Television again...

It used to be as simple as getting the directions to Sesame Street or spending the afternoon with Barney or Mr. Rogers. But if the latest Nielsen ratings are any indication, today’s children are more interested in watching people eat blended pig guts and cow tongues than singing songs and learning their ABCs.

Figures released by Nielsen Media Research in March and April show that Fear Factor,  NBC’s gross-out reality series, is prime time’s third most-watched program among 2-to-5-year-olds, behind only CBS’s Survivor and ABC’s My Wife and Kids.

The rating of children watching the adult-oriented shows may be misrepresentative of what children are really watching and may represent of what their parents are watching instead.

“My kids don’t watch those kinds of shows”, said Pamela Greene, whose five children range from 16 months to 8 years old. “We watch things like Disney and Discovery Kids. I’m not happy with a lot of shows that are on network TV”.

She said that her children spend their TV time watching shows such as Disney’s Even Stevens and Cartoon Network’s Thundercats and Power Rangers. However, local Nielsen ratings suggest that children are watching the same thing as other children in the area.

According to Allan Josephson, a professor of psychiatry at Medical College of Georgia, the ratings could be attributed to the baby-sitter phenomenon – a general lack of human interaction – and could have detrimental effects on children. “Children that age don’t have the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality”, Dr. Josephson said. “They don’t the cognitive capacity. The ratings show a general lack of supervision”.

Mrs. Greene said she believes children learn from the TV programs they watch – and the lessons being taught may not always be the ones she wants children to learn. “I think adult reality TV is awful”, she remarked. “These shows are teaching children that you do whatever it takes to get ahead. They are teaching them that it’s OK to cheat and steal to get what you want”.

But children in the 2-to-5 age bracket don’t have the ability to learn those lessons, Dr. Josephson said. “It just goes completely over their heads”, he said. “It won’t teach them anything. It’ll just scare them”. (...)

The ratings could be indicative of a bigger problem with society. “It’s a sign that these parents can’t be bothered to do something active with their children”, Dr. Josephson said. “Children in that age bracket should be doing things like physical motor play, group interaction, the kind of stuff kids see on Sesame Street”.

TASK:

1. Read the text and write a paragraph (5 lines) of the impact of television in our society.