Article 8CAN 'TV IMPROVE Us?BY J ANE ROSENZWEIGIt’seight o’clock Wednesday evening and arumor is circulating at a small-town highschool in Massachusetts that a student namedJack is gay Jack’s friends-one of whom is aE-year-old girl who has been sexually activesince she was 13, and another of whom has amother who has recently committed adul-tery-assure him it would be okay with themif he were, but admit their relief when he sayshe isn’t. An hour later, in San Francisco, awoman named Julia is being beaten by herboyfriend. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, ayoung stripper who has given birth out ofwedlock learns that her own mother lockedher in a basement when she was three yearsold, an experience that she thinks may explainher inability to love her own child.A typical evening in America? If a visitorfrom another planet had turned on the televi-sion (specifically the WB and Fox networks)on the evening of Wednesday, February 10,1999 with the aim oflearning about our soci-ety he would likelyhave concluded that itis made up pretty ex-clusively of photogenicyoung people withdisintegrating nuclearfamilies and liberal atti-tudes about sex. It’s ob-viously not an accuratepicture, but what mightour visitor have learnedfrom the programs hewatched? Would all thesex, violence, and pa-thology he saw teachhim antisocial behavior?Or might he glean from prime-time dramasand sitcoms the behavior and attitudes thathe would do welI to adopt if he intended togo native in America?This is not an idle question-not becausealiens might be watching American television,but because people are, particularly irnpres-sionable children and teenagers. In a timewhen 98 percent of U.S. households own atleast one television set-a set which is turnedon for an average of nearly seven hours aday-the degree to which people learn fromand emulate the behavior of the charactersthey see on TV is an academic cottage indus-try Some evidence does support the wide-spread belief that children and teenagers areaffected by violence and other antisocial be-havior in the media. When Dan Quayle madehis infamous comments in 1992 about Mur-phy Brown having a baby out of wedlock, hewas merely doing what numerous concernedparents, ethnic groups, religious organiza-tions, gun-control advocates, and others werealready doing-blaming television for encour-aging certain types of behavior.But if television contributes to poor behav-ior, might it also be a vehicle for encouraginggood behavior? In 1988, Jay Wmsten, a pro-fessor at the Harvard School of Public Healthand the director of the school’s Center forHealth Communication, conceived a plan touse television to introduce a new social con-cept-the “designated driver”-to NorthAmerica. Shows were already dealing withthe topic of drinking, Wmsten reasoned, sowhy not add a line of dialogue here and thereabout not driving drunk? With the assistanceof then-NBC chairman Grant ‘linker, WinstenReprinted with permission from The American Prospezf, Issue 45, July/August 1999, pp. 58-63. 0 1999, The Am&n Prapect,5 Broad St. Boston, h4A 02109. All rights reserved.met with more than 250 writers, producers,and executives over six months, trying to sellthem on his designated driver idea.Winsten’s idea worked; the “designateddriver” is now common parlance across allsegments of American society and in 1991won entry into a Webster’s dictionary for thefirst time. An evaluation of the campaign in1994 revealed that the designated driver“message” had aired on 160 prime-timeshows in four seasons and had been the maintopic of twenty-five 30-minute or 60-minuteepisodes. More important, these airings ap-pear to have generated tangible results. In1989, the year after the “designated driver”was invented, a Gallup poll found that 67 per-cent of adults had noted its appearance onnetwork television. What’s more, the cam-paign seems to have influenced adult behav-ior:polls conducted by the RoperOrganization in 1989 and 1991 found sign&cantly increasing awareness and use of desig-nated drivers. By 1991, 37 percent of all U.S.adults claimed to have refrained from drink-ing at least once in order to serve.as a desig-nated driver, up from 29 percent in 1989. In1991, 52 percent of adults younger than 30had served as designated drivers, suggestingthat the campaign was having greatest successwith its target audience.In 1988 there were 23,626 drunk driving fa-talities. By 1997 the number was 16,189. Whilethe Harvard Alcohol Project acknowledgesthat some of this decline is due to new laws,stricter anti-drunk driving enforcement, andother factors, it claims that many of the 50,000Lives saved by the end of 1998 were saved be-cause of the designated driver campaign. (Thetelevision campaign was only a part of theoverall campaign; there were strong commu-nity-level and public service components aswell.) As evidence, the project cites statisticsshowing the rapid decline in traffic fatalitiesper 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the ayears during and immediately following themost intensive period of the designated drivercampaign. Officials at the National Highway8. Can TV Improve Us?Traffic and Safety Administration have statedthat the only way to explain the size of thedecline in drinking-related traffic fatalities isthe designated driver campaign.Following the success of the Harvard Alco-hol Project’s campaign, various other advo-cacy groups-the majority of them withprogressive leanings-have begun to workwithin the existing structures of the televisionindustry in a similar fashion, attempting to in-fluence programming in a positive direction.In truth, there are limits to the effect any pub-lic interest group can have on what getsbroadcast. Commercial television’s ultimateconcerns are Nielsen ratings and advertisers.Thus there will always be a hefty quantity ofsex and violence on network television. As Al-fred Schneider, the former vice president ofpolicy and standards for ABC, asserts in hiscontribution to the forthcoming anthologyAdvocacy Groups and the Television Industry,While [television] can raise the consciousnessof the nation, it should not be considered asthe major vehicle for social relief or alteringbehavior.”But why not?MAUDEY~ ABORTIONThroughout the first decades of television, ad-vocacy groups generally tried to work againsttelevision rather than with it. Their strategiesfor changing “offensive” television contentconsisted of boycotts, letter-writing campaigns,and