Can parents teach their children to watch TV newscasts? And should they?
Yes, say TV experts and children’s advocates.
What do you want at your house? And what can you do?
“Children can be taught to be smart consumers of TV,” said Linda Ellerbee, who produces the acclaimed “Nick News” for children on cable’s Nickelodeon. “You start telling them they are smarter than their TV. We know most kids will spend more time in front of TV than in classrooms. By implication, that means TV will be their most important teacher. We don’t teach our children how to watch.”
No surprise there. Most parents today were never taught to watch, either. For many older Baby Boomers, television was simply a widely accepted miracle of technology. And for younger Baby Boomers and Generation X, the medium has been a largely unexamined fact of life.
No more. Think of all the complaints over TV violence in general and “Beavis and Butt-Head” in particular.
Putting heads in the sand
Some parents might want to remove television from their homes, taking “the ostrich approach,” as children’s TV advocate Peggy Charren dubs it. “That’s nice to think about, but 99 percent of us have TV sets.”
Even if your children don’t sit down and watch an entire news broadcast, they’re aware of what’s going on. They pick it up through channel surfing, from friends and from your discussions of current events. You can help them make sense of what they see and hear.
“We can think of that kind of program as the family going to school together,” Charren said. “Sharing ideas at the dinner table is a way to keep the family together, and make the children feel the world is not such a terrible place. You could make a learning game out of the news. `So what item can we focus on? How can we make that better? What can we fix? What are the reasons things don’t work?’ “
When do you know your children are ready to watch news? It has to be an individual choice, based on the child’s maturity. Shelter the very young from the news, Charren urges. She also suggests watching “Nick News” and talking about the ways the news is presented.
Parents also need to talk about violent stories.
“You have to help children understand murder,” Charren said.
Covering the exception
But children need to understand the world is not as violent as the news makes it seem, Ellerbee said. “TV news covers the exception, not the rule,” she said. “We don’t report the number of people who got home safely from schools. When they see Polly Klaas or 30 minutes of mayhem, they need to understand that’s the exception in their community.” (Klaas, a 12-year-old California girl, was kidnapped and later slain.)
Charren says sometimes parents might have to force children to talk. “You may have to introduce conversations so they’re not hiding fears from you,” she said.
Parents shouldn’t be afraid of re-examining some long-held beliefs about television as they watch with their children. “For years, we’ve been told the camera doesn’t lie,” veteran newswoman Ellerbee said. “Nothing lies easier than the camera. The camera shows you a very selective piece of reality.
“We can now manipulate the image. The audience is going to have to rely on our good intentions not to do so.” Ellerbee points to the example of Time magazine, which doctored a picture of O.J. Simpson for a recent cover.
Nothing is equal
Children need to understand that a lot of reporters are out there covering news. “They are not all the same, they are not all equal, they are not all good,” Ellerbee said. “You have to understand that `A Current Affair’ and ABC News don’t play by the same rules.”
The hours before prime time, which were meant to be devoted to news and information, have become home to “A Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and “Geraldo”-shows that “pass themselves off as news,” Ellerbee said. One newsmagazine with content and a time slot good for viewers 11 or older is “60 Minutes,” Ellerbee suggests.
For now, the heavy O.J. Simpson coverage has abated, but Ted Turner told TV critics recently that CNN expects to cover the murder trial full-time once it begins.
The Simpson case also proves that seeing someone on television cannot be confused with knowing the person. “People on TV can control what we see of them,” Ellerbee said. “We know the image, and that’s different from a whole person. That doesn’t imply he’s guilty of murder, but we know he was guilty of beating his wife.”
Tough questions, answers
If children ask about the heavy coverage, Ellerbee has some answers, not all of them pleasant.
“It’s because we want to see it,” she said. “If it weren’t getting these amazing ratings, selling newspapers, they wouldn’t be covering it every day. We don’t cover economic summits with this fervor, yet they are more important . . . We’re partly responsible for what TV news is. We are part of the problem. We are not the whole problem. It’s a collective problem.”
There is a need for media literacy, both at home and in the schools.
“TV is something that’s happening to our children a lot in their lives,” Charren said. “One of the problems with news is, how long is each message? The news of the world gets four minutes. More time is spent on sports than news in the community.”
To help children understand the TV process, Ellerbee’s “Nick News” followed an NBC station covering a story for a day, from the assignment to broadcast. The report looked at the editing and the material that was left out.
“None of this is bad-it’s only bad if it’s used to manipulate or change the intent of facts,” Ellerbee said. “Kids need to put critical distance between them and what they watch, but they won’t be able to until parents do.”
