Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

What happens when kids are held captive to an endless stream of MTV-like television commercials? Armed with a tape recorder, Roy F. Fox, a language and literacy researcher, spent two years interviewing over 200 students in rural Missouri schools. Why? Because more than eight million students in 40% of America's schools, every day, watch TV commercials as part of Channel One's news broadcast. Students read commercials far more often than they read Romeo and Juliet . These ads now constitute America's only national curriculum.

In this ground-breaking study, Fox explores how these commercials affect kids' thinking, language, and behavior. He found that such ads do indeed help shape children into more active consumers. For example, months after a pizza commercial had stopped airing, students reported that one brief scene showed a couple on an airplane. The plane's seats, students noted, were red with little blue squares that have arrows sticking out of them.^L ^L Also, kids blurred one type of TV text with another, often mistaking Pepsi ads for public service announcements. Kids replayed commercials by repeating or reconstructing an ad in some way--by singing songs, jingles, and catch-phrases; by cheering at sports events (one crowd at a school football game erupted into the Domino's Pizza cheer); by creating art projects that mirrored specific commercials, and even by dreaming about commercials (the product, not the dreamer, is the star).

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Kids and Commercials
• How Well Do Kids Know Commercials?
• How Do Kids Respond to Commercials?
• How Do Kids Evaluate Commercials?
• How Do Commercials Affect Kids' Behavior?
• How Do Commercials Affect Kids' Consumer Behavior?
• Conclusions and Recommendations
• What Can We Do Right Now?
• Works Cited
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In 1989, Chris Whittle began broadcasting Channel One, a package of news and commercials, to participating schools nationwide. Whittle provided the schools with broadcasts, video equipment, and other goodies in exchange for a contractual guarantee that the schoolchildren be required to watch the daily broadcasts. The arrangement has been widely criticized as an unconscionable violation of the educational environment and the public trust. Fox (Univ. of Missouri) supports this view by recounting conversations conducted over a two-year period with small groups of student viewers of Channel One, who reveal themselves to be uncritical of their media environment and heavily influenced by it. Fox closes with a discussion of propaganda and a laundry list of media literacy exercises and public policy recommendations. There are several inaccuracies and unsupported claims, however, and the writing is tediously repetitive; also, Fox supplies no unifying theoretical perspective to explain how students construct meaning from these broadcasts. More substantial and evocative work on children and television is widely available (e.g., Newton Minow and Craig LaMay's Abandoned in the Wasteland, CH, Oct'96). But the present title is an eye-opener. General and undergraduate collections in education, communication, and advertising. T. Gleeson Neumann College