Girls Express Viewpoints to TV Execs
How do you portray girls on television? How do you give them appropriate images to help them become “strong, smart and bold”?
On Wednesday, Girls Inc., a national youth organization geared to girls 6 to 18, and which takes those attributes as marching orders, brought together a group of girls and prominent industry executives to try to answer those questions at a Beverly Hills conference.
The TV representatives got an earful.
Gabriela Perez, 16, of Carpenteria, wanted to know why “women in cartoons always have the same body image, like Barbie. I would like to see that changed. I would like to see role models that look like we look.”
Karen Barnes, executive vice president of Fox Children’s Network, replied that it is “one of those things that concerns us the most” and added that “a lot of people are making efforts to change that.”
Chely Rodriguez, 17, also of Carpenteria, noted that the only television show she really likes is UPN’s “Moesha,” which is about an African American teenager, and asked why there aren’t more Latinas on television. “What can we do to express our concerns to you?”
Barnes pointed out that Latinos constitute the fastest-growing population in the nation and suggested they use their economic clout to support programming they like.
In conjunction with the conference, Girls Inc. released a poll it commissioned of 2,000 school-age children that found females were more dissatisfied than boys at the number of and the way characters their age and gender were depicted on television.
“Girls from across the country have told us that they want female characters on television that look and act like they do,” said Regina Montoya, president of Girls Inc. “ . . . While some television executives have broken new ground by creating fresh, innovative female characters, we hope that ‘strong, smart and bold’ will promote girls’ call for more realism and diversity.”
Herb Scannell, president of Nickelodeon, who received an award from the organization at a luncheon following the conference, told the morning session, “There has been a tendency to marginalize women and kids on television, but at Nickelodeon we put girls front and center.”
Too often, he said, girls are put into two categories--”the cheerleader types and girls in pigtails and braces.”
Barnes said that the problem stems from the fact that “TV is a business” and that a lot of children’s programming is driven by the ancillary toy market. She said executives perceive that “girls watch what boys watch but boys will not watch what girls watch. . . . I totally disagree with that.”
Attitudes have to change, she said. Pointing to the success of Nickelodeon, she said, “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”
Chris Albrecht, president of HBO Original Productions, told the audience of about 75 that watching less television would be a good idea. He said his daughters, aged 13 and 7, hardly watch TV at all. “I don’t think television is a bad thing; it’s just a habit that they shouldn’t really have,” he said.
Albrecht advised girls and young women: “Don’t expect so much from television. . . . You’re going to be disappointed if you go to TV solely for your role models.”