WASHINGTON, September 8, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Following on yesterday’s story ‘Teen Promiscuity Linked to Sex on TV’, LifeSiteNews.com interviewed Frank Vespe, executive director of the TV Turnoff Network based in Washington, D.C. The organization encourages children and adults to watch much less television in order to promote healthier lives and communities. Since 1995, more than 24 million people have participated in the organization’s TV-Turnoff Week.
Vespe says that the television and teen promiscuity study “re-enforces what we already know, that television influences behaviour. You just have to ask business why it continues to spend billions every year on television advertising”. The Boston Globe reported on August 24 there is a $58 billion annual US television advertising market.
Vespe stressed TV advertising obviously produces results otherwise those billions would not continue to be spent every year. He added that the teen shows with sexual content “can be seen as advertisements for a lifestyle. The producers are making a certain lifestyle attractive”. However, the TV-Turnoff director said, “it is the amount of immersion in TV that ultimately influences how profoundly those messages affect one.”
A common response from addicted TV viewers is that is doesn’t affect them. Vespe responds, “You often hear people say I don’t think what you see on TV has any impact on people but of course it does. You figure the average American spends about two entire months a year watching television and some of what you see in that amount of time has to rub off on you. It’s crazy to pretend that I can watch over a 1000 hours of television over a year and it’s not going to influence me”.
The biggest hurdle for many families who want to cut down on TV, says Vespe, “is to make the decision that we want to re-capture some of our time for real life, and not just to watch other people live. At the beginning it can be a challenge because we’re used to the TV filling up all our dead time and when you don’t automatically turn to the TV it forces you to make a decision about what you really want to do”.
Vespe told LifeSiteNews.com that “one of the larger problems associated with TV watching is overweight and obesity. He says “the problem is becoming more and more troublesome for kids and the evidence is abundantly clear that excessive TV time and excessive screen time contribute to overweight and obesity and conversely, reducing screen time is a great way to fight it. We are undermining our health as individuals and as a society”.
LifeSiteNews asked Vespe what his organization says about the effects of television watching on critical thinking. He responded, “Educators will tell you that almost as important as what you learn is how you learn it. What is education about if it is not about teaching you how to think. TV doesn’t provide what true education does. It provides it all for you on a platter. It’s a mode of learning that is passive and not at all interactive. The TV spews out all that information. You get some of it. You don’t get the rest of it, whereas real learning is an interactive process. That interactive process is how you develop critical thinking skills, not like TV where you have information wash over you like a wave”.
TV Turnoff Network is happy to report that “there is definitely a growing awareness that all this time spent in front of TV and other screens does have negative consequences on us as individuals and as a society and people are beginning to take steps to change that”. The organization reports that the percentage of 4th graders watching less than an hour of TV per day has gone up from 19% in 1994 to 38% in 2002. The other trend that they are seeing is the percentage of kids with limits on their TV time has gone up from 1994 to 2000 from 63% to 72%. “That’s 9% difference in just 6 years which translates to several million children with limits on their TV time, says Vespe. “It is clear”, he says, “that this is a message that’s getting out there”.
See the TV Turnoff Network at
https://www.tvturnoff.org/index.htm
See point form document, Facts and Figures About Our TV Habit
https://www.tvturnoff.org/images/facts&figs/factsheets/Facts%20and%20Figures.pdf
See previous LifeSiteNews.com story:
Teen Promiscuity Linked to Sex on TV
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/sep/04090705.html