Television, Parents, and Children

In a study conducted by the Philippine Children’s Television Foundation (PCTF), Feny delos Angeles-Bautista, PCTF executive director, explained that 1 400 children from different cities and provinces were asked what their favorite television programs were and what television programs they watched regularly. Survey shows that the top 25 programs included adult programs, sitcoms and action series, and sports programs, basketball and wrestling.

In a similar study conducted by the National Statistics Office under the Office of the President of the Republic of the Philippines, the National Capital Region garnered the highest of television exposure, 91.3 percent, as compared to other forms of mass media.

Studies also show that next to parents and family, television is the most influential factor in shaping children’s views and values. Television is the most popular source of information and entertainment among Filipino children. Compared with American and European children, Filipino children are allowed to watch adult television programs unsupervised. As a result, they have a media diet heavy with violence and vulgarity.

This is consistent with one of the important conclusions of the UNESCO Global Study on Media. There is less to worry about in the case of children who live and grow in secure and stable homes, who can count on parents or guardians to regulate their mediated experiences, or who benefit from school and faculty support with some attention and emphasis on media literacy training. But, this is not the case of many Filipino children. One in six suffers from neglect while one in three drops out before grade six. Barely two-thirds of 12-21 years old live with both parents. 409 849 children of 5-7 years old live away from home.

“Parental guidance is very important. Children need to learn to explore the best possibilities that media can offer while protecting themselves from negative effects of watching television programs, simply by learning to be discriminating media consumers who can understand all forms of mass media,” Delos Angeles-Bautista said

Television, Practitioners, and Children

The death of Joy Guevarra is not only because of the negligence of her parents. Aside from the importance of parental guidance and the importance of media literacy training, mass media producers and practitioners are responsible in helping children became not only discriminating media consumers, but also ones who could maximize mass media products as they grow to their own advantage.

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.”