The Lone Voice in the Wilderness

review by Mike Gange

It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children
by Karen Sternheimer

Westview Press, US $26.00/CAN $40.00, 272 pages

Almost everything I have read in the last five years spells out that our kids are under enormous pressure from pop cultural influences. Because of all of the things the kids see, hear or read in the mass media, these reports say, our kids are changing, becoming more involved in drugs and school violence, using bad language and developing anti-social attitudes, experiencing lower reading scores and higher rates of teen pregnancy. Academics and entertainment insiders alike say our popular culture has lost its sense of values, selling more sleaze than entertainment. All predictions are ominous for our kids, and the blame seems to always be placed directly on the mass media.

Finally, though, there is a lone voice arguing the opposite. University of Southern California Sociologist Karen Sternheimer says all of those views slamming our kids are way off base. In her book It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children she very capably points out the fallacy in those contentions that blame the media for what our kids are doing.

Sternheimer says part of the adult hostility toward our teens comes from what is portrayed in the news media. "Young people represent change, and change can be frightening," she writes. "This fear of change is coupled with a news media that has grown in the last twenty years to contain multiple twenty-four hour news channels constantly in search of "news" filling much of their time with talking heads that often pontificate about the troubled state of youth. Chain ownership of newspapers has led to pooled reporting and the same stories run in multiple cities, greasing the perennial fear of the next generation."

Repeatedly, Sternheimer uses statistics to prove that today’s kids are not as far out of line as they are often made to be. For example, she points out that in 1950 the pregnancy rate for fifteen to nineteen year olds was 80.6 per thousand, but by 1999, the rate had dropped to 49.6 per thousand. Similarly, she points out that acts of extreme violence are rare, and are not exclusive to this new generation of teens. The most deadly act of violence among young people occurred in 1967, when a twenty four year old student shot 46 people from a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing 16 of them. These kinds of incidents are often played up in the news media because they are so shocking. They are universally memorable because we all want to keep them from happening in our own communities. In reality, writes Sternheimer, children are far more likely to be victims of violence in their own homes than in schools.

While Sternheimer does not excuse or overlook the sometimes anti-social attitudes of today’s youth, she repeatedly comes up with anecdotes and examples that prove we can not blame it all on what the kids see, hear or read. Just as comic books were castigated in 1953 as contributors to juvenile delinquency, the whole mass media today are being slammed as instigators of illicit or inappropriate activities. She urges us all to be more tolerant and understanding of kids, as they use their own pop culture to find themselves and to define themselves.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.