Posted on 12/04/2006 3:59:48 PM PST by Eric Blair 2084
CHICAGO - Inappropriate advertising contributes to many kids' ills, from obesity to anorexia, to drinking booze and having sex too soon, and Congress should crack down on it, the American Academy of Pediatrics says.
The influential doctors' group issued a new policy statement in response to what it calls a rising tide of advertising aimed at children. The policy appears in December's Pediatrics, scheduled for release Monday.
"Young people view more than 40,000 ads per year on television alone and increasingly are being exposed to advertising on the Internet, in magazines, and in schools," the policy says.
Advertising examples cited in the statement include TV commercials for sugary breakfast cereals and high calorie snacks shown during children's programs and ads for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs shown during televised sports games.
The statement also is critical of alcohol ads that feature cartoonish animal characters; fast-food ads on educational TV shown in schools; magazine ads with stick-thin models and toy and other product "tie-ins" between popular movie characters and fast-food restaurants.
These pervasive ads influence kids to demand poor food choices, and to think drinking is cool, sex is a recreational activity and anorexia is fashionable, the academy says.
Interactive digital TV, expected to arrive in a few years, will spread the problem, allowing kids to click on-screen links to Web-based promotions, the new policy says.
In response, the academy says doctors should ask Congress and federal agencies to:
_ ban junk-food ads during shows geared toward young children;
_ limit commercial advertising to no more than 6 minutes per hour, a decrease of 50 percent;
_ restrict alcohol ads to showing only the product, not cartoon characters or attractive young women;
_ prohibit interactive advertising to children on digital TV.
The academy also says TV ads for erectile dysfunction drugs should be shown only after 10 p.m.
Nah, can't happen.
It is scary that such educated people can be so STUPID.
For 50 years, there was no advertising of hard liquor on TV. Did that stop people from being stupid with it?
"Inappropriate advertising contributes to many kids' ills, from obesity to anorexia, to drinking booze and having sex too soon, and Congress should crack down on it, the American Academy of Pediatrics says."
Seems like advertising has the same affect on many adults.
Maybe a better role for government, if there is one, is to educate children about all the messages they are bombarded by. Not in the sense of one is right, or one is wrong, but how their responses are being manipulated.
Or better yet educate the adults, and let them educate their children.
I'll have my viagra with a snickers bar and a Coors
Advice to parents
The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home.
Maybe a better role for government, if there is one, is to educate children about all the messages they are bombarded by.
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That's not good enough. The liberals and progressives have tried that for 40 years and they weren't satisfied with the results.
My Dad told me not to smoke 25 years ago. I didn't listen. I should have. Not because it's bad for my health, but because a quarter of a century later I have to listen to health Nazi's tell me what to do.
Parents have failed in the eyes of the left. Now the Gubmint is in charge.
For 50 years, there was no advertising of hard liquor on TV.
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Mark my words, in 10 years there will be no Alcohol advertisments on TV or billboards. And there will be sports stadiums with no beer sales.
Got it, now mark mine. Reinventing Prohibition in the form of banning advertising will have no impact whatsoever on alcohol consumption.
Inappropriate and immoral EDUCATIONAL materials are also to be held accountable for sexualizing children. SEICUS and those who subscribe to the sex positive agenda WANT kids sexually active.
It has been considered their birthright (at least since the texts of Reich and Kinsey). They consider abstinence to be an unhealthy suppression of sexual desires. If it feels good, do it.
Certainly major companies have also behaved irresponsibly but the Supreme Court has just said that parents do not have the right to demand that they are the sole source of sexual (and moral) teaching for their kids.
The institutions are corrupting the young. It is by liberal design. Ain't no accident.
Mad Magazine used to educate kids about the hoaxes in advertising claims.
During the whole life of the publisher, Bill Gaines rejected advertising because he felt it to be hypocritical to slam Pepsi and then advertise Coke. Then he died. He'd long sold out to Time-Life-Warner but it wasn't until after his death that they took on advertising and cheap partisan political slams.
There were some books published in the 1950s and 1960s that attempted to expose the psychological research that advertising firms had used. Our own government recommend them to national security officers during the Kennedy years; somehow I don't think they were pushing "Nation of Sheep" to help educated consumers as much as to adopt the same proven tactics of marketing.
Advice to parents
The best way to keep your children from drowning is to never have a baby or more than a glassful of water in the home.
. Do not have children, especially a baby.
. Remove all containers (buckets, tubs, tanks, pools) that may hold small-large bodies of water.
. Throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The institutions are corrupting the young. It is by liberal design. Ain't no accident.
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You're right. That's what happens when Free Markets aren't allowed to work and parents with limited means have no choice but to send their kids to the Hitler Youth Schools that we in the US call Public Education.
School choice? That would interfere with the left's entire agenda of producing the next batch of liberals.
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