Teenage wasteland: critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of mass media.

• Author: Horowitz, Carl F.
• Position: Book Review

Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's children, edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 267 pages, $29.95

Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, by Alissa Quart, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 239 pages, $25

HOLLYWOOD HAS BECOME to the right what big corporations are to the left. When it comes to criticizing popular entertainment, the two targets coincide, and the differences between left and right dissolve. I vividly remember the ghastly sight of Jesse Jackson and Bill Bennett appearing together on CBS's Face the Nation a decade ago, united in their eagerness to protect vulnerable youth from cultural pollution.

Two new books, one mainly from the right and the other from the left, reflect this bipartisan view of America's young people as victims of mass culture and mass marketing. But both also contain hints that kids are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with evil desires--that in fact, they and their parents can counteract the antisocial messages decried by critics like Jackson and Bennett.

Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children must be understood in the context of the Federal Trade Commission's September 2000 report on the entertainment industry's allegedly deceptive marketing practices. Congress ordered up the study immediately after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, largely because the two killers reportedly had played the video game Doom and seen the film The Matrix shortly before their rampage.

Despite the FTC's lukewarm conclusion that violent depictions might have a harmful effect on minors, The Wall Street Journal and other alarmed guardians of morality latched onto the report, along with a joint statement from the American Medical Association and other health organizations condemning media violence, as an excuse to ratchet up their culture war. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) denounced Hollywood's "culture of carnage." He and his allies insisted that the debate about the relationship between fictional and real-life violence had been settled; now was the time for action.

The contributors to Kid Stuff, a collection of 11 essays, do want action, but first and foremost they are empiricists. And the data come flying fast and furious, occasionally making some inescapable points. Media, to a certain extent, do act in loco parentis. The average American child spends some 5.5 hours a day interacting with media (including the Internet), a figure that rises to seven hours by age 18.

Many of the contributors to Kid Stuff insist that movies, TV shows, and video games not only assault kids with sex and violence but induce them to imitate what they see on the screen, ultimately causing them to lose their moral compasses.

Syracuse University historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn sees America awash in a culture of moral obscenity. Popular culture routinely strips people of their humanity, she argues, tediously detailing content analyses showing, for example, that "children who watch an average amount of TV see 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other acts of violence during their elementary school years." She adds, "By renting just four videos--Total Recall, Robocop 2, Rambo III, and Die Hard III--a child would witness 525 deaths." Iowa State psychologist Craig Anderson, in his review of 32 studies on violent video games, concludes that repeated game playing heightens aggression and reduces pro-social behavior among both children and adults.

Such concerns fly in the face of two realities. First, youth crime has dropped sharply in the last decade. From 1992 (the year Mortal Kombat debuted) to 2000, arrests for...