GLUED TO THE TUBE

By Steve Wulf

Aloysius Snuffleupagus is under siege. It's nothing personal against the beloved elephantine creature from Sesame Street, but as a symbol of quality children's television, Snuffy is trying to hold the fort while Rita Repulsa, Newt Gingrich, Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, Armani-clad copywriters from Madison Avenue, Rupert Murdoch, professional wrestlers, professional lobbyists and Nickelodeon emcees armed with green gook storm the walls.

Despite years of efforts by parents, educators, children's-TV activists, and occasional FCC commissioners and members of Congress, the forces of commercial television are overwhelming the true believers in quality children's programming. Peggy Charren, founder of the now defunct advocacy group Action for Children's Television, says, "There are more choices than when I began act 27 years ago because of cable and the vcr, but broadcast television has just gotten worse. What's so sad is that's all that's available to poor children, and they are the ones who need the most help." Newton N. Minow, the former fcc chairman who called TV a "vast wasteland" in 1961, argues in a new book (see excerpt) that children's TV is still a wasteland-and that the government ought to step in and do something about it.

Indeed, these are perilous times for those who care about what our children watch on television. Consider:

-- The 28-year-old Children's Television Workshop, producer of such acclaimed programs as The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact and Square One TV, is down to a single show in first-run production, namely Sesame Street. In February, abc canceled ctw's animated Saturday-morning science program CRO, and its pbs show Ghostwriter is on indefinite hiatus, having lost its funding. In the fiscal year that ended in June 1994, ctw lost $5.8 million, and two weeks ago it had to lay off 47 people -- 12% of its staff.

-- While Senate majority leader Robert Dole and Speaker of the House Gingrich bemoan the state of American culture, they oppose government mandates on children's programming and demand that pbs stop relying on federal appropriations. "It's nauseating," says Charren, "that the same guy [Dole] who is attacking what's terrible in entertainment is working very hard to keep the alternatives from getting on the TV screen."

-- Efforts to put some regulatory teeth into the Children's Television Act of 1990-- which requires that TV stations air at least some "educational and informational" programming for kids -- are long overdue. FCC chairman Reed Hundt is soliciting comment on several proposals, including one that would require broadcasters to air at least three hours of quality children's fare each week but would allow them to pay other stations -- presumably PBS stations -- to run two of those three hours. Representative Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the 1990 act, has said that the proposal "completely fails children."

-- While programming choices for kids have multiplied with the explosion of cable channels, much of the most popular children's fare still gives parents fits. The king of them all, Fox's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, has spawned a merchandising industry, and later this month will appear on the big screen for the first time; that means small children will be kicking one another in record numbers as they exit the local multiplex.

-- A look at their recently announced fall prime-time schedules reveals that the broadcast networks have all but abandoned the "family hour" between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Such kid-oriented shows as Full House have been canceled, and adult comedies like NBC's Friends, CBS's Cybill and ABC's Roseanne will now air at 8 p.m. Network programmers point out that they can no longer afford to aim prime-time shows strictly at children, since advertisers spend most of their dollars targeting the 18-to-49 age group. Says ABC television network president David Westin: "There was a time when most households had only one TV set, so majority ruled. But with the increase in households with two, three or four sets, we've increasingly seen children going into one room and adults into another."

Some children's advocates were buoyed last week when the Senate approved an amendment to its telecommunications bill requiring that new TV sets be equipped with a so-called V-chip, a device that would allow parents to block out programming deemed to be violent. But a similar amendment considered by a House committee has already met defeat, and the National Association of Broadcasters is threatening legal action if the provision becomes law. "The First Amendment doesn't say the government can identify, label and rate these things for you," says Valerie Schulte, a lawyer for the nab. "If you have a V-chip, next you'll have an L-chip for language, an N-chip for nudity-it's just going to go on." A J-chip for junk would be nice, but such computer gimmickry does make the government seem like Big Brother or, as Markey puts it, "Big Mother and Big Father."

Even FCC chairman Hundt, the most pro-regulation head of that agency in years, seems to be treading lightly around broadcasters on the children's-TV issue, possibly because he lacks support from his fellow commissioners: "I would like the sweet power of persuasion to be the key to success." He might have a receptive audience in Winnetka, Illinois, where members of the Winnetka Alliance for Early Childhood became so concerned over the pervasive negative influence of the Power Rangers that they organized a TV Tune-Out week last winter. Says Winnetka developmental psychologist Jeanne Beckman: "If parents would sit down and watch that program from beginning to end, they would be shocked at what they see."

Hundt might have a tougher audience at the Los Angeles headquarters of the Fox network, home of the most popular children's programming in America. Murdoch's Fox Children's Network has virtually all the top-rated shows on Saturday morning, including the Power Rangers, Spider-Man and Eek!Stravaganza. Says Margaret Loesch, president of fcn: "I'm trying to do in our entertainment what I as a parent want broadcasters to do . We are trying to present fantasy. We drive home the point that this is not real, and we tell children not to play karate at home." Some of Fox's kids' shows actually do have redeeming quality-Steven Spielberg's Animaniacs spouts Shakespeare and Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? is a cartoon spin-off of the geography-minded pbs show. But the Power Rangers and their imitators will continue to be the bane of parents' and educators' existence-until something new comes along.

Is there a common ground between Winnetka and Hollywood? No, not unless somebody is twisting the arms of the networks and local stations -- which, after all, are in the business of making money, not doing good deeds. "I don't think [the state of children's TV] has anything to do with any villainy on anybody's part," says ctw president David Britt. "It just has to do with the conventional wisdom that unless somebody makes us, it isn't in our economic interest to do educational programming for kids."

The TV industry doesn't lack for well-meaning people. Terri Tingle, the executive producer of TBS's Feed Your Mind!, says, "At Turner Broadcasting, we do more than most industries do. We really feel that serving children is an important part of our job." Geraldine Laybourne, president of Nickelodeon, the innovative children's cable channel, isn't shy about tooting her network's horn: "It would be dishonest of me not to say that I think we helped change the landscape of children's television." True, but the landscape even on Nickelodeon is mixed. Doug is sweet, but Rugrats is frightening. Even the good about Clarissa Explains It All is undone by Ren & Stimpy.

Parents need as much guidance as their kids do. Says UCLA psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield: "Parents tend to opt out after Sesame Street. They don't research what the good programs are." Notes Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "For children, television is a window to the world. Parents should control, limit and regulate television exactly as much as they control, limit and regulate other things the child does-like taking lessons, like eating, like being outside." Indeed, too many parents are like the Man in the Yellow Hat in Margret and Hans Rey's Curious George books -- we send our young charges off to the television set with only the admonition, "Don't get into trouble." And, of course, they find it.

Pity the poor younger sibling, who might have been watching Sesame Street had not his big brother or big sister -- who once learned along with Snuffy -- switched to the Power Rangers. The Rangers too shall pass, just as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman and Bartman passed before them.

Even so, the rest of television will remain. On Saturdays alone, kids can watch as many as seven hours of WCW and WWF wrestling. Daytime talk shows like Ricki Lake are aiming at younger and younger audiences. Six-year-olds can watch reruns of the raunchy sitcom Married . with Children well before their bedtime. Then there are the commercials. Pay attention, for instance, to an ad for Starburst candy in which the adult world magically disappears when you pop a Starburst into your mouth. The message is clear and dangerous: kids can make things better by ingesting this incredibly cool substance.

Forbidding commercial TV, or unplugging the infernal machine altogether, is a noble idea, but children do need popular culture in order to connect to one another. As Ann H. Dyson, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, and a consultant to Sesame Street, points out, "Who could defend slush like the Power Rangers and X-Men? But if we bar kids from watching these shows or talking about them, we're turning them off." Says Jeff Cole of the ucla Center for Communications Policy: "Everything we learn about the world comes from media, particularly television. Children learn about school before they attend it. They learn about sibling rivalry even if they don't have a brother or sister. They learn what every occupation and ethnic group is like. Television opens the whole world to us and broadens our horizons. It can be terrible, but it can also be wonderful."

What kids watch can make a difference, a fact that was demonstrated in a study released last month by Aletha C. Huston and her husband John C. Wright, co-directors of the University of Kansas Center for Research on the Influences of Television. Commissioned by CTW and financed partly by the MacArthur Foundation, the study of preschoolers in low-income areas around Kansas City showed that those who regularly watched Sesame Street and other educational programs performed significantly better on standard verbal and math tests than did children who consistently watched adult programs and entertainment cartoons.

Evidence like that cheers staff members at the beleaguered ctw, who met last week for a seminar on teaching kids via TV. Some of the more successful segments from last season's Sesame Street were played, and for a visitor who hadn't watched the show in years, they were fresh and funny and exhilarating. Snuffy will hang on because, after 26 years, Sesame Street is still children's television at its best, even if the neighborhood around it has gone downhill. "We know what's out there," says Valeria Lovelace, the show's research director, "and we know it isn't pretty. But we also know that children don't just need to learn -- they desperately want to learn."

The highlight of the session was a videotape of a group of preschoolers watching Monsterpiece Theatre, starring Alistair Cookie. The kids were entranced, shoving imaginary cookies into their mouths and clapping as the Cookie Monster told the story of The King and I. Says Lovelace: "Our children get as excited as kids who watch the Power Rangers. But they aren't getting excited about fighting or morphing. They're excited over the letter I."

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/ Washington, Marcy Lamm/Atlanta, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH/WASHINGTON, MARCY LAMM/ATLANTA, JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES, ELIZABETH TAYLOR/CHICAGO AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK