Media Hype, Accuracy and Celebrity Influence on Raising Teenagers
June 4th, 2009 by Sue Blaney
Once again, Amy Jussel at Shaping Youth.org offers thoughtful commentary on the cultural messages your kids consume… and reading her blog has to get your juices flowing. In addition to offering a plethora of resources for parents of teenagers, Amy’s critical eye points out discrepancies and underlying messages making her voice is an important balancing influence. I urge you to spend some time on her site as you will not only find her perspective informative and thought provoking, but you will get helpful links, input on books, movies and more.
A good place to start is to read her interview with The Girl Revolution as well as her posting Influencers, Accountability and The Global Cost to Youth. [Fair warning: this isn't light reading...pretty heady stuff.]
She caught my attention in this second posting as she brought up Tyra Banks’ well publicized study about teens’ levels of sexual activity…having mentioned the Tyra Banks research myself in a post Talking About Sex is Not an Option, this caught my eye. Amy’s comment makes great sense:
- Those of us who work with youth regularly tended to roll our eyes at the Tyra talk, as it falls into the ‘shock schlock’ category of media punditry that ALL needs taken with a HUGE grain of salt.
Regardless of her popularity with teens, Tyra is FAR from a Johns Hopkins qualitative analysis or the CDC, ya know?
And can I just point to the lil’ ol’ ratings game and profit motive of this media and marketing analysis, folks?
Tyra is an ENTERTAINMENT show, people! Stay out of the research and science genre and we’ll all stay out of modeling, fair? Scary thing is, MSM ran with it big time. (that would be ‘mainstream media,’ since the MSM acronym at the SxTechConf has an entirely different meaning in healthcare)
From The Today Show to network news mentions, these teen ‘truemors’ immediately morphed into ‘findings’ in classic ‘it must be true’ phenom that media power and influence wields so haphazardly. In an instant, Tyra’s ‘study’ latched onto a perception of credibility since it was picked up as ‘news’ and deemed authoritative by the sheer massive numbers.
What concerns do you have about your teens’ exposure to values, information and behavior via media hype? What input would you like on the topic of mitigating harmful cultural influences? I hope to interview Amy in the near future and would love to hear from you as to what your questions and issues are. Comment here on the blog or drop me a personal note.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Culture & Media, Parenting Teens, Tips and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 4th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Honored to be here, Sue. As you know, I’ve been WANTING to work with you forever, just am in ‘overload’ mode much of the time running a ‘me, myself and I’ ship in the nonprofit sector.
Hope to shore up the flanks this summer on correspondents/crossposts/cash influx to solidify the sustainability of all of our ongoing nonprofit ventures, esp. since grants are going out the window w/the economy. So if you have any teen interns to send my way, I can sure use a hand! (I’m losing some to graduation!)
Speaking of which, here’s a fun ‘flash animation’ which will add some levity to the fiscal crisis for parents of teens. (Walt Handelsman’s editorial cartoons!)
http://www.newsday.com/media/flash/2009-04/46217527.swf
p.s. As graduation nears, I also just interviewed the movie producers of “Default” trailer here: http://www.defaultmovie.com on student debt, which will post on Shaping Youth.org in the next week or so.
Though collegiate “Gen Y” kids are getting hammered from all sides of this downturn, they remain positive, optimistic and unflappable; a breath of fresh air.
And p.s. I should be interviewing YOU too.