Word: kidvid
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Other organizations will carry on the kidvid cause, and Charren herself will not disappear. But the demise of ACT leaves a void and raises a question: For all Charren's efforts, has children's TV got any better? In some ways, as Charren readily admits, it is worse. In the 1970s, partly because of Charren's lobbying, the networks added a host of informational shows for children, from ABC's Afterschool Specials to CBS's newsmagazine for kids, 30 Minutes. During the Reagan years, however, government regulation eased, and most of those shows were canceled or scaled back. Though...
...these mild efforts at reform, as well as critics' persistent gripes about the poor quality of children's TV, skirt the central issue. Even if the commercialism on kidvid were reined in, even if local stations were persuaded to air more "quality" children's fare, even if kids could be shielded from the most objectionable material, the fact remains that children watch a ton of TV. Almost daily, parents must grapple with a fundamental, overriding question: What is all that TV viewing doing to kids, and what can be done about...
Anyone who tunes in on kidvid shows knows the full meaning of advertising overkill. Some programs, like G.I. Joe and Transformers, are based on popular toys, and have been denounced by critics as program-length commercials. All are punctuated by pitches for every product from superhero dolls to sugared cereals. Last week Congress moved toward giving the kids a break. By a vote of 328 to 78, the House of Representatives acted to limit ads on children's programming to twelve minutes an hour on weekdays and 10 1/2 minutes on weekends. Ever since a Federal Communications Commission ruling...
Ever since the days of Clarabell the clown and his ever ready seltzer bottle, parents have complained about the quality of children's TV programming. But seldom have they had so much to complain about. A typical afternoon of kidvid these days can be a mind-numbing march of cartoon superheroes like He-Man, BraveStarr and the Defenders of the Earth. Many shows, from The Transformers to Pound Puppies, are based on hot-selling toys and seem intended to shuffle kids straight from the TV set into the toy store. Worst of all in the critics' view, under the deregulatory...
...however, most kidvid fare seems less an alternative to dreary network programming than a reinforcement of it. "The good news," says Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, "is that children's video is the most likely place to find alternatives to toy-commercial video, which is what network children's TV has turned into. The bad news is that all this stuff on network TV is also in home-video stores, and the promotion budgets are enormous...