WORLD PANEL EXAMINES CHILDREN’S PROGRAMMING

Early on Saturday morning in family rooms across the country, brightly colored, high-voltage programs zoom, soar, slash, biff, wham--and sell--their way through the small screen to television’s most avid viewership in powerful 30-minute or hourlong doses of action and fantasy.

But the educators, film makers and critics who recently came to Los Angeles from all over the world for a meeting of an international committee on children’s programming are concerned about the subtler messages that children are receiving alongside the clashes of robots, the questing after treasures and the noble missions of super heroes.

“Nowadays the media are manipulating children into caring for a toy bear or a robot, but not for another human being,” lamented Elizabeth McDowall, manager of the Australian Council for Children’s Films and Television and one of the two Australian delegates at the conference. “It is essentially a very dehumanizing message--trust a machine but fear the human behind it.”

The USC conference, co-hosted by the USC School of Cinema and Television and the Children’s Film and Television Center of America, was the focus of many presentations by American makers and distributors of children’s films and programming. During their weeklong meeting they paid several visits to studios, to Southern California landmarks and even to that ultimate fantasy factory, Disneyland.

Yet in their working sessions and in moments of reflection, delegates expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of the art in programming for children and young people.

“If you ask any of us here how we think things are going for children on television and in the cinema, none of could say we were happy right now,” said Elke Ried, director of the Film Centre for Children and Young People of West Germany. “Perhaps some small progress has been made in the last few years, but our situation, in Germany, anyway, is not good.”

Part of the struggle to bring quality children’s programming before its audience is the general lack of a workable distribution system, several delegates said.

“We have troubles, both with finances and distribution, in getting good children’s features and programs out to their audiences,” said Horst Gerhartinger, an Austrian film critic and media educator. “We in Austria have difficulty convincing our government to finance original films, so the distribution problem is especially bothersome.”

But the greatest cause for concern, delegates agreed, was the lack of suitable role models for children in the programs they already watch.

In a research paper presented to the conference by Colombian delegate Maria Josefa Dominguez Benitez, the current lack of human relationships in children’s programming was called “deplorable and ultimately destructive.” “But, since choice of role models is not offered to children by the media,” the paper continued, “exploitation, often of a commercial kind, takes place much too often. Too often (children’s programs) represent to children money and possessions as an ultimate goal. And this is where we are clearly failing them.”

Although most of the presentations made to the conference did offer just this kind of choice--between programs with fantastic protagonists and those with fallible human ones--the majority of children’s shows that receive wide distribution are, according to McDowall, “filled with monsters, fairies and machines nearly unapproachable by children.”

“How long are we going to let children go on watching this stuff, which gives them such an impossible view of themselves?” she fumed.

Even delegates from communist nations reported that children believe that they aren’t being given the kinds of programming they need.

V. Grammatikov, a Soviet film maker and animator, explained that “some seminars we have had recently in Leningrad showed that what children in the Soviet Union really want in their films, etc., is the truth--the kind of truth they see around them, neither ‘rosy’ nor filled with silly mythic figures they can’t understand.” He gestured toward the Disney characters that surrounded him and continued, “What we must remember is that children’s minds are always seeing things more clearly than we are believing.”

The delegates reported that their countries were taking measures to compensate for these perceived failings in the programming that they offer their children. Australia, McDowall said, passed legislation in 1979 requiring the commercial networks to broadcast eight hours of children’s programming a month in the evening hours--”it helps prevent the ghettoization of Saturday mornings,” she said.

Yu Lan, a Chinese actress and head of Beijing’s Children’s Film Studio, noted through an interpreter that her country’s government was beginning to soften its “formerly harsh ideological stand” and is now “forging positive links between important messages of moral instruction and the desire to look outward, to be curious about the world outside our borders.”

And the United States, which exports much of the world’s programming for children?

“Much of our problem is, I think, that parents are not standing up and saying, ‘Enough!’ ” said Shanta Herzog, executive director of the Children’s Film and Television Center of America, hostess of the conference and U.S. delegate to it. “Parents are always saying to me, ‘You know, we love that good work you’re doing,’ but then they never do anything to bring it to the networks. The main reason that quality programming is sorely lacking is this country is that no one seems to care.”

When asked what the solution to such apathy might be, Herzog replied: “Pressure has to be brought to bear upon the networks, which are too often geared to the lowest common denominator. If parents see more good stuff, that makes the difference tangible between it and the usual fare available to children.”

Herzog pushed a stray hair back and concluded: “The answer to all this is: We have to teach parents that, if they want something good for their children, they’ve got to fight for it.”