A New Era for Social Advocacy?

Everyone has heard tales suggesting television inspired someone to commit a heinous crime or dangerous act, from the notorious assault on a young girl that mirrored a scene in the 1974 TV movie “Born Innocent” to the child who set a house on fire after watching “Beavis and Butt-head.”

Yet if television can spur people to engage in antisocial behavior, can TV, harnessed properly, generate the opposite effect--helping to promote tolerance, educate our youth and offset less uplifting influences children encounter both in the media and society?

Such questions bear examining in light of Friday’s scheduled release of findings by the Gore Commission--a panel assembled under the aegis of Vice President Al Gore to recommend public-interest standards for broadcasters in the digital television age.

Exploring TV’s potential to do good seems almost quaint given the discourse surrounding its ill effects. In recent years, deriding television and its harmful impact on children has become the sort of safe, bipartisan political territory normally reserved for respecting the flag and honoring veterans.

President Clinton, for all his fabled coziness with Hollywood, has often chided the media, including accusations of desensitizing children to violence. Bob Dole, in more strident election-year rhetoric, attacked the entertainment industry for turning out “nightmares of depravity.”

“Television today has become a destructive force in our culture,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), one of the most impassioned cultural warriors, said last year.

This view stems in part from research regarding the relationship between television violence and aggression--a concern fueled by some of the appalling crimes committed by children. Susan Linn, an official at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston, wrote after this year’s spate of schoolyard shootings, “Hundreds of studies clearly show that as surely as cigarette smoking is linked to cancer, exposure to media violence is linked to aggressive behavior.”

Making that leap from social science to physical science seems a trifle simplistic, and anecdotal evidence can be misleading. If exposure to televised violence alone triggered actual violence, my brother and I--having viewed practically every TV western made in the 1950s and ‘60s--would have killed the rest of our neighborhood long before I escaped my teens.

“I don’t think the kids who kill watched any less of ‘Mr. Rogers,’ ” said Academy of Television Arts & Sciences President Meryl Marshall. “There are other pieces of the puzzle.”

Still, the bond between images on television and bad behavior is widely accepted, raising the question of whether the converse holds true. If kids act badly after watching “Power Rangers,” will they glean something positive from programs preaching sexual abstinence and racial tolerance? If wrestling can incite impressionable youths to body-slam each other, shouldn’t the saccharine moments that flavor programs like “7th Heaven” and ABC’s youth-oriented “TGIF” sitcoms instill some higher values in them?

While the issue isn’t as enticing--or politically advantageous--as railing about its deleterious effects, academics say television can yield benefits.

UC Santa Barbara professor Dale Kunkel, who has overseen several studies on TV content, said research clearly establishes television can “be very effective in conveying pro-social messages to children . . . and helping them develop cognitive skills.”

Murray Gaylord, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Ad Council, said television is principally responsible for drumming concepts such as wearing safety belts and “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” into the national consciousness.

After evincing reluctance to running public-service announcements earlier this decade, the major networks have embraced what Gaylord called “promotional PSAs.” Efforts like NBC’s “The More You Know” campaign showcase network stars to convey information, simultaneously promoting pro-social messages and NBC itself. After all, if young women adopt “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston’s hairdo or “Ally McBeal’s” short skirts, wouldn’t they listen to them pontificate about parenting or tolerance?

What probably doesn’t help, Kunkel said, are mixed signals the medium sends, like airing a public-service announcement celebrating ethnic diversity adjacent to a program featuring minority criminals. Fox, for example, recently ran antidrug spots immediately after teenagers were depicted giggling incoherently in a smoke-filled basement on the sitcom “That ‘70s Show.”

“You’re not going to accomplish much if the 30-second message is outweighed by the 30-minute program,” Kunkel said.

The debate about television’s public-service role is, not surprisingly, fraught with politics, not just academics. Advocacy groups have characterized the giveaway of digital spectrum to broadcasters as corporate welfare, urging the government to impose standards compelling TV stations to justify use of public airwaves with free time for political candidates, increasing educational fare for children and offering more public-affairs programming.

Even in the well-intentioned realm of public-service announcements, business and politics also intervene. Television stations often appear less than eager to sacrifice valuable air time to fulfill public-interest obligations, with ratings declines making the minutes allocated for those purposes--time that could otherwise be sold or used for on-air promotion--that much more precious.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have forged ahead with a $1-billion antidrug ad blitz over the next five years, despite legitimate questions regarding its efficacy. Drug abuse rose through the early 1990s, at the same time pithy slogans like “Just Say No” and “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs” became part of the national lexicon.

The Gore Commission report may renew the debate over what TV should be doing to make the world a better place, but the most lucid voices in this discussion recognize that television can only help affect change if parents, peers and other cultural influences support the cause.

The TV academy’s Marshall conceded the industry must do more not just to convey positive images but to draw attention to its contributions, demonstrating its desire to function as “good corporate citizens.”

Given the number of people assigning television a share of blame for society’s problems, inspiring critics to acknowledge such efforts could be difficult.

“It’s not sexy,” Marshall said. “It’s much more fun to find the negatives.”

One has to wonder, in fact, if TV did all that was asked of it, and kids suddenly roamed around like little angels humming the “Barney” theme, would those who have campaigned against Hollywood’s depravity really be willing to give television any of the credit?