Legacy Youth Ministry Resources

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TV Doesn't Tell The Whole Story About Sex

Each year the average person views 9,230 scenes depicting sex or implied sex. And 81% of the sex is outside of marriage (Why Wait?, p. 41). Put that together with the fact that one in four sexually active youth will acquire an STD before they graduate from high school, and I come away with a major question. Of the 92,230 sex scenes you have viewed over the past 10 years, how many of you have ever seen a show where a character picks up a disease from their casual sex experience? (Get a show of hands from the youth.) Not even one? Does this strike you as odd? If 92,000 t.v. characters played in war scenes over the past 10 years and we never saw an injury, Roger Ebert and the rest of us would be crying out for some reality. Television has told us that we can have casual sex without physical consequences.It would be a great reality shock to viewers if James Bond were to pay some price for his casual sex. Let him develop a troublesome itch, visit a doctor, be diagnosed with herpes, and be warned to stop all sexual activity. But will it ever happen? Not a chance. ? Copyright 2002 Steve Miller - All Rights Reserved

Today's Tower of Babel

"In the place of truth, we have discovered facts; for moral absolutes we have substituted moral ambiguity. We now communicate with everyone and say absolutely nothing. We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna." (Ted Koppel, from a 1987 commencement address at Duke University, found in Insight, May 6)

TV Biggies vs. Rest of Population

A few years back, two researchers interviewed 104 key TV people !V writers, producers, executives, directors, and creators. (Newsweek, 7/20/92 and Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman study in 1982) Here's what they found: ?h 45% have no religious affiliation. Rest of society: 7.5%.(Chandler, p. 15) ?h 93% said they never attend religious services, or seldom do. (Rest of America? 66% attend at least once a month. 40% to 50% go every week. Successful Hollywood writer/director/producer James Brooks said, "guess there is nothing that Americans are doing more! and nothing that is represented less by Hollywood!than going to church. Only 5% (20% Newsweek) strongly agree that homosexual acts are morally wrong. Rest of society: 76% Only 16% (49% according to Newsweek) strongly agree that adultery is wrong. Rest of society: 85%. They felt that religion should have little influence on society. [Rest of America? 64% think religion can answer all or most of today!?s problems. (USA Today, 4-1-94, p.1)] And this last one is scary. KTV's creators seek to move their audience toward their own version of the good society. ? Copyright 2002 Steve Miller - All Rights Reserved

Time In Front Of TV

Want a shocker? Take the average amount of time that you watch TV per day, e.g., two hours (below the national average). Do you realize that over a period of 60 years, you will spend the equivalent of 7 1 years, sitting in front of the TV every waking hour of the day? ! Imagine what a person could accomplish given 7 1 years in which to accomplish it! (1. In some fields, you could go through college and get a Masters and Doctorate. 2. Become an accomplished guitar or keyboard player. Spend a year immersing yourself in another culture and get a conversational understanding of the language. Spend the next 6 1/2 years continuing mastery of the language and impacting the culture. 3. Become really good at several sports.) (To really make it sink in, go through the math with your group, letting some youth help with calculators. Here it is: 2 hours x 365 (days per year) = 730 total hours of TV per year. Divide this by 16 to get the total number of days of that year that I would have spent every waking hour (16 hours) watching TV (45.625 days). Multiply this by 60 to get the total number of 16 hour days I would have spent totally on TV over a period of 60 years (2737.5). Divide this by 365 to find the total amount of years I would have spent watching TV every single waking hour of each day.] I come up with 7.5 years of spending every waking moment watching TV! An easier way to figure it (but perhaps not as easy for youth to see) would be to say that 2 hours is 1/8 of the waking hours of a day. So 1/8 of all my waking time is spent watching TV. Thus, 1/8 of my 60 years are spent watching TV [60 divided by 8]. This gives me 7.5 years. Another way to introduce this point: What Could You Accomplish in 7.5 years? 1 - Earn a Doctorate degree. 2 ? Become an accomplished musician 3 ? Master some field you want to excel in 4 ? Become formidable at some sport 5 - ..... or, simply watch 2 hours of TV per day over a period of 60 years.

Church Attendance

Fifty-five percent of Americans attended church (at least once a month) in 1998. (U. of Michigan Study) (If most Americans go to church, it would be interesting to see what percentage of TV characters or movie characters are ever portrayed as going to church. ? Copyright 2002 Steve Miller - All Rights Reserved

R-Rated Movies Affect Teens

So you don?t think that watching impure movies affects behavior? A recent study found that kids whose parents don?t let them watch R-rated movies are five times less likely to try cigarettes or alcohol than youngsters who are allowed to watch whatever they want, a new study found. Over 5,000 students ranging from age 9 to 15 were asked about the types of restrictions their parents placed on their movie viewing. Researchers discovered that 31% of students said their parents placed no restrictions on their movie viewing habits, with 53% reporting that they were allowed to watch R rated movies once in a while and 15% never allowed. So how did their viewing habits affect their behavior? The survey also found that for every five R-rated movies the kids saw from a list of 50 popular titles, they were 1.6 times more likely to have tried smoking and 1.8 times more likely to have tried alcohol. In all, 17.5 percent had tried smoking and 23.4 percent had tried drinking alcohol. (Study by Madeline Dalton and Dr. James Sargent, of the pediatrics department at Dartmouth Medical College, consolidated from ?Kids? Bad Habits Blamed on Movies? by Julia Sommerfield, MSN, 3/23/01).

Smoking Encouraged by Top-Grossing Films

Dr. James Sargent, of the pediatrics department at Dartmouth Medical College reported in the January issue of the British medical journal The Lancet that among the 250 top-grossing films from 1988 to 1997, 87 percent contained scenes of tobacco use. In 95 percent of the occurrences, there was no cue that smoking was a negative behavior. While R-rated movies usually have more tobacco than other movies, on average eight occurrences per film versus four for PG movies, it isn?t factored into the ratings process, Dalton said. Over 430,700 Americans die each year from smoking-related diseases and 4,800 kids between 11 and 17 smoke their first cigarette every day.

TV: The Golden Goose That Lays Scrambled Eggs

?Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the lowborn, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses?.Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs. And it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.? Lee Loevinger

TV: Neither Rare nor Well Done

?Television is called a medium because so little of it is rare or well done.? Fred Allen

The Behavior TV Prevents

?The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents ? the talks, the games, the family activities, and the arguments through which much of the child?s learning takes place and his character is formed.? Urie Bronfenbrenner

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