Anti-TV Alarmism Mutes the Message

The Times mercifully stopped running pictures of its columnists, but even without that weekly photographic evidence, let the record show that your humble TV servant carries a few extra pounds--partially a consequence of too much time on the couch (to better serve you, the reader) and not enough on the treadmill.

For that, lay some of the blame on television, which would be the case even if the job didn’t require staring at the blasted thing. After all, that particular appliance has contributed to an entire generation wearing thick glasses and loose-fitting jeans. Marie Winn, in her recently updated book “The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers and Family Life,” lists a variety of effects among TV’s offenses, including rising levels of obesity as well as declining physical fitness.

From that perspective, it’s hard to get too exercised about TV-Turnoff Network, a well-intentioned if historically fruitless nonprofit group that “encourages children and adults to watch much less television in order to promote healthier lives and communities.” The annual campaign asks people to boycott television for a week, this year beginning Monday. That means the blackout period overlaps with the onset of another rating sweeps, which, for TV junkies, is akin to being asked to go on a diet right before the holidays.

File it under the heading of near-hopeless causes. Despite repeated claims that the campaign has been a success, Nielsen Media Research figures indicate no appreciable decline in viewing during targeted weeks since the TV-Turnoff drive started in 1995.

Of course, such campaigns might garner better results if the standard ingredients included less sanctimony and more plain-spoken talk about personal responsibility. No one, for example, is organizing “Get Up and Move Around, You Slug” Week, “Try Parenting Your Kid Better” Week, “For God’s Sake, Put Down the Chalupa and Turn Off ‘Blind Date’” Week, or “C’mon, Stop Downloading That Stuff and Breathe Some Fresh Air” Week.

That said, it’s hard to quarrel with the notion that people watch too much television, or that there might be more enriching ways to spend a half-hour than tuning in “Judge Judy.” What one can take issue with, however, is the habit of do-gooder groups to exaggerate their case, trying to convince people that viewing “Just Shoot Me” amounts to sticking one’s head in an oven, or worse, risks turning today’s kids into a generation of homicidal maniacs.

As a case in point, in a recent announcement TV-Turnoff Network referred to a study by Columbia University researcher Jeffrey Johnson and others that concluded that adolescents who watched more than an hour of television daily were more prone to violence as adults. “TV-Aggression Link Too Strong to Ignore,” the press release began.

The research was only the latest highlighting a correlation between TV viewing and aggression, but as always, there were some questionable aspects to its findings. For starters, the study paid virtually no attention to the kind of programming watched, meaning a steady diet of “Sesame Street” would theoretically make children more likely to be violent if they watched enough of it.

Moreover, beyond experiments measuring short-term behavior that can’t always be readily applied to the real world--say, show kids a Jackie Chan movie, then see if they’re more likely to punch or kick things during the next 30 minutes--such research generally doesn’t account for chicken-or-egg issues, among them whether antisocial kids are more prone to watch television, as opposed to the other way around.

“It’s advocacy science, and I think that’s always very dangerous,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles and one of the rare academic voices counseling caution when it comes to stating (or overstating) the TV-watching/societal-violence connection.

Nevertheless, such studies regularly provide fodder for one campaign or another. Even TV news outlets dutifully report them, at times with typical bluster, as in “Can watching TV make your kids violent? Find out the alarming news at 11.”

Not that this ritual addresses TV’s excesses or helps tame a technological landscape that keeps erupting with new options, rendering television itself a smaller part of the media equation.

Just this month, children ages 8 to 17 surveyed by Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research rated Internet usage first in terms of media they would least be willing to sacrifice, ahead of TV watching and even the telephone. In short, media preferences are changing at such a breakneck clip that researchers find themselves racing just to keep pace.

Frequently lost amid that chase is a truth no doubt patently obvious to most consumers--namely, that TV is ultimately an appliance, and a potentially useful one at that. From the indelible images of Sept. 11 to natural disasters like California brushfires, the medium provides a window on the world unrivaled in its immediacy. Yet those accomplishments aside, its basic impulses remain to entertain and to anesthetize, fueled by a mandate to hold our attention long enough to make us covet products we either don’t need or need in less ostentatious quantities than advertisers would have us believe.

In that context, television, like anything else, should be consumed responsibly and in moderation--something the baby boomer generation, admittedly, has exhibited little inclination to do with its vices and diversions. Campaigning to boycott TV, then, makes no more sense than evicting the microwave because you tend to overeat. Simply put, there is a less drastic solution that doesn’t require an advocacy group to realize.

Stripping away the hysteria, of course, might bring the TV-advocacy treadmill to a grinding halt, but who knows? When all’s said and done, throwing in a larger dose of common sense might actually inspire more of us to put down the remote control long enough to step on board.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at brian.lowry@latimes.com.