What Are Your Kids Watching?
A Back-to-School TV Quiz for Parents

Jerold M. Starr is executive director of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcast-ing, a grassroots campaign to improve broadcasting. He is also, professor of Sociology at West Virginia University.

America's kids are heading back to school - but year round they devote 60 percent more time to watching television that they spend in class. As children across the country get ready for a new academic year, a university professor has prepared the first exam. It's for their parents and it's about TV.

"Schools are under a lot of pressure to preapre kids for work, family life and citizenship," says Jerold M. Starr, Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University and Executive Director of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcast-ing (CIPB). "Yet kids devote much more time to TV than they do to the classroom. What are they watching, and who determines what they see? Parents don't really know." Now, he says, is the time for parents to find out and fight to take back the airwaves.

Starr, author of Air Wars: The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting, says Americans are unaware of the economics of television - the concentration of ownership in a few hands, the growing commercialism, rising profit margins and indirect subsidies paid by the public."The statistics are shocking," he comments. Moreover, real choices are increasingly limited. For example, very few Americans get to choose their cable TV provider.

Public television, long regarded as an educational stronghold above commercial interests and influence - a safe haven for kids - is now little better than for-profit TV, Starr points out. "Noncommercial" television has been infected by commercialism, disturbingly, at the expense of public service. In 1995, former PBS Program Director Kathy Quattrone stated, "Many program decisions are being based not on the program value they bring but what kind of deal it can bring."

Children's programs on PBS currently feature pitches for theme parks, shopping web sites and fast food like McDonalds, Chuck E. Cheese and Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. PBS producer Bill Moyers observes that public television "has become a textbook example of how a non-commecial climate is undermined by the merchandising of sponsors."

Starr and CIPB propose creating a Public Broadcasting Trust that would free public television from political and commercial dominance. "We call on commercial broadcasters to pay a fair fee for their use of the public's airwaves into a fund to subsidize truly independent, noncommercial public broadcasting. Children and adults alike deserve a service that educates rather than exploits, and helps us to become better workers, family mem-bers and citizens." Just a two-percent license use fee would generate $1 billion to free public broadcasting, he notes.

Harvard psychiatrist, Alvin Poussaint is particularly concerned with advertising on preschool programs like Teletubbies, because research shows that children don't grasp the concept of advertising until ages 6-8. He calls PBS's claim that its "kids programs are commercial-free" a "betrayal of public trust" and "betrayal of parents trust" in what is supposed to be noncommercial educational broadcasting."

"We call on PBS to stop selling our kids," says Starr. He points out that the average family of four spends more than $1,000 a year indirectly subsidizing commercial TV through increased product prices and corporate tax breaks, and barely $2 a year to support all noncommercial public broadcasting - far less than other industrialized countries."Yet U.S. broadcasters get to use our public airwaves for free and make billions of dollars in profits every year while PBS stations sink deeper into what former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson calls 'the tar pit of commercialism' in order to pay the bills."

Starr challenges parents to take the quiz by clicking on "Take the CIPB Quiz" selection and join CIPB in challenging the current commercial climate of public television by demanding a fair share subsidy from commercial TV providers.

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