Children Talking Television

The Making Of Television Literacy

David Buckingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780750701099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135722272
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

Is television harmful to children? Does it destroy imagination, provode delinquency and violence, undermine family life and have other detrimental effects on children?; The author, himself a parent, teacher and researcher investigates the complex ways in which children actively make meaning and take pleasure from television. Chapters cover the popular debates about children and television from a general and academic perspective. The characteristics of children's talk about television are explored, as children interact with other children and other family members in "family viewing" sessions.; Key concepts which inform children's talk about television are investigated i. e. genre, narrative, character, modality, and agency. Finally, conclusions are presented and issues outlined for further research.; Drawing on theories and ideas developed within media and cultural studies, English, education, psychology, sociology, linguistics and other related areas, this book will be useful to both students and teachers in the field, and to the general reader with an interest in children and the media.

Part One

Chapter 1

Children and Television:
The Context of Research and Debate

An Ordinary Parent Speaks Out

On September 15th 1988, just as the research reported in this book was being devised, Prince Charles, heir apparent to the throne of Great Britain, delivered a speech at the opening of the Museum of the Moving Image, London’s hyperactive museum of film and television. His comments were enthusiastically reported by many popular newspapers the following morning. The Daily Mail ran the story on its front page:

Charles, speaking not just as Prince of Wales but as the father of two young sons, chose the opening of the new Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank and an audience of top TV and film executives to deliver his message.

He said: ‘A museum of this kind draws our attention to the past — the kind of standards which used to exist throughout the film-making profession.’

And, he argued, it was not difficult to draw comparisons and to ask a few basic questions.

‘For instance, do we have to tolerate an incessant menu of utterly gratuitous violence on both cinema and television — especially television — and most particularly videos?

‘Those of us with children are very concerned by the appalling lack of restraint shown by those who make such films and videos, and who define their so-called art by insisting on the absolute necessity of portraying real life.

‘They say that all you have to do if you don’t like it is to switch the television off. And if, as parents, you complain that a diet of freely-available and insensate violence is likely to influence the way some people behave and relate to others, then you are told there is absolutely no proof that violence on TV has any effect on people’s behaviour.

‘But that, as we all know, is palpable nonsense.’

The Prince, who wrote the speech himself, labelled this an attempt by ‘so-called experts’ to confuse people — to make them feel they didn’t know what they were talking about and that what they were seeing with their own eyes was an illusion.

‘But it is not an illusion and it is high time someone told these self-appointed experts that it is like the emperor’s set of new clothes — that they are not wearing anything at all.’

Charles, who has video recorders at his homes in Kensington Palace and Highgrove, Gloucestershire, continued: ‘I suspect that a great many people up and down the country are deeply concerned, for example, at the type of videos on sale — and, as we all know, available to children who cannot be prevented officially from obtaining them.

‘So many people feel utterly powerless to alter this situation and so I hope that this museum will entertain and educate, while at the same time help to show people just how far good taste has been diminished during the last 20 years.’

The Daily Mail’s report was supplemented by an inside story entitled ‘Why Charles speaks for every parent’, in which Jeannette Kupfermann congratulated Charles for the ‘finger-on-the-pulse wisdom of that attack on screen violence’. On the following day, its lead story was headed ‘25 KILLINGS ON YOUR TV NEXT WEEK’, and reported that ‘the flood of television violence is continuing unabated despite Prince Charles’s heart-felt attack on it’.

The Daily Mirror also supported Charles’s statements. Its editorial claimed that increases in crimes of violence were directly caused by increases in TV violence, and that ‘those who say it has no effect on people’s behaviour must know they are talking rubbish’. Here too, the lead story was supplemented by a feature article, in which newsreader and ‘mum-of-two’ Carol Barnes argued for the need to ‘turn off the violence’.

This kind of controversy about ‘screen violence’ is familiar enough; but it is worth taking a little time to investigate what is taking place here. Firstly, consider how the key participants in the debate are defined. Previous media representations of Prince Charles have tended to portray him as an eccentric with little sense of everyday realities. Stories about how he talks to his plants or attempts to ‘get in touch with nature’ by escaping to the Scottish islands have provided extensive opportunities for satire. Indeed, as the Mail itself is bound to admit, Charles has often been criticized for leaving ‘the mundane tasks of child-rearing’ to his wife. Yet in this case Charles suddenly acquires the right to ‘speak for every parent’. Rather than declaiming his usual quasi-mystical beliefs, he is seen to be the embodiment of common sense, to have his ‘finger on the pulse’, to ‘voice what so many people feel’ yet are somehow powerless to say. In effect, the press reports redefine Charles as a responsible parent, and as the voice of consensus.

Ranged against Prince Charles, two main parties can be identified. Firstly, there is the film and television industry, which is implicitly defined as cynical and irresponsible — although it is hardly aided here by the fact that its primary advocate is none other than Michael Winner, director of the Death Wish films. The Daily Mail reports Winner’s ‘astonishing outburst’ in response to Charles’s speech, although it is given little credence. The point, made by Winner and by representatives of the video industry, that video rentals are now extremely tightly censored, is effectively buried. The second major party here is the ‘so-called experts’, the researchers who talk such ‘palpable nonsense’ and attempt to deny the evidence of ordinary people’s experience — although these experts are neither named nor consulted.

Significantly, the reports in both the Mail and the Mirror conclude with the words of Mary Whitehouse, Britain’s leading ‘moral majority’ campaigner. Whitehouse expresses her ‘immeasurable gratitude’ for Charles’s remarks, which she claims will ‘echo in hearts just about everywhere, certainly among parents’.

Secondly, let us consider how the object of concern — ‘screen violence’ — is defined. Apart from the tendency to overstatement — ‘incessant’, ‘utterly gratuitous’, ‘insensate violence’ — one curious but significant aspect here is the recurrent food metaphor. Children are shown a ‘menu’ of violence, ‘served up’ a ‘diet’ of violence, ‘fed’ with gratuitous violence every day. It is obviously a metaphor of consumption, in which children have to ‘eat’ what they are given, yet it is also strangely physical, suggesting an almost visceral disgust.

Perhaps more significantly, there is the assumption that the object can be defined quantitatively — most notably in the Mail’s ‘25 killings’ headline. ‘Violence’ is defined here exclusively as acts of physical aggression, which are to be counted irrespective of the contexts in which they occur or the characters who commit them. The argument would seem to be that the more ‘violence’ there is, the worse the effects will be: we can judge the influence of television simply on the basis of counting what is shown.

Insofar as the context of ‘screen violence’ is addressed, however, there is a significant emphasis on fiction rather than non-fiction. The Daily Mail’s ‘25 killings’ refer exclusively to drama and feature films. Carol Barnes in the Mirror spells this out more explicitly: she is not concerned about the effects of television news on her children (although she obviously has a vested interest here!) but about movies and programmes like The A-Team. Perhaps paradoxically, fiction is seen to be capable of exerting effects in a way that factual material is not. According to Barnes, fictional programmes like this give children ‘a completely wrong idea about life … children think that after people have been zapped or beaten on the head they just get up and walk away’.

However, when it comes to defining the process through which effects are presumed to occur, there is some confusion. In most cases, the process is implicitly seen as one of direct imitation: the Daily Mirror, as we have seen, attributes the rising crime rate to increasing levels of television violence, and its influence on ‘impressionable minds’. The industry’s claim that the incidence of television violence — at least in terms of counting aggressive acts — has steadily declined since the 1970s is dismissed as mere ‘cynicism’. The Mail’s TV critic, Jeannette Kupfermann, offers a bewildering range of explanations of this process:

Young children can still buy videos that degrade, humiliate and desensitize, and while we don’t know exactly why screened violence will trigger real-life violence in one person and not another, the indisputable fact remains that it creates a climate that not only acts as a catalyst for the disturbed but will raise our level of tolerance and even expectation of violence. The Prince is right: common sense dictates that eventually television violence seeps through and has an effect on people’s behaviour.

Violence, according to Kupfermann, appears to work in a number of different ways simultaneously: it ‘triggers’ and ‘acts as a catalyst’, yet it also ‘desensitizes’, ‘creates a climate’ and ‘seeps through’. Yet among these diverse and seemingly contradictory hypotheses, it is the notion of ‘direct effects’ that wins through. Any request for a more complex explanation is merely academic quibbling.

Finally, how is the solution to this problem defined? The answer would seem to be two-fold. Firstly, there are calls for stricter censorship by the state — although, as I have noted, the censorship apparently being called for here already exists in the form of the Video Recordings Act, which itself arose from a previous ‘moral panic’ around the so-called ‘video nasties’ (see Barker, 1984). Yet just as the term ‘video nasty’ remained undefined, so in this case the precise nature of the ‘violence’ being condemned remains unclear. Apart from the Mail’s litany of ‘25 killings’, there are very few actual films or programmes mentioned throughout the debate, and none by Charles himself. Here again, a consensus is being presumed — or rather constructed — around a shared abomination of something which remains conveniently vague.

However, there is another kind of regulation being promoted here, which is more ‘private’ than ‘public’. Carol Barnes, for example, is implicitly held up by the Mirror as a model parent, who limits the amount of television her children watch and encourages them to select more ‘educational’ programmes. Similarly, Jeannette Kupfermann in the Mail contrasts the approach of the ‘responsible’ family, exemplified by ‘family man’ Prince Charles, with that of the ‘worst’ families, where ‘latch-key children’ watch TV alone, and are ‘barraged with messages, none of which get filtered through mediating values’. The problem, according to Carol Barnes, is that new technologies like video and satellite TV are much harder to control. ‘Deviant’ families, such as single-parent families or those in which both parents work, are implicitly seen to be failing in their responsibilities, and it is up to the state to intervene.

What is at stake here, therefore, are much broader questions about knowledge and authority — about what children of different ages should be allowed to see and to know. Prince Charles, for example, argues that film-makers attempt to justify their ‘lack of restraint’ by ‘insisting on the absolute necessity of portraying real life’; while Michael Winner counters this by suggesting that Charles’s views would lead to ‘endless programmes about flower-arranging and cookery’. While both parties somewhat overstate the case, the underlying issues here are much more fundamental than the mere local anxiety about what children might or might not watch on TV. In effect, they are about who defines ‘real life’ and who decides how far children should be ‘exposed’ to it. As this example illustrates, the topic of ‘children and television’ condenses much broader social, moral and political concerns — to the extent that a more open, less judgmental investigation of the issue is often extremely difficult.

Terms of Debate

Prince Charles’s contribution to the debate about children and television was one moment in a continuing controversy. Stories about the evil effects of television on children make good copy, and they are rarely absent from the headlines. At the time of writing, for example, there have been stories about a killing apparently inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and television has also been drawn into the debate about declining standards of literacy, which is currently enjoying one of its perennial revivals.

As a number of writers have argued (e.g. Pearson, 1984, Lusted, 1985), this public anxiety about children and television is the latest manifestation of a long-standing concern about the effects of popular media forms on young people. Over 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato proposed to ban the dramatic poets from his ideal Republic, for fear that their stories about the immoral antics of the gods would influence impressionable young minds. Just as in the case of concerns about The A-Team, Plato argued that young people were unable to tell the difference between what was ‘allegorical’ and what was literal’, and would therefore be likely to copy what they saw. In more recent times, popular literature, music hall, the cinema and children’s comics have all provoked ‘moral panics’ which have typically led to stricter censorship designed to protect children from their allegedly harmful effects. More recent public controversies — such as the ‘video nasties’ scare of the early 1980s (Barker, 1984) or Mary Whitehouse’s attacks on the soap opera EastEnders (Buckingham, 1987a) — are merely heirs to this long tradition.

While Prince Charles’s concern about ‘screen violence’ derives primarily from a right-wing ‘moral majority’ position, anxiety about the negative effects of television on children is manifested right across the political spectrum. The work of Marie Winn (1985) and Neil Postman (1983), among others, derives from a more ‘liberal’ position, which has considerable currency, especially among middle-class parents. The concern here is not so much with the effects of television on children’s behaviour as on their thought processes. Here, it is the activity of viewing itself — irrespective of content — which is seen to be ‘bad for children’s brains’.

Winn’s symptomatically-titled book The Plug-In Drug provides a barrage of evidence — much of it anecdotal — in support of the view that television destroys children’s capacity for intelligent thought. Television, she asserts, retards the physical development of the brain, blunts the senses and encourages mental laziness. It impairs children’s sense of their own identity, their attention span and their linguistic abilities. As a result of their addiction to television, Winn argues, children are deprived of play and of the opportunity to participate in the everyday rituals of normal family life. The metaphor of television-as-drug recurs throughout: television is ‘an insidious narcotic’, children are ‘TV zombies’ who watch in a ‘trance-like state’, which ‘blots out’ the real world. By contrast, Winn provides a series of glowing testimonials from parents who have helped their children ‘kick the TV habit’.

For these writers, television is also regarded as a primary cause of social unrest. It is no coincidence, Postman (1983) argues, that the generation which rebelled so spectacularly against adult authority in the 1960s was the first to be brought up on television. By making adult ‘secrets’ freely available to children, television effectively undermines their respect for their elders and betters. As with the so-called ‘moral majority’, this argument is informed by a powerful nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ which apparently existed before television; and here too, the most effective response to the problem of television is seen to lie in a reassertion of traditional family values.

While there are definite affinities between these ideas and those of the ‘moral majority’, they also connect with anxieties about the negative effects of television voiced by many on the political left. Here, television is often regarded as an extremely powerful agent of the ‘dominant ideology’ — a kind of ‘propaganda machine’ which is responsible for brainwashing children into ‘consumerism’ and other forms of false consciousness.

Rose Goldsen’s book The Show and Tell Machine (Goldsen, 1977) provides a typical example of this more ‘popular’ left-wing perspective. Goldsen describes television as a system of ‘mass behaviour modification’, which anaesthetizes the emotions, distorts authentic art and culture and maintains ideological hegemony. Significantly, she draws on the imagery of dystopian novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, and on the equally apocalyptic theories of Marshall McLuhan. What emerges here is a view of television as enormously powerful — as ‘irresistible’ and ‘insidious’ — and of audiences as passive consumers, who are simply ‘manipulated’ by television and thereby ‘sold’ to advertisers. Yet again, it is children who are seen to be most at risk: their ‘authentic’ culture has been replaced by the ‘imagineers’, who have turned them into mere victims of merchandising.

On one level, this account of media effects would appear to be directly opposed to that of the ‘moral majority’. If Whitehouse and her ilk condemn television for its attack on traditional moral values, many on the left condemn it for supporting them, and thereby upholding the dominant political order. Yet they are united in a view of television as extremely powerful, and as capable of seducing children away from their ‘better nature’. Indeed, despite their overt political differences, there are significant similarities in the rhetoric used by these popular critics of television: in each case, the medium is seen as an attack on ‘authentic’ or ‘essentially human’ values, and on ‘true’ art and culture.

The different positions I have briefly sketched here often unite around particular controversies. Indeed, in reporting Prince Charles’s speech, the Daily Mail notes the common ground which has been established on the issue of ‘screen violence’ between moral watchdogs like Whitehouse, feminists like Germaine Greer (described here as ‘one of the darlings of the Sixties revolution’) and Charles himself (‘the prince of the counter culture’, no less!).

Another recent example of this may be found in the controversy surrounding ‘new wave’ US cartoons such as Thundercats, Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In this instance, it is often hard to distinguish traditional right-wing anxieties about violence from left-wing criticisms of ‘war toys’ and militarism. The cartoons serve as a focus for left-wing concerns about gender stereotyping and about merchandising, as well as liberal arguments about the way in which television is ‘colonizing’ children’s play (see Engelhardt, 1986; Carlsson-Paige and Levin, 1990). The anxieties about these cartoons are also part of a broader concern about the potential impact of the deregulation of broadcasting. In the British context, these arguments are heavily informed by a fear of ‘Americanization’ (see Hebdige, 1982) and by a kind of nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of ‘quality’ children’s television, represented by programmes like the long-running factual magazine Blue Peter and ‘classic’ serials like The Chronicles of Narnia.

As these examples suggest, debates about children and television frequently serve as a vehicle for much broader concerns. Genuine, often deep-seated anxieties about what are perceived as undesirable social or moral changes lead to a search for a single, causal explanation. Blaming television may serve to deflect attention away from other possible causes of change or decline — ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Transcription Conventions
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Reference
• Index