Harry Potter is an island in a swamp of silly children's media
June 29, 2003
By Bloomberg
By my calculation - or rather, by the calculation of my 12-year-old son - roughly 10 800 metric tons of freshly minted Harry Potter books were dropped on the US last Saturday: a first print run of 8.5 million books, with each copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix weighing 1.27kg.
Add to this a marketing budget of $3 million, 3 million Harry Potter bumper stickers, 400 000 buttons, 24 000 life-sized cutouts and countless other items of Potter paraphernalia, and you've got the biggest phenomenon in the history of children's book publishing.
Most remarkable of all is the critical unanimity. The Potter books and their British author, JK Rowling, have charmed everyone, apparently, by reviving the most ancient medium, words-on-paper, with the most basic technique: excellent stories, told with intelligence and taste.
So why, with all its success, hasn't the Potter series been more influential among those who produce entertainment for young people? Why is children's media - from the cartoon violence of the X-Men to the mindless potty-mouthing of Eminem - still a swamp of silliness and worse? Why aren't there more Harry Potters?
It's hard to find a parent who doesn't complain about the dreck of children's entertainment. An entire industry of sociologists, pedagogues and other professional busybodies has been thrown up to measure and channel every quiver of parental discontent.
Most of the anger is directed at electronic media - not surprisingly, since not much reading is going on: even in the post-Potter era, only 20 percent of eighth graders read an hour a day for pleasure, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And the media American kids consume are saturated with sex and violence, as such organisations as the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation document with grim regularity.
For example, according to Kaiser, 84 percent of prime-time situation comedies "drew on sexual content" for plots and jokes in 2001 - up from 56 percent in 1998. The foundation estimates that pre-teen viewers see more than 14 000 sexual references on television a year.
Sociologist Sylvia Ann Hewett estimates children will watch over 8 000 television murders during their elementary school years.
With the same grim regularity, the parental grievance industry notes that parents worry endlessly about this.
According to an American Viewpoint poll in April, 64 percent of parents "consider the content in today's [children's] media inappropriate for [their] children". Nine out of 10 believe media make kids "too materialistic" and encourage them to be prematurely "sexually active".
Many activist groups have established ratings systems to guide parents in choosing entertainment for their kids. Politicians have pitched in too. In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act requiring all new TVs to have V-chips enabling parents to screen out offensive content.
All such efforts have stumbled over an inconvenient fact: parents don't do much to monitor what their kids watch and read. According to Kaiser, 61 percent of kids eight and older say there aren't any rules about TV watching in their homes: 95 percent of the time they spend watching television is done without parents.
And how about the federally mandated V-chip? A 2001 Kaiser study showed the chip was used by 7 percent of American parents.
Like any good business, the parental grievance industry follows the iron rule: never blame the customer. Rather than suggest parental fault, it blames corporate villains like NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch or the laissez-faire Federal Trade Commission.
But this misdirection of blame may be changing. A new book, Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children, compiles essays by writers, liberal and conservative, who dare to ask the question the grievance industry will not.
"Are parents reluctant to exercise their responsibilities as adults?" the editors write. "Many seem to be fearful of being considered prudes by their peers."
The result of this abdication of authority, writes researcher Kay Hymowitz, is a "race to the bottom" by entertainment producers. In kids' media, only kids are setting the standards.
Yet Harry Potter's success proves two things: the market in child entertainment is capable of producing excellence, and children respond to excellence when offered. However, parents have to assert their authority and impose their standards. Maybe then there will be more Harry Potters - and fewer Eminems. - Bloomberg
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