Children of Television Wars in Peril

Adopted by the UN General Assembly except Somalia and the United States of America, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes four basic group rights: survival, protection, development, and participation. It is one of the springboards of the Republic Act No. 8370, also known as the Children’s Television Act of 1997. The said Act, in its Declaration of Policy, states that: The State recognizes the vital role of the youth in nation – building and shall promote and protect their physical, moral, spiritual, intellectual, and social well-being by enhancing their over-all development, taking into account sectoral needs and conditions in the development of educational, cultural, recreational policies, and programs addressed to them.

Likewise, the State recognizes the importance and impact of broadcast media, particularly television programs on the value formation and intellectual development of children and must take steps to support and protect children’s interests by providing television program that reflect their needs, concerns, and interests without exploiting them.

The State recognizes broadcasting as a form of mass communication guaranteed by the Constitution, the exercises of which is impressed with public interest, and which imposes upon the broadcast industry the social responsibility of ensuring that its activities serve the interest of the Filipino people.

Adults and children share the same mass media environment and they have diverse emotional needs and mental capabilities. Mass media producers and practitioners must consider that children are part of the public that they are committed to serve. Advocates of children’s television are committed to children as special audience and consumers of various mass media forms.

The power of visual comprehension in television overwhelms other sensory organs and higher levels of cognitive, psychomotor, and affective processes. Children are visual learners and they comprehend things differently with adults, not because they are less intelligent and not capable of critical thinking and understanding the real world, but because they have qualitatively different ways of thinking at specific stages of growth and development.

Today, the contents and the visuals of television programs that children watch and the amount of number of hours they spend in watching are important indicators in learning about our own people, our own culture, and our country. But, many television programs that children regularly watch include stereotype images and characterizations, especially of girls, of women, and of children.

Television, Advertisers, and Children

The book “The Ordeal of Mark Twain” written by the great literary critic and cultural historian Van Wych Brooks in 1920 used Twain, a renowned artist who became famous because of his imposing works but failed in the end, as an example of the effects of commercialism in mass media brought by gigantic advertisements. From the novel, we could ascertain that commercialism tells readers or viewers what they want to know rather than what they must know.

Television is what we could call a modern day Tower of Babel; its scope is unlimited, its ideologies are too unorthodox. Frankly speaking, it would be very difficult, if not downright impossible, to live nowadays without mass media. It would also be very difficult, if not downright impossible, to produce television programs without advertisers.

This is because mass media is a commercially driven industry. Fr. Ray John Marek, OMI, proved this when he said that “mass media are business with commercial interests where the majority of the programming that we watch has one purpose: to deliver an audience to an advertiser and that networks sell time to advertisers and thus increase the advertiser’s revenue.”

The death of Joy Guevarra “became one of the triggers that forced McCann Erickson Philippines to take a long, hard look at the content of noontime variety shows” because their “clients were concerned that their products might suffer after being identified with shows that offend the sensibilities of the viewers.”

McCann confirmed “that some of the language used on these shows was intended for a “mature” audience, containing “sexual references’, that hosts remarks tended to humiliate contestants in the game portion, some of which are hazardous, that programs were also rife with slapstick comedy, and that dance numbers were sexually graphic.”