Baby Einstein Refunds

Congratulations to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) !

Note: for a list of studies looking at the effects of TV on very young children see: http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/young.html 

CCFC successfully pressured “the Walt Disney Company to offer a full refund to anyone who purchased a Baby Einstein DVD in the last five years.”

This is in addition to their ”2006 Federal Trade Commission complaint” which forced Disney to stop making false claims that Baby Einstein DVDs were educational.

From The New York Times article on the Baby Einstein Refunds:

Last year, lawyers threatened a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004. “The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

Perhaps “Baby Einstein” should be renamed “Baby Bozo” !

But it was the comments that were the most fun, here are a few that I especially liked:

New tvSmarter Pages

I’ve added a few new pages to tvSmarter.com, hope you’ll check them out.

Playing versus TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/playing.html

Young Children (babies & toddlers) and TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/young.html

My Democracy page had gotten too unwieldy, so I divvied it up into:

Democracy & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/democracy.html

Civil Society & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/civil.html

Propaganda, the News & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/propaganda.html

Covert Propaganda & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/propaganda2.html

Torture & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/torture.html

Please let me know if I should change and/or add anything or any other suggestion.

Dove Campaign for Real Beauty

Jon Hanson has written an excellent takedown of the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty”.

Here are a few excerpts:

Several weeks ago, as part of its much lauded “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,” Unilever released “Onslaught,” a video (above) examining disturbing images of women in beauty-industry advertising. The video ends with this admonition to parents: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

But is talking “to your daughter before the beauty industry does” an effective solution?

It seems peculiar, therefore, that Dove would offer a film demonstrating the ubiquitous attack of the beauty industry that ends with the suggestion to parents that they are the ones to make a difference by simply talking to their kids. If the industry is the problem, it strikes me as odd that the parents are supposed to be the solution.

Hanson, makes a very interesting point, about parallels with Philip Morris ad campaigns.

Telling parents to talk to their children is not unusual as a public relations Philip Morris Talk to your Kids; They’ll Listen strategy. For instance, Philip Morris, among other companies, has long been pushing that message in its “public service” ads, particularly since the industry began to face a real threat of tort liability in the 1990s. The message seems public-spirited, but most industry analysts believe that Philip Morris is delivering, not a public-service message to parents, but a responsibility-shifting message to the public: kids smoke because of uninvolved or irresponsible parents, not because of anything that Philip Morris has done.

Cold, Dead Hands

"from my cold, dead hands."

No one is arguing that TVs should be banned, but for too many people giving up the remote (even for one week) could only happen if it was dragged from their “cold, dead hands“.

Here’s a sad story:

How much do white Americans think it costs to be black in our society, given the problems associated with racial bias and prejudice?

The answer, it appears, is not much.

When white Americans were asked to imagine how much they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested relatively low amounts, generally less than $10,000.

In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives.

P.S. Thanks to my hubby for the great photoshopping job!

Vicarious Cooking

Driving home, I happened to catch part of Michael Pollan’s interview on NPR. He was talking about an article he wrote for The New York Times called “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”.

His article is about how TV cooking shows have become a big hit in the United States, but that this doesn’t seem to have lead to more cooking, instead Americans are cooking less than ever.

He also contrasts Julia Child’s original cooking show from the 1960’s with today’s much more frenetic shows that emphasize cooking as a spectator sport.

To the question of why people enjoy cooking shows so much, he answered that they provided a “vicarious experience of cooking”, but without the effort and mess.

I really enjoyed his article and interview, here is a quote that, that I think, very much hits the target:

“The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.”

Online Voting Ends July 10

 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has committed to awarding “$500 million in grants to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015″.

To get a better idea about what programs should be supported they looked at the research on the causes of obesity. From this they picked “20 recently published articles ” that looked promising.

Now the Foundation is asking the public to vote.

“This summer, we want to know what you think. Below are 20 articles that we believe had a major policy impact, affected our work and thinking, or warranted our attention, due to our effort to advance the research and knowledge base for childhood obesity prevention. Please choose up to five (5) articles you think best meet those criteria. We will publish the voting results in mid-July. Voting ends July 10, so vote now.”

My 5 picks are (note articles are listed in random order):

 

“A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children”

 

“Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and its Influence on Childhood Obesity”

 

“Child Care as an Untapped Setting for Obesity Prevention: State Child Care Licensing Regulations Related to Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Media Use for Preschool-Aged Children in the United States”

 

“The Context for Choice: Health Implications of Targeted Food and Beverage Marketing to African Americans”

 

“Is Support for Traditionally Designed Communities Growing? Evidence from Two National Surveys”

 

I hope everyone takes a few minutes to vote, especially for the article “A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children”