submit article search main Helping Your Children Become Media Wise Posted by Dr. Ted Baehr on Wednesday July 31, @01:33PM from the teach-your-children-well- dept. Most families are concerned about the influence of media violence on their children, but many families dont know what to do about the problem. The good news is that there are effective ways to teach your children to be media-wise. As director of the TV Center at City University of New York, I helped develop some of the first media literacy courses in the late 1970s. Since then, years of research have produced a very clear understanding of how to teach media literacy. There are four pillars of media wisdom. The first is understanding the influence of the media, which may be titled, breaking the bonds of denial. As Dale Kunkel, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points out, after thousands of intensive studies in this area, only one significant researcher still denies the influence of the media, and that researcher last did real research in this area in the mid-1980s. In the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, CBS president Leslie Moonves put it quite bluntly, Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with this is an idiot (Associated Press, 05/19/99). Thus the American Psychological Association's report on media violence concludes, "There is absolutely no doubt that those who are heavy viewers of violence demonstrate increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior." | |
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