Our recent in-class assignment forced us to look at our local media from a critical perspective. We investigated the FCC 398 Reports from several San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland-area commercial TV stations. We were asked to put on the FCC lens and evaluate the extent to which these stations follow a) the Children’s Television Act (CTA) legal requirements and b) the CTA’s spirit.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/10/kron-tv-looks-to-sell-san-francisco-hq.html
I analyzed KRON, a MyNetwork TV-affiliated station in San Francisco. Based on the report from quarter 4 of 2014, they did abide by the CTA rules. They provided the minimum of 3 hours of core educational/informational (e/i) programming and pre-empted all of 12 their shows which had to be rescheduled due to outside factors. But do they really abide by the spirit of the law? Debatable.
The most interesting take-away from our station is that every single program (and there were 15 different ones!) listed their target audience as 13-16 year olds. However, after reading the descriptions of many of them, we concluded that no teen we know would actually watch these. In fact, we thought most of our shows such as Animal Exploration, Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures, and Bay Area Quiz Kids would be best suited for 6-9 year olds or maybe 10-12 year olds depending on the content and the interest levels. The most common show theme for us was cognitive-intellectual, which we applaud KRON for doing because a majority of e/i programming currently seems to address the socio-emotional theme instead. I appreciated how their shows were kid-tailored topics like animal facts, quiz shows, and news shows. I would be interested to further explore Teen Kids News specifically, because it is a great concept of a new program for teens by teens, and it reflects back on a media need we discussed earlier this quarter regarding the lack of children’s voices in programming.
http://www.teenkidsnews.tv/
I think our children are served adequately well in our market but there is still a lot of room for improvement. The visual calendar grid that we created using post-it notes really exemplified the areas of growth. Firstly, most of the shows across the stations were unrealistically targeted to 13-16 year olds, which is obviously a strategy to avoid the advertising regulations for kids programs 12 years and younger. Secondly, most of the shows were heavily concentrated on weekends, especially Saturday mornings 7-10am. Our KRON station had NO programs Monday thru Friday. This is problematic because a) many kids within that older adolescence range do not wake up that early and b) the program options at times when they are most likely TO watch are rare. Hardly anything is offered during weekdays, although we understand this is likely for financial reasons. Thirdly, there needs to be more programming directed to the younger audience, specifically the 2-5 year old preschool range. Although PBS does an excellent job with this spectrum, it should not completely eliminate the competition for these viewers. Other stations should feel inspired to create other e/i alternatives for their own stations to give kids more variety and choice.