24-hour network news channels are not good for children

by J Scott Christianson, Columbia Daily Tribune Columnist

Last month a school board in Portland, Maine, faced a difficult vote on a proposal to allow the school’s health clinic to provide birth control services to the district’s middle schoolers. Even though all the board members wished they didn’t even have to consider such action, the board ended up passing the proposal simply because many of their middle school students were, in fact, becoming sexually active.

Unfortunately, such trends are not limited to the Northeast. Across the country teens are becoming sexually active at a much younger age. Which should lead us all to wonder where teens so young are getting the message that sexual promiscuity is acceptable.

Television is one of the first things people point to when trying to understand how teenagers are learning how to behave — and rightly so. According to Nielsen Media Research, most Americans (including teenagers) watch more than four hours of television each day. Despite the fact that teenagers have all sorts of new media at their disposal — instant messaging, the Internet, cell phones — television viewership among teenagers continues to increase each year. More than half of America’s teens have television sets in their bedrooms.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest surveyed teens about their television viewing and found that 60 percent of teenagers age 12 to 13 years old have some restrictions on television-watching imposed by their parents or guardians. Of those, 54 percent said they were not allowed to watch television after 9 p.m. and 93 percent were not allowed to watch after 10 p.m. By setting a cutoff time for television-viewing, parents have traditionally been able to limit their child’s exposure to strongly violent or sexual programming since television networks limit their mature material to the later hours.

But on the 24-hour news channels, available on cable and satellite TV, such standards are rarely observed. Sadly, with 24 hours of programming to fill daily, several channels apparently have found it easier and less costly to titillate than to investigate.

The Fox News channel has been an industry leader when it comes to using sex to increase viewership. The channel regularly shows as much smut and nudity as it can, all the while claiming to condemn such material. So far, it has gotten away with this farce and profited handsomely.