April 4 - Today in San Francisco, your pre-schooler's brain is being sold to the highest bidder. There, on stage at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association convention, the CEOs of the Public Broadcasting System, Sesame Workshop, HIT Entertainment and Comcast will announce a partnership that sounds at first like the greatest thing for children under 6: a 24-hour cable channel that will broadcast the best educational programming ever made in this country.
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Under the terms of the deal, great shows like Sesame Street, Bob the Builder, Thomas & Friends, Angelina Ballerina and the Berenstain Bears—plus really annoying shows like Barney & Friends—will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the new channel, PBS Kids Sprout, for all of Comcast's 21.5-million subscribers.
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What could be bad? Nothing, except that your kid is paying the bill. The new cable channel will be financed, of course, with advertising. All of the relevant parties involved say that the advertising will be discreet and be targeted only at parents and caregivers—ads for diapers rather than sugar cereals, for example—much like the existing advertising on your local PBS station.
What this means in practice is that your kid will soon be humming the McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" theme song, just like mine. The mini-advertisements that precede Sesame Street nowadays—the other day, it was an ad for McDonald's and Life cereal—may not show hamburgers or bowls of sugary treats, but they're insidious to the mind of a 3-year-old nonetheless. Why, after all, does my kid know the term "all-inclusive family resort" if not from the Beaches ad she sees before Sesame Street? Why, after all, did she ask for an ice cream cone—at 7 in the morning!—after a Chuck E. Cheese advertisement? (Answer: Because the ad has a split-second image of an ice cream cone—in addition to the Chuck E. Cheese logo, of course.)
I'm not the only one appalled by the increasing commercialization of our kids. Plenty of academics have done studies showing that advertising of any kind is bad for our youngest children. And plenty of people in the public broadcasting community are angered by the Comcast deal because of it. "The spots that are going to run on the commercial channel are outright commercials, product endorsements, superlatives," John Hesse, general manager of KUHT, the public television station in Houston, told The New York Times. Hesse explained that he didn't want his channel to be affiliated with the Comcast deal because "we have touted ourselves as a safe haven from commercial programming."
PBS officials told me that their hands are tied. Government funding of public television in the United States is a fraction (per capita) of what it is in England, Germany or Japan—where the pre-school programming is all commercial-free.
"Children [in the U.S.] today are growing up in a highly commercial environment and it's hard to protect them from it," said Joan Ganz Cooney, who, as creator of Sesame Street almost 37 years ago, was one of the very people who did protect our kids from it. Now, she's two steps down a slippery slope—and admitting it!
"None of us want to exploit children as a market," she told me. "But if that's the only way to get quality educational programming to children, it's more positive than negative. In our society, you can't protect children very long from commercialization. Look at Christmas, look at Easter. Commercialization is all around them now."
