, on just how important this influence is.

Part of the difficulty in evaluating the problem is that TV is not like a separate creature, an invader from Mars, that plops down uninvited in our living rooms. Instead, it is the crystallization and expression of a culture already here. American television quintessentially represents a society recognized by foreign observers for at least 150 years as both impatient and time-conscious, superficial and efficient, competitive and earnest, puritanical in terms of sex and profligate in terms of violence.

TV may not be so much an outside invader as an embodiment of our national character.

The Church/The Hospital/The Library

Unlike business, which is driven to technological efficiency by the persistent "bottom line," the public service sector has often been slow to accept media innovations, although creativity and rapid change can occur at any time. Often limited finances dictate that public organizations walk a fine line between 'old" and "new" media.

While some churches and synagogues are still mimeographing their bulletins, many are exploring new applications for ministry with video and computers. In the meantime, televangelists have taken to the airwaves with aplomb.

Hospitals still use an old-fashioned loud speaker system but they also summon doctors and staff with electronic beepers and "prescribe" videotapes as preventive medicine to patients and their families.

The public library, while still housing books, is also a "multimedia center" with a computerized catalog and a lending library of audio and video tapes.

The Store

The store is specifically designed as a means of communication. Product packaging is eye-catching and products are placed, where possible, at eye level, with children's products on lower shelves. Public address systems may announce to shoppers and at some checkout counters TV monitors beam ads to waiting consumers.

Some stores also serve as information centers, housing bulletin boards as a cheap and convenient form of interpersonal communication. These bulletin boards — as well as the new electronic ones developed by computer networks — offer a communal form of mass communication with a remarkable equality between speaker and audience. It is a striking contrast to most of the media surrounding us.

This is not to say that we always want or always should want a perfect democracy of speaking and media use. If the media can be invaders, they can also be good company. If they can be corrupters, they can also be teachers. If they can exclude, they can also include. If they can attack privacy, they can also provide connections and enlarge horizons. If they are a vehicle of commercial or political propaganda, they can also be a forum for a public world of debate and discussion.

It seems even from this review, that no place is "safe" from the influence of the media age. However it's not so much that media and technology are 'invading" our lives as that we may not have developed the economic, political and cultural structures to absorb and process the potential that media and technology offer. The way we use media — or the way media uses us — is less an indicator of technological progress and more a measure of our culture, our politics and our vigilance.

The media world is a lot more complicated for today’s girls and women than it was for prior generations who watched Annette grow up on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s. During our 20th century lifetimes, women have witnessed the increasing influence of the mass media in shaping our values, needs and identities — and those of our daughters and granddaughters.

The world is saturated with messages telling or selling something. Americans are exposed to over 2,000 ads a day, sixty channels of tv, movies showing at the local theatre or on video, airwaves full of radio talk and music, newspapers, magazines, books and now the Internet.

Women are rightfully concerned about the role the mass media plays in their lives. What's a woman to do? The challenge facing women today is to develop the skills to discern and interpret the images presented by the media. And teaching these skills to the young people in our lives. This can be done by:

• Observing women’s images in the media.
   
• Seeking out alternative depictions and supporting women to make their own media messages.
   
• Sharing knowledge with your family and community.

Observing women's images in the media

Television is still the leading source of news, information, and entertainment for most of us. After all, the average adult today spends three to four hours a day watching television. What picture of women and their place in society does television present?

To begin with, women are 51% of the U.S. population. But in prime time entertainment, there are twice as many male characters as female characters, with men representing 65% of that fictional population compared to their 49% share of the real population.

According to studies conducted by Children Now, an independent children’s advocacy group that keeps tabs on diversity issues in television programming, prime time is a world overwhelmingly populated by able-bodied, single, heterosexual, white, male adults under forty. Diverse types of women do not populate much of the television world:

• Women over 40 are less than one-fifth (19%) of the characters in primary roles.
   
• Ethnic women are barely seen. Out of the prime time population of 2,251 characters, only 145 were black, 25 Asian American, 18 Hispanic and none were American Indian female characters.
   
• Gay and lesbian characters comprised less than 2% of the prime time population and were found primarily in comedies.

When women are seen in fewer roles, the existing portrayals skew the proportions and are perceived by the viewers as "normal." The idealized image of women on television is a female who is under 30, thin, white and has plenty of disposable income.

Magazines and movies reinforce this idealized image using production techniques to improve upon even the most attractive woman. Recently actress Michelle Pfeiffer was featured on the cover of a national men’s magazine with the headline "Michelle Pfeiffer is Perfect!" No offense to Ms. Pfeiffer but if she is perfect, why did the photo re-touching — taking out wrinkles, smoothing the chin, removing tiny skin blemishes — reportedly cost over $1000?

As a result, women of normal weight are likely to have a distorted perception of their weight and body image. Compared to today’s Courtney Cox of the hit television show "Friends" who barely tips the scales at 105 pounds, few people know that Marilyn Monroe wore size 16! And Lillian Russell, the sex symbol in 1900, weighed 200 pounds!

Usually, models and actresses are forced to maintain the myth of thin is sexy. So it may be good news for all women when actress Renee Zelleweger chose to gain twenty pounds for her role in the recent film Bridget Jones Diary in order to depict an "average" young woman.

As for the news, a few individual women are prominent in national news reporting. Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters are usually listed amongst the top ten people of influence in the news. At the same time, women reported less than one fifth of the network news stories in 1997 according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

And men are more often newsmakers and the voice of authority. Reporters turn to men as experts more than women. Media monitor "Women, Men and Media" reports close to 90% of comments are provided by men for news sound bites. On the morning programs "Good Morning, America" and "Today" twice as many men are interviewed as women.

These observations have just touched upon how women are seen or not seen in both news and entertainment. Viewing the media with a critical eye does not mean one gives up watching her personal favorite programs. Women can enjoy television while at the same time recognizing the need for heightened awareness of the images the mass media presents, or leaves out.

The media is just one of many educators

The media may present negative images but despite political finger-pointing, they do not create core values. "Sexism was not born in the media, but it is most visible there," stated sociologist Karen Sternheimer at a recent seminar sponsored by the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles. "Although [the media is] a pervasive force, we are not passive recipients," she noted.

Indeed, according to Carlos Cortes, author of The Children are Watching: How the Media Teach About Diversity, "we each bring our own experience, culture and age to our understanding of media images." Many women and young girls are able to resist media messages and make up their own minds about what messages they will accept or reject.

This ability to think critically must begin early in a child’s life, notes Dr. Jane Brown, a media researcher at the University of North Carolina, who has spent over 12 years researching, as she describes it, "sex, drugs and rock ‘roll."

In one of her first studies on how pre-teens interpreted sexual messages in the media, Dr Brown asked a group of teen girls to keep a journal for one month noting TV shows and movies they watched, magazines they read and music they listened to. Then she visited with each girl privately at home. In the intimacy of their own bedrooms, surrounded by their favorite movie star posters, music collection and bulletin boards, the girls were at ease to express their feelings and ideas about what they accepted or rejected in the media — and why.

What she found was that images or messages from media are a lot less influential than how the girls were raised. "Media sophistication seemed to be correlated not with age, but with family communication patterns, family media habits and the sexual values conveyed by parents and other role models," she explains. "Girls whose families stressed conformity and obedience to authority were more likely to accept media messages at face value. But girls whose parents encouraged their daughters to think for themselves were apt to initiate the kind of independent thinking needed for media criticism."

Expanding your media diet

What we see today is not a uniform media culture. The television networks, national magazines and newspapers, Hollywood movies and videos represent only the bottom tier of a common culture. The media is rich in alternatives if we just look. Not only adults, but also young people, can be encouraged to explore and expand their media experiences. The approach is pro-active:

• Don't rely on any single source of information about an issue or idea. The Internet is now a powerful tool to find alternatives to mainstream newspapers or network TV news. Thoughtful documentaries about issues of interest to women exist and can be found by taking a second look at the TV guide or the video store shelves.
   
• Learn (and teach others) the monitoring skills needed to stimulate analysis and critical thinking. Try conducting a gender study of your local newspaper. This is a wonderful activity for women of all ages and leads to amazing insights about who makes the news — and why.
   
• Seek out ways to deconstruct advertising and commercial images of women. A classic curriculum for groups or classes is "Break the Lies that Bind." The website of the non-profit organization, About Face, (www.about-face.org) takes on advertising images in provocative and, often, very funny ways.
   
• Plan a woman's film festival in your church or community in order to experience different points of view and alternatives to mainstream "action" movies made primarily for young males. "Women Make Movies" (www.wmm.com) is a great source for short and feature length films by women around the world. Work with your local video store or public library to stock and feature independent and alternative films made by women.
   
• Be a media maker and encourage others, particularly young people, to create their own media messages — on video, in print or multi-media. Girl Director is a wonderful low-cost book that helps young girls find and speak in their own voice.

If you follow the public debates over media violence, you may be familiar with arguments like these. Made by adults from an adult perspective, they dismiss and discredit the problem of media violence for children. But I suspect few of these complacent critics understand how a child really sees the violence in a movie like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" or a video game such as "Sonic the Hedgehog." Most adults find it difficult to remember their childhood reactions to media. Fewer still can analyze them.

This lack of understanding becomes a huge problem in crafting -- or even evaluating -- ratings systems designed to protect children from the effects of violence on movies and, increasingly, on television. In fact, analysis of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) film ratings system -- the familiar G, GP, R and N-17 that appear in ads and movie reviews -- demonstrates that it is based on several faulty assumptions about children's responses to violence in media.

How Does A Film Get a Rating

As a system of self regulation by the motion picture industry, the MPAA rating program was designed to measure parental reactions. Jack Valenti, MPAA president, has noted that the MPAA is concerned with finding out what "most American parents will think about film content."

The ratings are established by a board of seven Los Angeles area parents -- real mothers and fathers -- whose fulltime paid job is to review films. Its membership is not intentionally selected to include educators, childhood development experts or others with special training in the effects of media on children.

Films are submitted violuntarily by studios and producers that pay a fee for the service. Unsubmitted films -- usually international productions and some independent efforts -- are usually reviewed and advertised as unrated and may be harder to market. The MPAA Ratings Board examines each individual film in terms of theme, language, nudity, sex, drug use and violence. Informing parents is important to the MPAA. But it is also clear that the rating system's main purpose is defusing public criticism and protecting the film industry from government intervention.

Unfortunately, the MPAA's preoccupation with what is offensive to adults comes at the expense of what is arguably a more important question: What types of portrayals are really harmful to children?

In light of social science research on the effects of medial portrayals on young viewers, there are several problems with the current MPAA rating categories:

• Age division.
  The MPAA rating system divides viewers into three broad age ranges: 0-13 years, 13-17 years and over 17. Such a broad classification ignores the critical changes in learning and evaluation that occur during the preteen years. Currently, movies that are rated as G or PG are deemed appropriate for any child under 13, without recognizing that a five-year-old, for example, is likely to respond quite differently than a 12-year-old to a violent or sexual portrayal.

   

   

• Older vs. younger.
  Current rating categories also assume that all films are more problematic for younger than for older children. For instance, the PG-13 rating indicates that some films may be seen by older children but should not be seen by those under 13. Yet research indicates that certain media depictions, such as teenage characters who engage in realistic aggression, are likely to be more problematic for an older child. Preteen viewers who are typically interested in motives and searching for role models might be more inclined to imitate the behaviors seen than a younger child who doesn't yet grasp the complexity of how motivation affects action.

   

   

• Context of violence.
  The rating scheme focuses primarily on the amount of violence and its explicitness, while ignoring how the violence is portrayed. The context of the violence, such as the nature of the perpetrator and whether the violence is justified (i.e, self defense), are important determinants of the impact of media violence.

   

Moreover, many of these features will affect children differently depending upon their individual level of cognitive development, that is, their ability to reason, to recognize consequences and to separate reality from fantasy. These distinctions are hardly simple; in fact they are quite complex and vary widely from child to child. But they must be considered when labeling films or television programs. An extensive review of social science research on children's response to media portrayals undertaken by myself and my colleagues at the University of California/Santa Barbara in 1990 provides a number of clues.

Children Are Different

Do children react to media violence? The answer to this question is more complex than a simple yes or no. It depends upon the emotional maturity and the level of learning ability of each child. Most parents of two or more children know how much children's abilities and understanding can vary even at the same age, and a year or two of development creates broad differences.

Certainly any parent who has taken two young children to even a mildly scary movie like Snow White or The Wizard of Oz has observed very different reactions. A six-year-old may be enthralled, while a three-year-old hides under the seat. A 13-year-old may be fascinated by the tension and special effects of Jurassic Park, while its portrayal of realistic and merciless dinosaurs would terrify a younger sister or brother.

Recent research on child development has provided us with a much greater understanding of the progressive changes in children's cognitive abilities that occur during the preteen years. Most studies find that preschoolers and children in the early grades differ from older elementary school children not only in what they know but in how they think about the world. For our purposes, then, we should classify children into two broad categories according to cognitive development: younger children, roughly ages three to seven, and older children, ages eight to 12.

Some of the differences between the two groups apply directly to the effects of violence portrayals. The following points should be kept in mind:

• Younger children are more dependent on appearances than older children. Their thoughts are tied closely to surface features of a character or object such as how it looks or sounds. ET's physical appearance frightened some younger children.

   

   

• Older children are able to consider more conceptual aspects of the same character.
  While a younger child is likely to focus primarily on a character's physical appearance or actions (Roadrunner has a long tail and goes Beep-beep), an older child is able to move beyond appearances and consider the character's motives and words (Roadrunner escapes while Wile E. Coyote falls off the cliff).

   

   

• Older children can distinguish reality from fantasy.
  A young child is apt to attribute life and realism to any character who looks real. Consequently, Ninja Turtles, Big Bird and many other animal figures, whether animated or not, are perceived as real so long as they appear to act like humans. As they mature, children gradually develop the ability to compare media depictions to real life. First they attribute realism to anything that is possible in real life. Later they attribute realism only to those depictions that are probable based on their own experience.

   

   

• Older children are better at drawing inferences.
  The ability to form opinions and draw conclusions from data is essential to the understanding of media portrayals. Research suggests that younger children are less able than older children to integrate pieces of information together from stories and narrations, and then to draw inferences from the information. Consequently, linking different scenes together to make sense of the plot can be particularly difficult for younger children, especially if the scenes are not in close in proximity or are out of chronological order.

   

Context of Violence

Many people complain about the amount of violence on television and in the movies. Perhaps more important than the sheer volume of violent actions, though, is the way in which even a small amount of violence is portrayed. The context of violence is a critical determinant of whether a particular portrayal will have a harmful effect. Contextual features help to explain why a movie like "Rambo: First Blood II" is more objectionable than a movie about the Holocaust, even though both may contain explicit depictions of violence. Research has identified four aspects of the context in which media violence appears. Each takes on special importance when considering the developmental level of the child viewer.

• Reward and punishment.
  Portrayals in which violent characters benefit from their actions are most likely to produce harmful effects on child viewers. Characters who receive money, popularity or praise for violent acts can encourage aggressive attitudes and imitative behavior in child viewers. Characters need not be explicitly rewarded for such effects to occur. As long as there is no punishment associated with a violent act, young viewers have been shown to imitate such depictions. Unfortunately, much of dramatized violence on TV and in movies is conveyed without negative consequences; neither perpetrators nor victims suffer much and the perpetrator is often rewarded for antisocial behavior.

   

  Although both younger and older children are influenced by the reward and punishment of violent characters, children at different stages of development will respond differently to the timing of these elements of the plot. In many scenarios, a character receives rewards immediately after performing an aggressive act. For example, the Joker in "Batman" evades the authorities throughout the movie and even gains the attention of a pretty woman. Only in the end is he captured and punished. As mentioned, younger children are less able to link scenes together and draw inferences from them. Thus, for movies in which rewards are immediate and punishment is delayed, younger children are more likely to see the violence as sanctioned and thus acceptable.

   

• Reality of violence.
  Another important feature is the degree of realism associated with a violent portrayal. Research indicates that naturalistic violence is more likely to be imitated and used as a guide for behavior. However, in this case the influence of realism is more critical for older, not younger, children. Because older children are better able to distinguish reality from fantasy, they will be affected more by movies, such as "Karate Kid" and "Rocky," that feature violent acts that are humanly possible. In contrast, younger children respond to both fantasy and realism, making cartoons that contain animated violent characters, like "The Transformers: The Movie," just as problematic for them as more realistic depictions.

   

   

• Justified violence.
  A third aspect of the reaction to violence is the degree to which it is presented as justified or defensible in a given situation. Violent actions that are seen as an appropriate response by the characters performing them are more likely to be imitated by all ages of viewers.

   

  A common theme in many programs is the hero who is forced to be violent because his job demands it or because he must retaliate against an enemy. The popular turtle heroes in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" are a good example. Their message may be ultimately pro-social but the point is conveyed through script twists that make the violence appear justified. Research suggests that both younger and older children can be confused by such mixed signals. However, because of their perceptual limitations, youger children are particularly susceptible. As many parents have learned, younger children were more likely to focus on the Turtles' violent behavior (Ninja chops) which is concrete and easy to see, than on their invisible and more abstract "good" cause.

   

• Perception of the character.
  A fourth contextual cue concerns the nature of the character who acts aggressively. Children are more likely to watch closely and imitate characters who are similar to themselves. Thus, violent movies that feature young perpetrators are more problematic than programs involving violent adults. In addition, the particular age of the perpetrator is important. Younger children are more likely to be attracted to child actors like Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone 2." Older children will be more strongly influenced by preteen and teen characters such as those in the G-rated "Free Willy" and such R-rated films as "Colors" or "Boyz 'n the Hood" that they may see on video or cable.

   

How Ratings Can Work Better According to this analysis, an effective ratings category structure should examine movies and films in the light of these four context areas. Ratings categories also need to determine the age groups most likely to be affected. In general, I recommend at least two categories, roughly three to seven and eight to 12. A separate category for adolescents would recognize both their more fully developed sensibilities and their likelihood of identifying with and modeling the actions of teenage or young adult characters. An effective system would also have to take special note of the impact of violence, horror and sexuality on young viewers.

The subtleties of these developmental differences and their complex interaction with media make the current five-category MPAA ratings system highly questionable. They also make the task of ratings reform far from easy. But I do not believe they make it impossible.

Above all else, those of us who are struggling to reform ratings or find other remedies to the problem of media violence must consider the varying capacities of children. We must recognize that all children are different. We must also remember that younger children perceive the world differently than older children, who in turn think differently than adults. Losing sight of this important principle is to lose sight of those we are trying to protect.