At the dawn of the information revolution, the outset of the digital age, the whole discussion of popular culture, media, and children is shrouded in misinformation, demagoguery, and journalistic cowardice.
People with foot-long academic pedigrees are hard at work counting the number of times Bugs Bunny slugs Elmer Fudd, the frequency with which Roseanne talks about "it" on prime time, and the number of karate kicks in "Walker, Texas Ranger." (Is there no honest work for these people?)
But they're having a much tougher time bringing us any concrete evidence that these incidents post a significant danger to our children or harm them at all, especially when compared to real problems.
Journalists are so freaked by manipulable politicians, changing culture, ideological mercenaries, and PC-sensitivities they have lost the ability to tell the truth about children, safety, and pop culture.
The idea that well-attended, properly raised, well-educated children would turn murderous or immoral through exposure to television, music, or films would be a dumb joke, if it weren't a central idea of both major political parties.
For all the hysteria, there remains no credible evidence that pop culture is a primary cause of violence in America. If it were, how could violent crime be plummeting all across the country, even as we're told almost daily that violence and sexual imagery are dangerously worsening?
The plentiful evidence we do have about children and danger shows there's little mystery about where danger comes from. Class, family structure, poverty, race, education, racism, and other social factors are the overwhelmingly clear links between children and violence. And they're pretty much ignored in media and politics. These problems demand solutions, that - unlike ratings - are complex, sensitive, and actually cost money.
Violence among urban underclass children has been epidemic. Violence among middle-class suburban children - the major consumers of high-tech new media - is low and declining.
Children with young single parents, absent fathers, poor day care, bad schools, little economic opportunity, and a culture of drugs and guns face a great likelihood of suffering from violence.
Children raised by two parents in stable, supervised homes who are given solid moral grounding, are attached to their parents, attend good schools, and will enjoy economic opportunity are not likely to suffer or commit violence, no matter what music they listen to or what TV shows they watch.
College-bound high-school seniors are achieving their highest SAT scores in years, despite a culture which is supposedly dumbing them down day by day. They're getting good jobs, too.
There is no question that mass media and new technology are exposing children to an unprecedented amount of information and material, and that some of it is lurid, sexual, violent, and frightening. Parents are right to be concerned about the impact of all this on their children, many of whom are left alone more often as parents work longer hours.
But it is nothing less than a bald-faced lie to suggest that V-chips and other forms of censorship will alter the basic realities of culture, technology, and the lives of children. They won't. Count on it.
Information technology will only expand. Popular culture will continue to grow. The liberation of information will become more pronounced. The young will get their hands and eyes on it, with our help or without it. We can war with them or we can help them. Our choice.
In a capitalist democracy, the marketplace ultimately determines content and choice. Artists and corporations have a right to generate whatever creative material they wish, and the public has a right to buy it - or not. It's called freedom, and it's sort of the point of our form of government. The idea of entities like Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, or William Bennett stepping in to save us from these choices is repugnant to the most basic notions of responsibility and liberty.
Children's pop culture is historically rebellious. It wants desperately to offend adults. In modern times, children's worlds are porous. The information revolution has swept away enforceable boundaries, and kids can't be forced into hermetically sealed bubbles. They have too many ways of transmitting and receiving information.
Politicians and political opportunists who are sincerely worried about children's futures - a tiny band if ever there was one - might give both kids and their families a break by considering solutions that might actually work:
Education. Few American schools teach children how to use new information technologies rationally. Even though screen culture like TV and computers is a central component of children's lives, most schools, like most journalists, view this new technology like a deadly virus. As a consequence, children aren't really taught how to use it or adjust to it: To learn how much TV is too much; how to differentiate between advertising and editorial content; how to protect themselves against exposure to violent imagery; how to ask programmers for more varied content; how to do research on the Internet; how to stay safe online; or how to blend traditional culture - books, magazines - with new culture like cable and computers.
Without coherent leadership from schools and politicians, or accurate information from journalists, parents and children are left to sort through all this sophisticated material themselves. No wonder they're nervous. But children can't be sealed off from culture or technology, not if they want to live, compete, and play in the modern world.
Child care. We need to solve the day-care issue, a nightmare for concerned parents and a primary reason too many children, especially poor ones, go unsupervised. Popular culture seems far less dangerous to adults if they are (or someone they trust is) nearby to offer children alternative activities, and to supervise what they're watching or playing.
As author Anne Roiphe says in her new book Fruitful: A Real Mother In The Modern World, this is the number one family issue in America, a far more central issue for parents of the young than any television broadcast. "There is no reason except traditional American individualism that we do not have decent, cheap, available day care for everyone. If small countries like Israel and Sweden do it, so can we if we put our minds and pocketbooks to it."
But cultural conservatives like Bennett and V-chip proponents like the president don't talk much about day care. Instead, they offer cheap placebos that won't help needy children or interfere much with affluent and technologically skilled ones.
Parental responsibility. American politics teaches finger-pointing at record companies, moviemakers, and sports heroes. But parents - not Wal-Mart or CyberSitter - are responsible for the moral lives of children, for what they watch, read, or buy.
Only parents can determine whether their children have a solid moral and psychological grounding. Lost in the righteous debate over freedom, values, and culture is the most fundamental notion of all - parenting is as close as we get to a sacrosanct individual responsibility, time-consuming, expensive, and complex. People who aren't up to it shouldn't do it. It's the children who suffer. The heat belongs on those who bring people into the world, not those who sell them CDs and movies.
This responsibility should never be - can never be - ceded to corporations, politicians, or technologies. The vast psychological literature on children and morality overwhelmingly concludes that children form values early in their lives, and primarily through interactions, clear signals, and directions from the people they love the most - their parents.
Absent fathers and extremely young single parents are a common link between children, violence, and poverty, much more demonstrably than TV, movies, or rap. So is the lack of job opportunities, as William Julius Wilson makes clear in his new book, When Work Disappears.
Until politicians and the media start making this point as forcefully as they shriek about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, needy children will get no real help, and children who are safe and prosperous will continue to be bombarded with needless hysteria.
