TV News' Coverage of Violence and Children's Fear

Contact: David Peikin
Public Affairs Office
(202) 336-5702 (until 8/12)
(415) 537-6397 (8/14 - 8/18)

MEDIA ADVISORY

Television News' Coverage of Violence: Instilling Fear in Children?

SAN FRANCISCO - While much of the concern surrounding media
violence and its effect on children has emphasized the role of movies,
television, video games, and music lyrics, new research indicates that
violence on television news is the cause of significant fear and
rumination in children. Two psychologists who have researched the
effects of TV news violence on children, and a third psychologist who
led the crisis response teams at the Arkansas and Kentucky school
shootings, will discuss how television news violence instills fear in
children.

WHAT: News Briefing: Television News' Coverage of Violence:
Instilling Fear in Children?

WHEN: Monday August 17, 1998 at 10:30 AM

WHERE: The Palace Hotel, Napa Room

PARTICIPANTS:

Joanne Cantor, Ph.D., is a Professor of Communication Arts at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an internationally
recognized expert on children and the mass media. Her research over
the past 15 years has focused primarily on the effects of television
on children, in particular the types of mass media images and events
that frighten children at different ages and the intervention and
coping strategies that are most effective for different age groups.
She has worked with the national PTA on projects related to the
V-chip, and her finding that parents wanted content information rather
than age recommendations helped bring together a national coalition of
child advocacy groups to oppose the industry's age-based ratings and
lobby for more informative ratings. As a result of her research on
the V-chip as a senior researcher for the National Television Violence
Study, she has testified before committees of both the U.S. House and
Senate and helped convince the television industry to add content
information to its age-based system. Dr. Cantor is a consultant and
researcher on children's
programming for Wisconsin Public Television, and her book Mommy I'm
Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to
Protect Them will be published by Harvest Books in September 1998.
Dr. Cantor is also on the editorial boards of Communication Research
and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

Barbara Wilson, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of
Communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her
area of expertise is the social and psychological effects of the mass
media, in particular children's emotional and cognitive processing and
developmental differences in children's responses to mass media.
Along with her colleagues at UC, Santa Barbara, she has just completed
a $3.5 million project funded by the National Cable Television
Association to assess violence on television. Dr. Wilson has served
as a research consultant for Nickelodeon, the National Association of
Television Program Executives and Discovery Channel Pictures. She is
currently principal investigator on a Court TV project to assess the
impact of anti-violence curriculum in middle schools. She is
currently on the editorial boards of Communication Reports, Media
Psychology, and the Journal of Communication.

Scott Poland, Ed.D., is Director of Psychological Services for
the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District of 56,000 students
in Houston, Texas. He is a two-time winner of the Texas' Most
Outstanding School Psychologist Award and has received the Excellence
in School Psychological Services Award. A nationally recognized
expert on school crisis, he served as a team leader on and spokesman
for national crisis teams sent to Paducah, KY and Jonesboro, AR in the
wake of school shootings. He is currently the Chairman of the
National Association of School Psychologists' National Emergency
Assistance Team. Dr. Poland was one of two educators invited to the
White House in May 1998 to discuss solutions to youth violence with
President Clinton, Attorney General Reno, and Secretary of Education
Riley. He also testified before Congress this year on the issue of
youth violence.

The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC
is the largest scientific and professional organization representing
psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association
of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 155,000
researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through
its divisions in 50 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 59
state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to
advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of
promoting human welfare.

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