Excerpt Two: "Stand Here and Cry, Stand There and Smile": How the News Media Exploit Children

     America's children are often presented in the news media as agenda-free barometers of American zeitgeist. After just about any tragedy of national importance, the news media dispatch reporters into classrooms across the country to report on how kids are coping. News reports show children "expressing their fears and feelings" through pictures, hand-drawn banners, songs, and other activities. Whether the topic is the Columbine High School shootings, the space shuttle Columbia, the war with Iraq, or even the death of Mister Rogers, the same questions arise: How are the children dealing with it? What do we tell the children? How much should we tell them? Teachers and reporters pretend they (and we) are glimpsing the inner worlds of children, but this is largely a morality play put on for the reporters and teachers. These are staged and organized school activities, not spontaneous expressions of children's fears or wishes. Children are required to participate in forced solidarity, regardless of their actual opinions, thoughts, or feelings. Children should be informed about world events, and instilled with suitable patriotism, but not forced to act out adults' ideas of their reactions.

     Without a hint of skepticism or real journalism, the reporters go with the predefined news story: Children are in turmoil. The nonstory notion that most kids might be coping just fine is not a productive angle that reporters wish to pursue. When children are interviewed, they know exactly what responses the teachers want to hear and the reporters are fishing for. It would be interesting to know how many children's responses are cut from the final broadcasts or articles because a reporter or an editor felt that the responses did not reflect the "right" tone of the story. A child who admits he isn't really upset about a given tragedy and is just participating because he is forced to probably won't get on the air. Aside from the vacuous journalism, this trend is also troubling because children's individual thoughts, feelings, and ideas are ignored. They are told how they are supposed to feel, what they are supposed to think, how they are supposed to interpret the events around them.

     This approach ignores the fact that children take cues from the adults around them and often act as they are expected to act. Many kids exhibit fear because they think they are supposed to. Parents and teachers see them as fragile, hypersensitive, and unable to deal with reality. The adults coerce children to enact what they think society wants them to feel or express. Thus they are photographed making memorials, sending messages, and concocting political statements in response to events they little understand or care about. Concerned parents might do far better to try to control their own reactions than worry about their children's. National, impersonal tragedies simply have far more emotional weight for adults than children. Instead of fretting over a war in Iraq or the loss of the two tallest buildings in Manhattan, most kids, I suspect, are far more interested in what's going on in the latest pop star's love life, music videos, or the latest video game for Playstation 2. Simply put, the lives of kids and adults are quite different. Because most kids don't spend hours watching the news about whatever scares or tragedies are being hyped that week, they don't work themselves into a pubescent funk worrying about them. This is clearly reflected in polls that ask kids what they are concerned about: Studies consistently show that the issues kids worry about are very different than those their parents and teachers worry about.

     The news media fill pages and airwaves offering advice on what to tell children about the news. It is ironic that American adults, who themselves are largely ignorant of national and global issues, suddenly take such a keen interest in making sure that their children have at least a superficial understanding of each new crisis. If the news media itself wasn't geared toward sensationalizing crime and tragedy, this would likely be far less of an issue. In some cases the activities and emotions portrayed by the media may be genuine and self-generated, but more often they seem imposed on children. Helene Guldberg, writing for Spiked magazine online, pointed out that "[d]espite all the concern, there is a distinct lack of evidence that children have been adversely affected or distressed by [the September 11 attacks]. . . . A colleague's eleven-year-old brother described how his classmates discussed among themselves (in gory detail, as many adults did) what they had watched on TV on September 11: "We were saying to each other: Did you see those people jumping out of the windows?!" But the horror of the event didn't stop them [from] inventing a new playground game called "Blow up Bin Laden": "We started screaming and running every time a plane passed, but the teachers asked us to pray for peace and stop messing about."

     A recently retired schoolteacher in upstate New York told me about the reactions of her former students to the September 11, 2001, attacks: "I can't speak for all the kids, but I can tell you what most of the kids [I taught] would be thinking when they saw the planes hit the [World Trade Center] buildings: Cool! Look at that!" Following the September 11 attacks, one teacher described how she "watched in horror" as her fifth-grade students made three-foot high stacks of books and then toppled them with makeshift airplanes: "My first instinct was to yell at them. I thought how could they be so insensitive, but then I realized they were trying to tell us something in the only way they could. Even though they were smiling and laughing, I knew they were hurting inside."

     In another news report, Associated Press writer Sara Kugler began: "With crayon drawings and building block toys, children in the New York area are still resurrecting the World Trade Center. Then they ignite the drawings in scribbled orange flames, and topple the blocks with their small fists. Nearly a year after the nightmare of Sept. 11, children are still struggling to understand what they went through that morning. . . . Parents say their children show signs of stress in their play, building and then destroying towers of blocks."

     This sort of reporting reflects little more than adults' projection of their own fears onto children. If kids aren't playing, that's a sign of stress. If kids are "smiling and laughing" while playing and knocking down towers of blocks, that's a sign of stress. While it's true that children (and many adults, for that matter) can't always express their emotions, that doesn't give adults license to impose their own thoughts and feelings on children. It is misleading to the public, disrespectful to the children, and poor journalism.

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