POP/ROCK - May 12, 1987

The music and lyrics in rock videos aren’t so bad, but videos can exert a strong impact on teen-agers, pediatrician Victor Strasburger said Monday in San Francisco at the American Academy of Pediatrics convention. The videos magnify the effect of music 100 times, a potential problem for teen-agers who spend a lot of time watching them, warned the Norwich, Vt., doctor, who is a member of the organization’s subcommittee on children and television. The videos are “not the end of the world, and teens are not going to go out and murder someone after watching these videos, yet they don’t add a lot to culture,” Strasburger said. “Adolescents see, on average, 10,000 references to sex or violence on American television annually, so videos are only partly to blame,” he said.