Media and other headaches

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the photographs of 9-year-old Christina Taylor-Green and her purported killer, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, may speak volumes about American youth culture.

Christina was the third-grade victim of the shooting that took place at the "Congress on Your Corner" event sponsored by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday in Tucson. The image of Christina released to the media is the picture of innocence and wholesomeness — her sweet smile and wide eyes conveying the kind and capable spirit for which she was known.

Christina's friends point to her fun sense of humor and willingness to talk with anyone as traits they will miss at Mesa Verde Elementary School. Recently elected to the student council, she had started to develop an interest in government, which prompted her neighbor and friend Susan Hileman to take Christina to Mrs. Giffords' event.

Born amid fear and foreboding on September 11, 2001, Christina was the picture of possibility and promise. A baseball player who also took ballet lessons, Christina was being raised in a faithful home and recently received her First Communion. By all accounts, she exhibited a zest for life that was fed by the love and encouragement of her family and friends.

The portrait of the man charged in her death is a stark and scary contrast, indeed.

OK, moms and dads, let's do a quick survey to see how well you're supervising your children's media consumption.

Is the TV in a main room in the house where you can easily monitor the content flowing into your home? Do you use DVR, TiVo, the V-chip or other technology to safeguard your children from inappropriate TV shows? Do you keep the remote handy to mute those embarrassing commercials for erectile-dysfunction treatments?

If you answered "yes," you're in the minority. According to the most current Kaiser Family Foundation "Generation M" survey analyzing media use by children aged 8 to 18, only 28 percent of parents have rules about TV viewing. But good for you, because all available research confirms that children with limits on media consumption - both in terms of time and content - fare better in virtually every way you can run the numbers.

Unfortunately, the nation's biggest entertainment conglomerates are offering your children an end run around your best efforts to limit their exposure to TV shows to which you might object.

When I ask my daughter how things are going at school, her voice tells me more than her words. "It's all good," she says with lukewarm enthusiasm. Obviously, it's not.

Explaining her misgivings about some friends she thought she knew well, she reminds herself, "I'm disappointed, but I guess it just takes time to get to know people."

It's an important life lesson. We can't know others based on first impressions or even on shared but limited experiences. We're not friends because Facebook says so, or because we've hung out occasionally.

It simply takes time to get to know people well enough to truly discern their authentic character.

This lesson is as true in our national politics as it is in a college dorm.

I've always tried to view politicians as both officeholders and fellow citizens. I can vehemently disagree with their ideas and political points of view as officeholders, but I appreciate their talents and personalities as fellow citizens.

In fact, I've admired plenty of politicians whose policies I believe are pure hooey. When he first appeared on the national scene, Barack Obama was among those.

I hoped that he looked at his fellow citizens in the same way — that while he won 52 percent of the popular vote for the presidency, he at least respected the 46 percent of us who didn't elect him based on the fact that we strongly opposed his agenda.

I'm convinced now, though, that Mr. Obama holds in contempt anyone who disagrees with him. He pays lip service to the notion of "spirited debate," but in truth he thinks those who espouse traditional values are just uneducated bumpkins.

Case in point:

Sometimes I wonder whether my parish priests stand outside the windows listening to what goes on in my house during the week. How else could they deliver homilies from Sunday to Sunday that speak directly to the things we face at home?

One week we'll be dealing with financial worries, and the sermon is about trusting God to provide everything we need, even if we can't quite see how that's possible.

Another week will find us stressed by too many obligations and commitments, and we'll hear a lesson reminding us "From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required" (Luke 12:48).

Either the stuff we're dealing with is universal, or someone is feeding talking points to the padres.

This week, Father Joe displayed his typical, uncanny insight into my family's spiritual challenges. How did he know we're getting a little tired of spending so much time together, sharing bathrooms and cars, wondering when someone else will take a turn to replace the shampoo or fill up the tank?

Must be my family isn't the only one counting the days until school starts. Either that or short tempers are serendipitously part of the liturgical calendar.

This seems like a good time to admit a personal bias: I'm prejudiced against daytime TV.

I realize this is irrational. It's just that where I come from, watching daytime TV is something you do when you have the flu or it's raining on a Saturday or a boyfriend has dumped you and there happens to be a "You've Got Mail" marathon on cable.

Turning on the TV during the day, especially to watch talk shows, has always struck me as an indulgence that comes with the urge to change into sweatpants and reach for a bag of Cheetos.

Consequently, I've missed some important moments in American pop culture. I didn't see Tom Cruise jump on Oprah's sofa or Dr. Phil's attempt to rescue Britney Spears. And I've never seen an entire episode of "The View."

Until now.

President Obama's appearance Thursday with the five co-hosts of "The View" struck me as such an incongruous idea that I had to watch it. Thankfully, I did this online rather than on the network when it aired last week, so I was able to skip the commercial breaks. I'm sure I would become despondent watching segments of conversation with the leader of the free world interspersed with ads for laundry soap and birth-control pills.

The appearance once again raised questions about what it means to be "presidential" in our celebrity-obsessed culture.

One of these days, someone is going to conduct some scientific research and discover that billions of dollars could be saved by not doing so much scientific research.

For example, the New York Times last week carried an interesting story by Randall Stross titled, "Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality," in which the author previews an upcoming scientific paper on the effects of home computers on the educational outcomes of low-income students.

The study's authors — professors from the University of Chicago and Columbia University — used fieldwork from a Romanian computer voucher program to prove that low-income students who received home computers actually achieved lower test scores than students who applied for, but did not receive, the vouchers.

Here's the part where we could pocket some research grant money: Mr. Stross quotes researcher Ofer Malamud as saying, "We found a negative effect on academic achievement. I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they werent surprised, given their experiences with their school-aged children."

Who needs stark regression discontinuity to establish something that any competent, responsible parent can tell you over a cup of Starbucks?

A priest, a rabbi and a duck walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "What is this? A joke?"

Ba dum ching.

Unfortunately, the folks at Comedy Central don't seem to know the difference between good-natured humor and vile insulting content that deliberately offends a huge segment of the population.

Last month, the network announced it is developing a new animated show titled "JC," featuring a hapless Jesus Christ living on his own in New York City.

The synopsis at Comedy Central's "Insider" website says, "A half-hour animated show about JC (Jesus Christ) wanting to escape his father's enormous shadow and to live life in NYC as a regular guy. A lot has changed in 2000 years and he is the ultimate fish out of water. Meanwhile his all-powerful yet apathetic father would rather be playing video games than listening to JC recount his life in the city. JC is a playful take on religion and society with a sprinkle of dumb."

Actually, based on previous depictions of Jesus on Comedy Central shows such as South Park, as well as the treatment of Christians and Christianity on shows across this network, the funniest part of that synopsis is the use of the word "playful."

Perhaps most curious of all the results of the recently released Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) study "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds" are the headlines it has generated.

"Researchers shocked at kids' online time," says one. "U.S. kids using media almost 8 hours a day," another screams. "New media use by children up by hours per week," another story warns.

Essentially, the news coverage since last week's unveiling of the updated research on children, teens and the media has focused on the sheer quantity of media consumed by America's youths, and this is newsworthy, to be sure.

The very idea that children and teens are physically able to absorb more than 53 hours per week of media content — or seven hours and 38 minutes per day — astonished even the researchers, who had thought the previous average of six hours and 21 minutes per day calculated in 2004 represented the maximum amount of time that could be spent.

Even more mind-boggling, thanks to multitasking (using more than one kind of media at a time) children and teens "actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes … worth of media content into those 7½ hours," the KFF study says. A note to the already astonished: The study didn't include the time youngsters spend texting via cell phones. Add another 1½ hours per day.

As the mother of four, I wonder if the folks who are surprised by this research have children. It strikes me that only the childless would be shocked by the results. The rest of us spend much of our time saying things like, "Turn off the computer and go to bed."

Left: The cast of MTV's "Jersey Shore." Snooki is the girl in black.

A message for Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi: I am not a hater.

I can see why you'd come to that conclusion after last week, when my comments about you and the show on which you appear, MTV's "Jersey Shore," made their way from Us Weekly online to countless entertainment Web sites, including the infamous PerezHilton.com.

But honestly, it's not personal, Snooki; it's strictly business.

They don't call it a "news cycle" for nothing. As surely as the minute hand winds down the waning moments of 2009, headlines bombard us with a now familiar theme for every New Year's week: The Recap. This time, we're reviewing not only the year that ends at midnight Friday, but the decade as well -- a period one of the newsmagazines is calling the "Worst Decade Ever."

Ouch.

Decade-in-review stories interest me because I'm afflicted with a memory like Swiss cheese. Pointing and clicking my way through the headlines, I'm saying, "I remember Kelly Clarkson," and "Oh yeah ... Halle Berry's Oscar" and "Has it been that long since the wardrobe malfunction?" Time flies like a bustier at a Super Bowl, doesn't it?

Of course, there were seminal occurrences during the past 10 years that have redefined our country and our culture, and those remain with us as current events. Richard Hatch's victory on the first season of "Survivor" gave us "The Bachelor" and "Jon and Kate" and the recent ill-fated "balloon boy" attempt at celebrity.

The Facebook guys gave us "friend" as a verb and teenagers with bad grades.

Those hanging chads of 2000 gave us a generation of Bush-haters and a lucrative career for Al Gore in climate change.

The inconceivable and surreal tragedy of 9/11 gave us the war on terror, now being fought by 18-year-old men and women who were still wide-eyed children on the day it began.