Television as the Third Parent

Benjamin Stein

EN YEARS AGO, I spent one year study­ing the handful of powerful people here in Hollywood who govern the general themes and specific social and political messages of prime time commercial television. The conclusion, now not seriously questioned, was that a politically and socially homogeneous clique makes television in the image of its own world view. That world view has little in common with the views of the larger society and is, in fact, often at war with observable reality.

For the past five years, I have been studying the other end of the funnel: the effect of mass culture, specifically television, upon the viewing public, and particularly upon young people. In a nutshell, I have been trying to discover more about the intersections of youth culture and mass culture.

To that end, I have questioned groups of students at ten high schools in the Los Angeles area. I have also just spent eight months sitting in on classes at Birmingham High School, a large middle-class school with students of every ethnic description located in suburban Van Nuys, California.

One basic hypothesis seems to me almost un­assailable: American mass culture, particularly the mass culture purveyed by television, is so powerful, intrusive, attractive, and ubiquitous, so thoroughly unchecked in its ability to instruct and command, that it is virtually a "third parent" in the lives of

American children. For the child of 1986, television is a source of values, an encourager for the future, a confidant, a narcotic, a blanket of security and inadequacy — in short, a parent.

The Way the World Really Works

Over and over in the past five years, I have talked to boys and girls who receive almost no clear messages about what the world is supposed to be from parents or friends. Frequently, a child has only one parent at home, who is often absent. The children can barely recall even talking with their parents about any subject beyond home life. Yet they have an ex­tremely well-developed idea of how the world is supposed to work. There is supposed to be trouble and danger, but it will all work out in the end. There is supposed to be action and excitement, but a resolution leading to calm. Force and strength gen­erally can be expected to solve problems. The people who trust in goodness and act honestly will triumph. These are the values of television.

If you ask a child who has seen nothing but chaos and disappointment in his or her own life just why he or she believes that things will turn out all right in the end — and if you push and don't take silence for an answer — you almost always hear a variant of, "Because that's the way it happens on 'Remington Steele'."

THE MEDIA 273

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Although the children I talked to live in Los Angeles, none of them is part of the gilded world of television or movie production. Their parents are far more likely to be working two jobs each than to be inking million dollar deals at Paramount. Yet these young people are convinced that a larger, more glamorous world awaits them somewhere beyond Ventura Boulevard. When you probe for details about that world, the promised land sounds surpris­ingly like the countries of "Dynasty" or "Dallas" or "Family Ties."

In fact, many of the children I talked to are morally certain that the "real" world is much more like the world they have seen on TV than the one they can smell and touch. More bizarre still, many of them believe that the world of "Diff'rent Strokes" or "Miami Vice" is the real world, every bit as authentic and available as Van Nuys Boulevard or their own kitchens.

That is, when discussing life, these children talk about things that happen to them every day — fights with parents, car crashes, problems with school — and then they talk about events on "The Cosby Show" or "Webster" as if they, too, were part of daily life — as in a sense they have become.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 948