MURDER FOR MOPPETS
Shipler, Diane
Murder for Moppets By Diane Shipter THE January issue of TV Magazine had a significant report on the angry attack launched against crime and violence on children's TV shows by The Chicago Daily...
...He must find a show that fits his product...
...Many of the letters were from parents who had revealing things to say about the effect of TV shows on their children...
...Murder for Moppets By Diane Shipter THE January issue of TV Magazine had a significant report on the angry attack launched against crime and violence on children's TV shows by The Chicago Daily News last December...
...Chicago is the only city where a newspaper has launched an aggressive campaign against TV fare tor children, but Chicago stations are not the worst offenders...
...sign-on to 7 p.m...
...IV What to do...
...Children's drama, for example, has dropped in New York from 30.4 per cent of the total TV time in 1951 to 6.7 per cent of the total time now...
...Parents feel helpless and begin to fret...
...The Schwerin Research Corporation, which tests the effectiveness of radio and TV programs and commercials, did a two-year study for a top television advertiser, and discovered that the sales effectiveness of his commercial was two-thirds more effective on a non-crime show than it was on a crime binge...
...4, 1953, Smythe's monitors tabulated 1,412 acts and threats of violence during what he calls the children-hours (5 to 7 p.m...
...This was startling news...
...There is no doubt that many people like mystery shows, and you can hardly have a who-dun-it without a crime to solve...
...When the set is new, everybody watches for many hours...
...Mabley went to town...
...Still, parents who have had TV sets for several years have seen the TV fare grow steadily worse...
...It tabulated 199 killings on shows for children in one week...
...At any rate, there are indications that the advertiser must do more than get a show just like the opposition's if he expects to see sales results...
...When they realize the situation is out of hand, they may vent their frustration on the networks and blame them for everything...
...In summing up his findings, Mabley wrote that he didn't believe that anybody—parents, station executives, or advertisers— realized how bad the situation had become...
...Edward Weiss, president of Weiss and Geller, a Chicago advertising agency, has been doing some research along psychological lines', trying to discover what unconsciously motivates people to buy or not buy a product they see advertised on TV...
...it has top writers...
...A sports store that had been sponsoring Sunday afternoon movies under the title Family Theater switched to soccer games after the Daily News carried a murder scene from one of the movies on Page One...
...It's a fortunate formula that may never be duplicated, but don't think the network and package boys aren't sitting up nights trying...
...Western drama ranks next with 15 acts per hour...
...In one week, beginning Jan...
...A show does well and soon it has a score of imitators...
...Judging by the limited research in the field, it seems to be a matter of what kind of crime show it is, and whether the product fits the show in some mysterious way...
...More than half the time the children win...
...Their parents liked / Love Lucy, and they can count on seeing lots of domestic comedy from now on, much of it bad...
...They could hardly jump gracefully to thoughts of home and mother just after the private eye had been sapped and left lying in an alley...
...This must be what the public wants," the network men conclude...
...The 1951 and 1952 reports have been analyzed and compared in a book by Smythe called New York Television, Monitoring Study No...
...Why...
...Then, after the children are used to watching it whenever they please, it is difficult to limit them abruptly to a few hours a week...
...II The book has a whole chapter on violence in television...
...Love Lucy is blessed with Lucille Ball, a talented girl, and Desi Arnaz in a role he can handle beautifully...
...Violence during these hours was up ten per cent over 1952...
...4 (he has made studies in Los Angeles too), and the preliminary report on 1953 has just been released...
...The show has become a sort of reward for good behavior...
...While the American Medical Association has protested the situation, TV Magazine pointed out that the Los...
...For three years Smythe's monitors have watched every program, around the clock, on all New York TV stations for a full week, January 4 to 10...
...He has compiled some revealing case histories...
...Out of 134 children's shows, 48 were Western films, 33 were old movies...
...It is becoming clear that a show that may sell cigarettes may fail to sell cereal...
...So they switched to a panel show and sales of the wine hit an all-time high...
...The agency turned out some new copy...
...it's "like grandma used to make...
...Several suggested that his pitch ought to be that sweet wine was associated with religious holidays, with childhood memories of happy family celebrations, with the kind of food and wine that mother used to serve...
...Letters—from parents and children both—to the producers of good shows help...
...It is even possible that some of the parents who object most strenuously to having their children exposed to crime shows are devoted to one or two themselves...
...Yet there are crime shows on TV that appear to be selling a lot of cigarettes...
...This wine takes you back to the good old days, it said...
...This kind of thinking does not take into account the inescapable fact that people, old and young, are many-sided...
...Saturdays and Sundays...
...And during the children-hours, the episodes of violence more than doubled the rate found in all other hours...
...Thus much of the violence that makes up the overall total in children's programs may be committed in a spirit of innocent merriment...
...The problem then arose: how to fit commercials with a nostalgic approach into a mystery show...
...A steady diet of anything palls in time, and it palls much faster on television...
...Chicago aldermen authorized a study of the problem to devise laws to correct it...
...Most TV crime shows are on after nine p.m., but that has not solved the dilemma for many parents...
...The reaction in Chicago was immediate...
...Network men and advertisers can't be blamed entirely for the violence on TV...
...For a week the News carried front-page, banner-line stories by its TV columnist, Jack Mabley, who had been given the results of a survey conducted by 30 volunteers, headed by a PTA official, who monitored every children's program on the four Chicago stations between Christmas morning and New Year's Eve...
...Still, any way you read the report it adds up to considerable violence: 3,539 distinct acts of violence in one week—or about one for every ten minutes of program time...
...A TV Magazine survey showed Los Angeles far in front in the volume of violence and brutality dispensed for children on television...
...I know one household where the big argument once a week is whether the children will be allowed to stay up to see their favorite mystery show at nine...
...Viewing habits for children were well-established before parents realized that it should have been handled some other way...
...It wasn't until he saw his program as part of an overall pattern which feeds the small children literally hundreds of bloody, gruesome crimes every week that he realized his part in the undermining of children's well-being...
...New York children are now watching an average of 9.2 acts and threats of violence per hour...
...In one case, a sweet wine he was trying to sell for a client via a private-eye show on television wasn't doing well, although the show had a good rating...
...Dallas Smythe's study showed that the most popular programs had a much higher percentage of violence than the whole of television...
...The fact that a child likes Hopalong Cassidy doesn't preclude his liking puppets, fairy tales, music, other kinds of drama...
...During that week the monitors tabulated 295 violent crimes, which included 93 murders, 78 shootings, 9 kidnappings, 9 robberies, 44 gunfights, 2 knifings, 33 sluggings, 2 whiplash-ings, 2 poisonings, and 2 bombings— on children's programs alone...
...Among the programs monitored in Chicago was a film which appeared on Saturday afternoon at 2:30 over WBKW, and was advertised as suitable "for the whole family...
...weekdays...
...The writer of a TV series may manage it once or twice, but can he do it for 52 weeks...
...It could lead to federal action to prevent renewal of their licenses...
...It should be understood that these figures are somewhat misleading in that the report shows, in its breakdown, that comedy-drama in children's programs had the highest frequency of violent acts—21.5 per hour...
...But he warned: "If they fail to give clear evidence of their good intentions I believe that a forthcoming City Council investigation of crime on television could become extremely embarrassing to them...
...Mabley thought that since the situation had been exposed, the stations would "make a conscientious effort to clean up the show...
...It's a new toy for the whole family...
...They have been known to keep shows on the air, and' they've brought one or two good ones back...
...He consulted psychologists...
...An individual advertiser," he wrote, "sponsoring one cowboy picture a week, could reason with some justice that one cowboy wouldn't hurt the kids...
...It included: two violent deaths, laboratory experimentation in bringing the dead back to life, the body of a woman rising from a casket, plans for an army of the dead to conquer the world, a body in a car trunk, experiments on a living man, and two drownings...
...They have cause for complaint...
...In addition to detailing the contents of some of the programs, he ran excerpts from letters (The Daily News declared that public response to Mab-ley's series was unprecedented in its interest and indignation...
...Angeles Tenth District PTA (the world's largest) has remained silent...
...Put the crime shows on later at night...
...The trouble is that television descended on most parents before they knew what was happening...
...A number of fine children's programs have lost their sponsors and disappeared...
...In the old Charlie Chaplin movies, for example, Charlie was knocked about considerably, but his misfortunes were not the kind likely to leave small children in a state of unrest...
...True, the crime doesn't always have to be portrayed, but it takes a clever bit of writing to hold an audience for a-half-hour if all the rough stuff takes place off camera...
...it has added charm in the fact that Lucille and Desi are happily married off-screen...
...Because Mom and Pop like / Love Lucy it doesn't follow that they're wedded to domestic comedy...
...No thought is more unsettling to a station owner than that one...
...Ill Duplication of shows is a hazard for the advertiser too...
...The old Hopalong Cassidy movies caught on with the kids, so the kids are getting a steady diet of Westerns...
...The most thorough monitoring of New York stations (all programs, not just children's shows) has been conducted under the direction of Dallas W. Smythe, Director of Studies of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, with Ford Foundation funds...
...The most obvious explanation is that the men who run the TV networks are the same who have been running the radio networks for years, and they are applying the same success formula—if it is one— with all its faults...
...In New York City, with seven channels to choose from, the youngsters are getting large doses of murder too...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
