It's Not The Media

...I THE PATH OFTEN TAKEN Kathryn Harrison back from Santiago...

...Several contributors, including critics Todd Gitlin, Kay Hymowitz, and Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, look at the larger, if harder-to-measure, impact of the popular media on child rearing itself...

...Resenting or resisting their obligations to serve as authority figures, protectors, and guides for their children, American parents have bought into "an ethos of child empowerment" that puts the responsibility for "good choices" on children themselves...

...I stumbled along dung-spotted stone roads and bridges the Romans built...

...Here, the conclusion on the halms of the popular media is qualified: most kids don't go on crime sprees or engage in casual sex as a result of media exposure, the contributors say...

...The Road to Santiago k(illlr101 Ilurriso;t Paul Moses walked through the Middle Ages last summer...

...By cent social life, and for the foreseeable acknowledging non-conduct-based en- future, we will be seeking an elusive, titlements to certain basic needs, he shows ever-shifting balance between them...

...Consequently, the proposed solutions rely on grass-roots action and consumer boycotts aimed at advertisers and media moguls, as well as efforts to strengthen the spine of parents who lack the guts to just say no to too much TV...

...Twenty-five percent of children under two have TVs in their bedrooms, according to a recent Kaiser Foundation study...

...On the impact of media violence, the subject of more than eighty studies since 1975, the research consistently points to increases in aggressive feelings and behavior among kids who are exposed to such messages and images through television, video games, and movies...

...The editors of Kid Stuff affirm their commitment to First Amendment principles and their opposition to government censorship...

...Superficially, it involves blisters, sore calves, and enduring the heavy weight of carrying all your belongings, all day...

...sumerist values of instant gratification and individual choice...

...And who, other than a parent, puts a television set next to the crib...

...For example, in his 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, the late Neil Post-man argued that the rise of a television culture broke the adult monopoly on knowledge that had existed in a book culture...

...It's Not the Media purports to tell the "truth" about the media's influence on children but offers instead a tedious polemic...

...Noting that First Amendment challenges to TV programming practices were al-most unknown until the mid-1970s when they brought down network "family viewing time," the Minows write: "If we accept the notion that the First Amendment prohibits us from trying to protect our children from the mass media, then we have committed the perverse error of divorcing our commitment to free speech from our commitment to the public interest itself...

...Academic studies use the camino as a window on the Middle Ages...

...Nowadays, a steady flow of books provides the history and legends of the camino, the how-to and anecdotal treatments...

...By creating a direct channel between children and the market, moreover, the media circumvent parental authority...

...I heard Benedictine monks chant vespers in Latin in a church the Templars built...

...And since children stand at the forefront of a changing world, "the concern about the media and violence is not just a fear for children but a fear of children," she writes...

...James, has transported travelers on this pilgrimage for more than a thou-sand years...

...From 1993 to 1995, he served under President Bill Clinton as deputy assistant for domestic policy...

...This was a pilgrimage on cow paths and mountain trails, village to village, from one bell-towered square to the next...

...James, son of Zebedee...

...that the spirit of generosity is strong enough to coexist with (perhaps even to override) Calvinist predilections...

...In it, contributors from diverse disciplines make the cumulatively compelling case that the popular media has undercut the moral and social authority of parents, teachers, and childrearing institutions in the civil society, leaving children to fend for themselves in a world governed by conWilliam A. Galston is professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement...

...In fact, if your kid is a hard-core heavy-metal fan, you may want to pull the plug on the amps, says contributor Peter Christenson...

...People fear change, so they deflect their anxieties onto an easy tar-get like the media...

...This shift of moral authority from parent to child, with its jaunty rationalization that kids will "make good choices" on their own, is the overarching theme of Kid Stuff...

...Still, as Kay Hymowitz argues, baby-boom parents hardly put up much of a fight...

...I infer that it would be very difficult for sustainable social policy to rest exclusively on either the openhandedness of need-based entitlements or the rigor of conduct-based deservingness...

...Yet neither are kids immune to violent or sexually explicit images and messages...

...Each of these principles plays a legitimate role in deKid Stuff Nlarketing Sep and Violence to ;America's Children Lrllte l Ir7, I)iunt' Ktrteitclt trrurl Joseph P. iteritti It's Not the Media The broth about Pop Culture's Influence on Children ktnt'n tittrnht'nu,er Barbara Dafoe Whitehead n the movie Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a hopelessly uncool mother who, in an early scene, drops her moody teenage daughter off at school with this cheery parting advice: "Make good choices, honey...

...Though the violent con-tent of gangsta rap and heavy metal music may provide an outlet for adolescent rebellion, it can also provide some troubled teens with the inspiration—even a blueprint—for violence...

...Instead, she re-sorts to the rhetorical tactic of verbal bludgeoning, placing the word "fear" in every chapter title, on nearly every page, and in her utterly vacuous conclusion: "Fear can be crippling", she writes, "especially when we fear some-thing that poses no major threat...

...Beyond that, it focuses pilgrims on basics: the feet, the ankles, the knees, the slope of the land, the shade, the next drink of water, the next place to sleep...

...The experience is difficult to put into words...

...Such notions are not entirely new...

...I saw people washing clothes in a stream and elderly women tossing hay with pitchforks...

...In The Road to Santiago, novelist Kathryn Harrison describes it as "living in real time—not writing time or brain time or screen time, but footstep time, hunger time, and body time...

...And I learned what it meant to travel solely on foot, following a hundred-mile section of a path that leads five times that distance across 1i tt northern Spain to the traditional tomb of St...

...Yet Sternheimer offers no evidence to support her contention...

...I BOOB-TUBE BABIES Commonweal 2 5 February 27, 2004 Can anything be done...

...Who-ever controlled the clicker controlled access to those secrets, whether the per-son was two or fifty-two...

...Not some medieval fair, with jousting, damsels in cone-shaped hats, and Harleys crowding the parking lot...

...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman (Broadway Books...

...It also involves indirect effects of an enveloping media environment and the sheer quantity, insipidity, and sensationalism of messages that pander to feeling, elevate the pursuit of pleasure over the mastery of knowledge, and treat people as objects or obstacles to the fulfillment of one's desires...

...Commonweal 2 6 February 27, 2004...

...Still, the concluding essay by Newton Minow and Nell Minow invites reflection on a central question: In order to defend the right of free speech, how far do we go in surrendering our responsibilities to protect children from lurid, trashy media...

...What the contributors to Kid Stuff bring to bear on Postman's thesis is the weight of empirical evidence and social experience that has accumulated since his influential, but highly speculative, essay was published...

...Heavy metal music is strongly associated with a cluster of bad behaviors, including drinking, drugs, casual sex, Satanic beliefs, and conflict with parents...

...More-over, as several researchers note, a heavy diet of violent images and messages numbs kids to the social and moral con-sequences of violent actions...

...As for graphic and violent depictions of sex, the few available studies suggest similar desensitizing effects...

...For nearly as long, pilgrims with a bent for writing have felt compelled to set down what they experienced...

...The problem, therefore, is not simply one of direct effects on behavior...

...In particular, the volume considers the body of research evidence on the observed effects of television, popular music, video games, and the Internet on youthful behavior...

...Sociologist Karen Sternheimer argues that public concerns about the media's effects on children are simply fear-based...

...Much of their analysis focuses on the encompassing nature of the media environment—the penetration of cable television, Internet, and video into children's households, even their nurseries...

...This monopoly included when and how children gained access to adult "secrets," especially sexual secrets...

...The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St...

...Early accounts were basically travelogues, indicating where the water was bad, the wolves were fierce, or the wine was good...