Media giants or parents -- just who is in charge?

Jim Steyer is fond of referring to the media as “The Other Parent.” Indeed, that’s the title of his 2002 book -- and given the statistics he’s accumulated, the term is as appropriate as it is alarming.

According to a University of Maryland study, American children aged 2 to 18 now spend only 17 hours a week, on average, with their parents -- “40% less time ... than kids did in the mid-’60s,” a decade in which the young were presumably so busy rebelling against their parents that they couldn’t bear their company. But kids now spend “more than double that amount of time -- 40 hours a week on average,” Steyer says, “staring at the tube or the computer screen, listening to the radio or CDs and playing video games.”

“Now, which is the parent in this picture?” Steyer asks.

Good question.

But unlike many who see the media as a disruptive, destructive force for children, Steyer is quick to insist that he “can’t relate to finger-wagging moralists or fundamentalist ideologues on the topic of the media and morals.... I’m not a Christian right-winger. I’m a progressive. I teach civil rights and civil liberties at Stanford.”

Thus, Steyer doesn’t argue for government censorship. He wants informed, voluntary parental supervision. What he’s trying to do, he says, is provide the data necessary to empower parents to make smarter choices about the media they allow their children to consume.

Toward that end, last spring he founded Common Sense Media, an independent, nonprofit organization that functions as a hybrid watchdog -- one part Consumers Union, one part American Assn. of Retired Persons, one part Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The CommonSenseMedia.org website features reviews and recommendations on the latest movies, software, CDs and other media products and services as well as reports on studies and stories that might be useful to parents.

“We want to give parents information, kind of like the nutritional information on food, so they can decide for themselves what their kids should and shouldn’t consume,” Steyer says. “What’s right for my 14-year-old might be very different from what’s right for your 14-year-old.”

Negotiating the minefield

Steyer doesn’t actually have a 14-year-old. His children are 6, 9 and 10. But I have a 14-year-old, and I know just what he means.

When the movie “Gladiator” came out a few years ago, the mother of one of Lucas’ friends called to ask if he would like to go with her and her son to see it that week.

The movie had just been released, and I didn’t know much about it. But my wife, Lucy, did.

“No,” she said. “It’s way too violent.”

Lucas wasn’t happy with our decision, so Lucy and I decided to see “Gladiator” that night before ruling it out.

The blood and gore were so rampant that we’d barely begun nibbling our popcorn when I turned to her and mouthed, “You were right.”

We’ve since let Lucas see such R-rated movies as “The Hurricane” and “Cold Mountain” (among others), refused to let him see “Saving Private Ryan” and “8 Mile” (among many others) and refused to let him buy any “parental advisory” CDs.

In each case, we’ve explained why we made our decision. He knows, for example, that we’re much more restrictive on violence than on sexual content or so-called obscene language -- and that we won’t tolerate racist, misogynistic or gay-bashing lyrics in our home.

So we talk about our feelings and let him talk about his. Then we, as parents, decide.

“That’s what we want parents to do,” Steyer says. “We want them to be educated, to talk with their kids, to use the tools we give them to have those discussions and make good judgments.

“We want parents to think about the enormous impact the media have on their kids’ lives. Remember, most kids spend more time with the media than they do in school.”

How about all those ratings for movies and TV programs and video games? Aren’t they useful?

“The rating for each medium is different, and taken together they’re confusing,” Steyer says. “What they have in common is that what the media give you is colored totally by the media companies’ own short-term objectives, and those objectives are always colored green.”

Putting kids first

Steyer has had personal experience with those objectives. In 1996 -- eight years after founding Children Now, a national child-advocacy organization -- he started JP Kids, a company that developed educational programming for television, film and online use.

By then the father of two, he was weary of “trying to convince media leaders to do a better job for kids” and was determined to “do the job myself.”

“I originally assumed that the companies that produce and distribute kids’ programming, as well as other media that kids so readily consume, have an overriding interest in children and a genuine concern for their best interests,” he writes in “The Other Parent.”

Hah!

“Market forces and the short-term profit goals of a few giant media corporations -- not quality issues or kids’ needs -- dominate the media world,” he says. “Put simply, money rules all, not the best interest of kids or our broader society.”

So last year, Steyer changed hats again. He raised $500,000 to start Common Sense Media. That sum has grown to almost $1.3 million, he says, and last month the organization announced its first awards for the best and worst in media for children.

They gave “golden lifesavers” to winners in six categories -- movies (“Finding Nemo”), television (“Joan of Arcadia”), music (singer Avril Lavigne), video games and software (the educational game “Leapster” from Leapfrog), website (pbskids.org) and books (“Eragon” by 15-year-old Christopher Paolini).

Common Sense Media also announced four losers -- recipients of “golden garbage cans.” They were singled out for “oversexed entertainment” (the Fox network, for such prime-time programming as “Temptation Island,” “Paradise Hotel,” “The O.C.” and “Skin”); “gratuitous violence” (Take-Two Interactive Software and Rockstar Games for “Manhunt” and “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” respectively); “offensive commercialism” (the Abercrombie & Fitch Christmas Field Guide Catalog that featured nude and semi-nude young models and seemed more interested in promoting sex orgies than in selling clothes), and “sheer stupidity” (the Miller Lite “Catfight” and Coors Light “Twins” beer commercials that were, the organization complained, “shown repeatedly during daytime television sports” events).

Steyer says more than 3,000 parents, teachers and children sent in more than 18,000 nominations for the awards, and he and his staff of seven made the final selections, “after consulting our teams of reviewers and our advisory board.”

CommonSenseMedia.org has had more than 170,000 users since it began and, best of all, it’s free.

The next time one of our son’s friends wants him to go to a questionable movie that I haven’t had a chance to see myself, I’ll know where to go for at least a preliminary assessment.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.