GoMom

Here's the thing about all this Miley Cyrus fuss. Kids aren't going to be affected by the photo in Vanity Fair for chrissakes! They're affected by TV and movies and we've known this for a gazillion years and yet year after year, kids spend more and more time in front of screens--TV, computer, movie, game, etc. It's up to forty plus hours a week now for the average K-12 kid. C'mon gang, who's in charge here?

But hey, does media really influence our children’s behavior? Does it matter if the average American kid will see over 200,000 violent acts on TV alone by the time of high school graduation? According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, the research linking violent media with attitudes and behavior is so overwhelming that few researchers even bother to dispute that screen violence has an effect on the kids watching it. David Walsh, the Institute’s founder and director, speculates that it’s not so much a direct mimicking of media violence that’s at issue, but rather the culture of disrespect it creates. Not to mention that the average vocabulary for a 16-year-old has dropped from about 24,000 words to just 12,000 since 1968. Yeah, like, meh, okay?

My favorite example of media influencing youth culture is the show Happy Days and the "Fonzie Gets a Library Card" episode. The gist of the story is that back then, in the mid 1970s, the number of kids taking out new library cards was nosediving—at the same time that their TV watching was surging. So the American Library Association met with the producers of Happy Days to ask for help. And on September 27, 1977, millions of kids watching Happy Days saw the Fonz take out his very first library card. In the days that followed, according to the ALA and the series creator, Garry Marshall, requests for library cards nationwide zoomed by more than five hundred percent.

Other examples of this sort of planned influencing of public behavior are plentiful, so much so that there’s a term coined it--the "Winsten effect," after Dr. Jay Winsten, director of The Harvard Alcohol Project. Winsten approached Hollywood in 1987 with the idea of the "designated driver." He convinced producers of The Cosby Show, Cheers, LA Law and dozens of other prime time series to incorporate story beats with his new concept in order to influence the drinking public. Starting in November 1988, over 160 prime time episodes included subplots, scenes, or dialogue telling viewers it's okay to party as long as someone stays sober for the drive home. One year later, a Gallup poll found 67% of adults surveyed recognized the term "designated driver." In 1991, Winsten's new idea became a listing in Webster's College Dictionary.

So what's all the fuss about a photo in Vanity Fair, really? After all, the controversy plays well on TV . . .