An interview with David Walsh
Executive Director
National Institute on Media and the Family

A colleague of David Walsh's had to cut short a summer vacation trip to California with his family, when he got word that a band of teenagers had broken into his home. The marauding teens "ate the family's food, broke their furniture, stole their valuables, wore their clothes, defaced their home's walls, and defecated and urinated on their carpets," wrote Walsh in his book Selling Out America's Children.

Police discovered the family barely knew the teens who, when questioned as to why they had robbed and vandalized the family's home, said "It was just for fun." Just as surprising, two of the ringleaders attended a prestigious private school in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Walsh, a psychologist and Executive Director of The National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, believes that the mass media play an important role in shaping the attitudes and values of young people like those who plundered his colleague's home. Increasingly, parents agree with him and want reliable, independent sources of information about the mass media, including television, movies, and computer games.

Only in the last 5 or 6 years have parents realized the influence the mass media have on their children, perhaps because their children's values are so at odds with their own. When surveyed in the 70s, less than 50 percent of parents believed that mass media influenced the attitudes and values of their children. Today, an overwhelming majority of parents, some 88 percent, believe that mass media have a pervasive influence, according to a Fall 1996 study conducted by the National Institute on Media and the Family.

The average child in the United States watches 28 hours of television each week, which works out to 4 hours a day. By the time the child reaches the age of 18, he has witnessed some 200,000 acts of violence. Disturbingly, children's programming tends to be more violent than prime time television. The violence is depicted in a comical way, with the goal of entertaining children.

Over the last 40 years, a wealth of evidence has accumulated that shows a cause and effect relationship between violence on television and youth violence. Although no one study is definitive, taken as a whole, they show a consistent pattern. And no one can doubt that violence is endemic among our children.

The United States leads the world's 26 richest nations in violence against youth, according to a recently released study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In 1991, the homicide rate among young people was 800 percent greater than that of the country with the next highest rate. And it is rates of violence, which do not vary with changes in the size of the youth population, that have skyrocketed, Walsh said.

There are multiple reasons for the violence, Walsh explained. Compared to previous generations, kids today are on their own more. Unsupervised children watch more television, which promotes violence. And children have easy access to firearms, "which creates a much more lethal combination," Walsh observed.

Socioeconomic class also influences children's television consumption. The lower their socioeconomic standing, the more television children watch. Low socioeconomic class already puts children at risk, so "the kids who are at greater risk are kids who are watching the most television," Walsh said.

While the media have focused on television's impact on youth violence, largely overlooked has been its subtle shaping of attitudes and values that leads to violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. Some kids will imitate what they see on television in copycat fashion, but what is much more common is mass media's influence on their attitudes and values over time.

"In my opinion, the most harmful effect of the steady diet of violent images that have been sent to kids is not necessarily the violent behavior. The most harmful effect is that what it has done is that it has created and nourished a culture of disrespect," Walsh said. "What we've done is that over time we have redefined the cultural norms about how we're supposed to treat one another," he added.

While not every kid will pick up a gun and shoot someone, many more will put each other down or shove or hit each other, as a result of repeated exposure to the attitudes and values of the mass media. Or kids learn values such as "what's in it for me?" "It's in that area that television and other mass media are so influential," Walsh said. And he believes that we still underestimate its influence.

We now know that children are born with the basic architecture of the brain in place, but with a brain that is still "plastic." Experience, especially in the first three years of life, has a direct influence on brain development. Walsh is currently writing a book on the influence the media have on the developing brain of the young child, in an attempt to take the discussion of the media's influence on children to a deeper level.

To critics in the industry, Walsh puts the question "If the images and messages that we see on television weren't influential, then why do businesses spend millions of dollars for the opportunity to get their messages and images in front of us? Either they are influential in shaping attitudes and values, or they're wasting their money," he said.

Walsh reacts with puzzlement and amusement when people in the television industry deny that what kids see on television affects them. "My response to that is, if it doesn't, then why do you charge such high rates for advertisers to get their messages and images on your screen?" he said. He notes the contradiction in telling advertisers that television can affect attitudes and values and then denying that it influences them.

People in the industry fail to show the same sense of accountability to other children as they do to their own. "We have producers of entertainment who publicly say that I wouldn't let my children watch the things that I create," Walsh said. Their approach to their own children is very different from their approach to children as a market segment.

Walsh would like to see the industry balance the right to pursue a profit with accountability to children. Walsh doesn't object to the industry making a profit. Rather, he views making a profit at any cost as objectionable. "When I, as a media producer, start to realize that many of the things that I'm doing have negative consequences, although they may be unintended, then I have a responsibility to figure that into my decision-making process," Walsh said.

The challenge to parents is to convert newfound awareness of mass media's effect on their children into action, Walsh believes. "We have to start to treat these very very powerful teachers that we brought into our homes with the care and respect that they deserve," Walsh said. "They are not going away, and so the challenge for us is to learn how to live with them," he added.

The first step parents can take is to remove television sets from their children's bedrooms. Some 56 percent of children in the United States have their own set. "How can we monitor what it is they're seeing, when we don't even know what they're seeing," Walsh noted. He also recommended limiting the number of hours children watch television.

Parents also need and want reliable information about television programs, so they can decide in advance whether something is worth watching, a concept called "appointment television" by Hollywood producer Ken Wales.

A thumbs up, thumbs down approach based on ages, favored by the television industry, won't satisfy parents, Walsh believes. "We need an information system that is content-based, tells parents what's in a movie or television show, and that's reliable," Walsh said.

Over the last two years, the nonprofit organization Walsh heads has developed content- based evaluations of television programs, movies, video and computer games marketed to children. Called Children's Impact Statements, they are now available on the World Wide Web.

While developing the ratings, Walsh and his staff talked to parents to get their input. "We actually built the whole ratings system based on input from parents, [from] the categories that they wanted information about [to] developing the evaluation or the rating tools that the raters could use, so that it's reliable," Walsh said.

Walsh pointed out that the current debate over television ratings focuses on whether the ratings should be content or age-based. But no one is taking a close look at how the ratings are derived. If people are to trust the ratings, they have to be reliable, Walsh argues. "There is such a danger of bias creeping in, particularly if there aren't any standardized protocols to use," Walsh said.

A recent survey of 600 parents revealed that 94 percent would use the Children's Impact Statements, because they want more detailed information on violence, sex, and language than other ratings systems provide. Conducted by Anderson, Niebuhr, an independent, national research firm, the survey also indicated that parents believe the media have a significant influence on children.

Some critics charge that content-based ratings effectively censor the mass media. Walsh emphatically denies the charges. "Providing people with information is not censorship . . . No one is saying what you can and cannot produce. What we're talking about is let's give people access to information about that so that they can make choices."

Walsh believes that while parents need to take responsibility in their own homes for what their children watch, it's also important for parents to take collective action. Parents have to work through their elected officials and through organizations to let producers know they want better information and programming.

"One parent complaining is not going to have much of an impact. But millions of parents complaining to advertisers could have a big impact. So I think we have to respond both individually and collectively," Walsh said.