Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 19, 1990 TAG: 9003172318
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: TONY NATALE COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We spend more time with it than we do playing with our children or talking with our spouses or, in many cases, working at our jobs.
But there are signs, however slight, that cracks are developing in America's love affair with the television set.
A recent Nielsen survey shows that Americans cut an average of 10 minutes off their daily TV viewing time in 1989, the second straight annual decline.
The survey of the country's 40 largest markets disclosed viewers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area keep their televisions on the longest - an average of 56 hours and 45 minutes a week.
But viewers in the San Diego area were last, averaging 37 hours, 45 minutes.
Even so, television still rules the typical American household for 49 hours each week.
Patricia Heck, head of the remedial reading department at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Ariz., said young students enjoy books, but they almost always lose interest in them by age 10 or 12. "Maybe TV is to blame, I don't know," she said.
Joan Anderson Wilkins, author of "Breaking the TV Habit" and many children's books, is among those who believe they have some of the answers. "Television has, indeed, become the mother and father in the typical American family - but it should only be a cousin," Wilkins said. "It's pretty crazy spending an inordinate amount of time in front of a machine."
Wilkins considers television necessary but says its importance should be downplayed. As a result, she has become one of several spokespeople in what has become a national campaign to shut down television screens, especially sets within view of young children.
Wilkins discovered how to break her own TV habit by accident, she explained.
"Just as I was about to watch my favorite soap opera one day, our TV set fell off the kitchen counter and smashed to pieces," Wilkins said.
"My kids were 3 and 5 at the time. Without a set we found ourselves with nothing to do. So we went to the garage and, instead of playing in the kitchen with the TV noise in the background, the kids started playing with things like cardboard boxes and creating things."
Since her book was published, Wilkins has toured between 50 and 60 elementary schools across the country, and thousands of schoolchildren have promised to boycott TV for a week.
"Children are more interested in real life than in TV - if they are given interesting things to do besides watching television," she said. But Wilkins, unlike some TV critics, doesn't want to pull the plug out forever.
"TV can be a wonderful teaching tool, but we've got to put it in perspective" she said. "We should be in control of the machine, not have it control us. But you can't eliminate television completely."
Steve Wagner disagrees. He's national director of SET, the Society for the Eradication of Television, headquartered in Oakland, Calif.
Wagner said he and fellow members believe television should be eliminated. "If you believe television is like a drug or alcohol, the only way to recover is to eliminate the drug. You can't just watch a little TV, just like you can't just take a little drink if you're an alcoholic.
by CNB