Super Bowl Redux: One Mother\'s Opinion
Looking back at last year’s Super Bowl, I remember that my first reaction to Justin Timberlake’s tearing of Janet Jackson’s bodice (and let’s not lose sight of the fact that this was a depiction of a sexually violent act, not a “wardrobe malfunction”) was not one of horror. Instead, I felt a deep sadness fused with anger. Sad because we’ve arrived at a point in our culture where our entertainers think so little of their audiences that they believe they can’t hold on to our increasingly small attention spans without resorting to shock treatments. Angry because the media companies have become so callous in their quest for dollars that they are willing to continually sucker punch their audiences with inappropriate content when kids are watching. It’s frustrating that in spite of fines and fury, there has been so little true progress. I fear concerned parent voices are being largely ignored and discounted.

Yes, CBS was fined -- as they probably should have been (for their arrogance if nothing else). And over the course of 2004, others who used our public airwaves to shock and titillate at inappropriate times felt the brunt of the once slumbering, now awakened, Federal Communications Commission’s power. Parent groups (our own included) spoke out and asked that some good old-fashioned common sense be used in prime time and kid time programming. The good news is that the people’s speaking out did make a difference. This year, we will be treated to Paul McCartney and ads that amuse us while nudging at the envelope rather than pushing the boundaries of propriety.

But one year later, we might have a more “safe” Super Bowl, but something else of greater concern has arisen. Instead of media sanity, we have media censorship. Somehow, those of us who just want to raise our kids without them being prematurely exposed to rampant commercialism, threesomes, drug use, and unfathomable scenes of violence and gore -- all in the name of selling cars, or beer, or yet another Happy Meal -- find ourselves lumped by default into a camp with people whose objections are about morality and not child development -- people whose rigid agendas often cause them to be dismissed by the very producers and media executives we are trying to reach. This kind of rigidity produces arbitrary censorship (the controversy around Saving Private Ryan comes to mind). My fear is that the voices of parents who want media sanity are being discounted by association simply because we have some of the same objections as the media moralists.

My objections, however, come from a simple, common sense place. I don’t like having my kids bombarded with sensationalistic, hyper-commercialized, age- inappropriate media. Instead, when censorship becomes the issue, it grabs the spotlight and distracts the focus from the real issue -- the fact that the public trust is much less valued than private shareholder interests. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against morality -– but I believe that it’s up to each individual family to decide on their own what standards work for each of them. If a family doesn’t want their children watching MTV or seeing Postcards from Buster on PBS because there are lesbian mothers in the background, they can turn the television off. I know what I believe is right for my family, and that’s good enough for me. I sure don’t want someone else acting as my moral proxy because there are greater dangers than inappropriate programming, and moralistic censorship numbers among them in my book.

This is not to let the television producers off the hook who wedge sex into every scene, slam violence into each frame, and cram as many commercials as they can both between shows and within shows. This doesn’t absolve the hip-hop artists who know that the more outrageous they are, the more money they’ll make even as my young teen daughter dances to the beat of a man telling his “ho” to bend over, or the video game producers who have now made it possible for my son to shoot President Kennedy. Parents must speak up against irresponsible and sensationalistic programming. We must remember we control the market and that with every purchase we make, we vote for the kind of entertainment we believe is best for our families.

As Editor-in-Chief of Common Sense, I spend my days immersed in kids’ media so that we can provide unbiased media content information to parents who just want to know what’s in a movie, TV show, CD or video game before their kids watch, listen and play. My work involves connecting the dots between entertainment and the voluminous, reputable studies that detail the truly quantifiable and deleterious impact of violent, commercial, and sexual images on kids. I work to educate parents because I believe we are the first line of defense. As we all know, one of the great tasks of parenthood is teaching our kids to be able to distinguish right from wrong on their own because we aren’t always going to be there to help them. That is why I firmly believe in media literacy and media sanity, not censorship.

Parents and kids deserve another choice besides, “no.” We do our children no service that way. So it is that I urge you entertainers up the production food chain to exercise your prodigious creative talents along with your best common sense as you set out to engage us. Put your kids in front of your television shows, your video consoles, and your stereo systems as you create the entertainment that exercises your artistic freedoms. Do you really want your children preprogrammed by those embedded ads to act like brand zombies? Do you really want them seeing the 18,000 annual acts of violence? Do you want them seeing TV shows where kids have sex with their teachers? Do these things really improve your productions?

Don’t leave it to a stupid, arrogant, and inappropriate Super Bowl stunt to dictate programming. Don’t leave it to those with an agenda beyond what is or isn’t age-appropriate for kids to dictate what is and isn’t acceptable on the airwaves. Most of all, don’t underestimate your audiences. We are neither stupid nor inert. We do not need to be bombarded. Rather, we simply seek to be appropriately, intelligently entertained.