Poor quality TV programs for children The Jakarta Post, Monday, April 20 2009
This is regarding your article on children's television in Indonesia (The Jakarta Post, April 15.) For the past 15 years I have been involved in developing and producing pro-social TV programming for children and young people in Europe and elsewhere. The lack of quality children's programs in Indonesia is a problem common to all environments where media are highly commercialized, as they are here. Children, especially in developing countries, are not a source of income for program producers or broadcasters. Programs that are produced tend to target parents as spenders of money on their children. Or, children's programs revolve around characters that are merchandised as dolls, games and other off-air products that children are encouraged to ask their parents to buy. In such cases, the contents of these "children's programs" are vacuous at best, and encouraging of mindless consumerism at worst. Truly educational television programs for children and young people are unfortunately rare. Indonesia now, at last, has its local version of Sesame Street, which targets preschool children with learning numbers and letters. I participated in a conference on children's television programming organized and held in Jakarta by UNICEF about two years ago. Present were TV producers and broadcasters, academicians specializing in children's media, and a few policy makers. Indonesia actually already has a law in place that prescribes the number of hours per week dedicated to children's programs; and a limit on the minutes of commercials relative to the minutes of programming per half-hour. As participants at the UNICEF conference admitted, the law is adequate, but no one is enforcing it. Your article rightly points out that children have very few programs produced with them in mind. Also, on average, for each 30 minutes of airtime, commercials take 12 or more minutes rather than the legislated four minutes. The solutions are to enforce the existing children's broadcast law and to give the government-run TV and radio network a mandate to become the country's true public broadcasting system. As such, without profit driving its decision making, the public broadcaster could become the mainstay of quality children's programming - as is the case in many other countries. Eran Fraenkel Jakarta Source: THE JAKARTA POST URL: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/04/20/letters-poor-quality-tv-programs-children.html ____________________________________________________________________ Kunjungi halaman depan Yahoo! Indonesia yang baru! http://id.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------ http://www.SuratPembaca.net Komunitas Surat Pembaca IndonesiaYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/surat-pembaca/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/surat-pembaca/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
