Finally, a subject the politicians can all agree on: the media is bad, bad, bad!

Last month, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman joined two of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans in requesting $90 million in federal funds for research on how the Internet and other electronic media “affect children’s emotional and behavioral development.” Clinton called sex and violence in the media a “silent epidemic.”

Actually, the epidemic in values-free entertainment isn’t silent — you can hear it blasting out of every radio speaker and cineplex. It’s the politicians who are periodically silent. Over the past 25 years, they have jumped on the sex-and-violence bandwagon about every five years or so. Remember V-chips and before them, Tipper Gore?

Hmmm….so why does the problem never seem to get better? Quite simply, it’s because a small number of publicly traded companies control most of what our children see and hear — and the business of these corporations is to make money, not shape our children’s values.

I don’t blame the media conglomerates for this. Remember, these corporations are owned by you, the public. And in a free market system, a corporation’s mandate is to maximize return to its shareholders. If you held stock in Viacom, for example, how would you react if the company hired a born-again Christian CEO who announced that he was pulling the plug on MTV’s sexy rap videos, vowing to make similar changes across other operating units? Well, you might be outraged or delighted — but either way, you’d dump the stock.

So, we’ve established that the media can’t solve this problem by itself. That leaves only two possible courses of action: (1) increase regulation, or (2) leave it to parents, churches and other private entities to come up with their own solutions.

I’m not a big fan of regulation. In particular, I don’t like the fact that the content of traditional broadcasters is regulated by the FCC (“wardrobe malfunction,” anyone?), while that of the media they compete against (satellite, cable, the Internet, iPods and Xboxes) is not. This unlevel playing field makes virtually all existing media legislation unfair in my mind.

However, if the pols could somehow create a regulatory structure that is fair to all media, I’d be in favor of it. Because families in both red states and blue states know that they (even with church support) are no match for the daily bombardment of the media.

The Center for Creative Voices in Media put the problem this way:

We are concerned because, for better or worse, the mass media fills many roles in our society: parent, educator, companion, babysitter, and entertainer. For example, research indicates that much of the American public receives the vast majority of its information regarding democracy, politics, values, history, and culture from television. And that’s television entertainment programming, not television news. Many say television has the power to make our children obese and violent, to turn them into smokers and drug addicts. Or, put more positively, that it has the power to persuade our children not to take up cigarettes and drugs. That it has the power to turn our children into indolent couch potatoes, or the power to turn them into responsible citizens who vote without fail. In short, almost everyone now acknowledges that television and other mass media do not merely reflect our culture, they also have the power to shape our culture. And since American popular entertainment is one of our nation’s most successful exports, it has the power to make us respected in the world. Or resented and reviled.

As for solutions, here are excerpts from an essay by author Mary Pipher, which provides a fascinating historical perspective:

Morality, eroticism, work, and families are all social constructions. As Neil Postman pointed out in The Disappearance of Childhood, childhood is also a social construction. In the preliterate culture of the Middle Ages, children had no childhoods. They were viewed as small adults, as we can see from the way they were painted in the pictures of the times. They weren’t seen as having special developmental needs, and they were used for economic and sexual purposes. They drank, smoked, and worked alongside adults.

When people began to read, a two-tiered culture formed–adults could read and children couldn’t. Children came to be viewed as different from adults, defined as a protected class, and sheltered from certain experiences. From this distinction between readers and nonreaders, the walls of childhood were constructed–schools and freedom from wage-earning work. Before books, everyone had access to the same kinds of information. After books, literate adults knew things children didn’t. They knew about such things as theology, history, people in other countries, science, and philosophy. They also knew about bad things, such as murders, wars, and famines, from which they sheltered children. With the inception of print culture, then, adulthood conveyed both responsibilities and privileges.

In the last decades of our century, for the first time since the 1500s, children have access to the same information as adults. In our electronic village, the walls that protected children and elevated adulthood are coming down. In effect we are dismantling childhood…

Some argue that change is inevitable, but there are precedents for making conscious choices about which tools to accept and which to reject. The Amish make such choices. When the Japanese saw the havoc that guns wreaked on their samurai society, they threw their guns away and lived for hundreds of years without them. Before the Seneca tribe made changes, the elders would ask, “How will the change affect the next seven generations?” No new tools or customs were introduced without a thoughtful conversation about the future. We can all benefit from taking up this practice in our families, especially if we have young children…

I am often asked if I believe in censorship. In some ways I do. I don’t think we should advertise to children. I think shows that brutalize children should be off the air. Instead, we need decent children’s programs, as they have in Europe. But mainly I would argue for more stories, not fewer. I like to hear that extended family, neighbors, old people, people from different backgrounds, poets, teachers, and children are telling stories to each other. Everyone has stories to tell.

Now too few stories are being told by too few people with motives that are too narrow. I would prefer that children hear stories told by adults who care for them, rather than by multinational entertainment corporations. I would like more adults who care about children to have opportunities to tell their stories to children via films, tv shows, and books, and in person. For good stories can save us… We need stories that teach children empathy and accountability, how to act and how to be.

Brilliant words from a good heart.