Today, at the start of the 21st century, five multimedia conglomerates -- Viacom, Disney, News Corporation, Vivendi Universal and AOL Time Warner - exert unprecedented power in marketing messages and products to young people. Here are excerpts from interviews with media critics about the marketing/media 'forcefield' of these conglomerates.

To give you a sense of some of the power these corporations wield, let me take you through just some of the holdings of News Corporation, for example.

This Australian-based transnational owns Fox Television, 20th Century Fox Films, Harper Collins Publishers. It's also the largest owner of newspapers in the world. Rupert Murdoch has Sky Television, which broadcasts the world over. And the list goes on and on.

This kind of range is unprecedented in the history of all the media industries. We now have all of our culture industries--from movies and TV and radio to music and book publishing and the web-- dominated by corporations that are all-powerful in all of those fields.

There's a handful of owners behind most of those products that you see at the newsstand or on cable or on the web. A handful of owners and the same commercial imperative at work, no matter where you turn. You talk about newspapers, magazines, movies, TV shows, radio. It's all alike, calculated to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

When you've got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take, they are going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down.

They're not going to be too nice about what they choose to do. They're gonna go directly for the 'please center.' They're gonna try to get you watching and buying right away. And what this means is that they are gonna do as much trash as they can because that will grab people. The word "trash" is old-fashioned, because this is a state of the art, highly sophisticated venture that we're talking about. They're using all the most brilliant means of measurement and surveillance to figure out what we're all about. They focus group everything a million ways.

media critic and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

The entertainment companies--which are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States--those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, all the TV stations pretty much in the ten largest markets. They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel, these handful of huge companies. They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing.

You should look at it like the British empire or the French empire in the 19th century. Teens are like Africa. It's this range that they're gonna take over and their weaponry are films, music, books, CDs, Internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market, to colonize this market. And that's exactly how they approach it. So they look at music as just one small part of it. They aren't music companies; they're money-making companies. And music is a weapon that generates money for them.

...What's happened in the media in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years--especially since about 1994 or 1995--has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership....Four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States--they own almost all the TV stations in the largest markets. They're huge conglomerates, and this is really a new thing.

It used to be a largest media companies 20 or 40 years ago only produced newspapers, they only made movies, they only had a TV network. Now they're dominant players in each of these markets. They're highly non-competitive. They don't have to worry about a newcomer coming in. The barriers to entry, as economists talk about, are so high that basically it's a private club, a gentleman's club of like a half-dozen, seven-eight companies that really rule the thing. And they're closely linked. I mean they know each other. They have deals together, and what they're able to do with this tremendous power between them is hyper-commercialize their content without fear of competitive retribution.

Radio is a classic case in point of how that works and the company Viacom, which owns MTV, is a big player in this. In 1996, radio was deregulated by the federal government, and this is public property. So the government has a right to say how many stations you're allowed to own. Well, in the 1996 Telecom Act, without a shred of debate in Congress or any hearings discussing it, the ownership restrictions were lifted on radio from 28 stations for one single company to as many as they wanted to own. And you were allowed to own up to eight in the largest markets. Overnight over half these stations in America were sold from small companies to big companies and big to huge.

So you have a handful of companies like Viacom that now dominate American radio. Every market now has usually two or three companies that dominate it, own almost all the stations, sell relevant advertising. And what's happened to American radio is a classic case then of this hyper-commercialism, on one hand. The amount of advertising on American radio today is 18 minutes per hour. It's something like 50 percent more than the early 1990s, because these companies don't have to worry about competition. Two or three of them own all the stations. They don't have to worry about someone coming in doing eight minutes an hour and stealing away their listeners. So it gets hyper-commercialized.

...Then you add into that conglomerates that Viacom also owns MTV and Paramount and Blockbuster. And what they can do now is they can go to advertisers and say, "Well, you advertise on our radio chain, the CBS Infinity stations we own, and maybe work out a deal with MTV or maybe work out a deal on VH1, or we can do posters in our Blockbuster stores or do something on Showtime or maybe we can have 'Entertainment Tonight', which is a TV show we produce, do something on your stuff, too." It gives them tremendous leverage to do much more commercialism than they could do if they only owned one thing.

And that's the reigning logic behind the entire system. It's based on concentration and hyper-commercialism. And it's done not because these are bad people. These people are no worse or better than their predecessors 50 years ago. It's done because this is what the system is set up to produce. This is the logical thing to do. If you don't do it, you can't compete. You're go to be put out of business. You're out of work. So it's really a systematic issue. It's not of the morality of individuals.
 

Excerpts from interviews with cultural/media analysts discussing the intense relationship between the media marketers and youth culture.

You have written: "MTV dramatically closed the feedback loop between culture and marketing and made it much harder to tell one from the other, or which came first."

I think the important thing about MTV is the way in which it's broken down the notion that there is culture of programming, on the one side, and marketing and advertising, on the other side. And if you reflect on what the gist of MTV is composed of--which are the videos--and ask yourself, "Well, what are videos? Are they culture?" Well, in one sense they are, because they're sort of very avant garde surrealist filmmaking that had you seen them 40 years ago...would have stood out and would have been hailed as sort of artistic break-throughs, and still do delight and astound on a regular basis. So on that level, it is what I would call culture.

But on the other side, these videos are advertisements for music. The record companies pay for them or they're paid for out of the band's budget. They're given to MTV for free and they're put on in order to move product. And so you can't say whether they're culture on the one side, or marketing on the other side.

And I think if you take that as the kind of ground zero for the MTV experience and widen it out, it gets more consistent the further you go. And then if you look at the world we live in today and talk about how people seem to use advertisements--for example, the Budweiser advertisement, the "What'sup" thing. Now you hear a lot of people saying "What'sup" to each other, which they're not saying because they're trying to market anything. They're saying "What's up," but they're referencing that Budweiser commercial because that's something that they have in common and that's their little shared piece of culture in that community moment. So you can't really draw the line clearly the way you used to be able to draw the line clearly.

So what?

So what? It's not that important in terms of how we interact with each other, I don't think. But, it is important in that it represents further inroads of sort of commercialism and consumerism into our community, into our culture, into the space that was not commercialized. It's all of this. MTV culture is commercial culture and to the extent to which kids internalize it and make sort of a fundamental value in their own lives, they're bringing commercialism into their lives. It's reaching them on a fairly profound, and also at a very formative age that those of us who are a little bit older, I think, were a bit more sheltered from. And it follows that I think it's somewhat of a harsher reality because it is all about commerce ultimately. It is all about selling and buying and there's a kind of a harshness to that, as a way of relating to other people.



a media critic and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

We've talked to people who have done research for MTV about kids--it's research done with kids in their own bedrooms.... And there's this sense of this intense feedback loop, where the teen audience seems to sort of suck in everything that's put before them.

I think we're in a really interesting phase culturally where the notion that there's something distinct from commercial culture comes into question when everything's commercialized.... I think it's a troubling notion, the idea that our references are so commercialized now that all our dissidents, all our autonomous voices are getting their cues from MTV on how to revolt. And I think that's a real tension that's going on among young people today.

I think we've seen really for the first time in a decade or two, from my experience among young people--not just college students--a real concern that their entire culture is this commercial laboratory and that being cool is like buying the commercially sanctioned cool clothes.

And it's a real tension that's going on right now and it'll be very interesting to see how it plays itself out, because I think there's a sense that the sort of MTV-VH1 infomercial view of life where everything is sort of part of the sales process and being cool is something you buy and an act you sort of pose in--ultimately that's not a very satisfying or nourishing way to live or to look at the world. And trying to create an alternative I think is imperative for a lot of young people. But it's very hard to do when all the markers around you are commercial.

 

a media critic and the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV

The MTV machine does listen very carefully to children. In rather the same way--if I can put it controversially--as Dr. Goebbels, [Hitler's] ministry of propaganda, listened to the German people. Propagandists have to listen to their audience very, very closely. When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen, you have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they're thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have. Now that's an important distinction.

The MTV machine doesn't listen to the young so that it can make the young happier. It doesn't listen to the young so it can come up with startling new kinds of music, for example. The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell to those kids.

Now the young tend to be presented always and everywhere with what is in a way the most seductive thing there is, and that's a mirror. There's a mirror held up to them all the time. It's the mirror as constructed by advertising and TV, but it's the mirror that tells you that you are all there is to be, or you could be, if you bought what we have to sell.
 

Excerpts from FRONTLINE's interviews with youth marketers and cultural/media analysts.

In the "Dawson's Creek" tv series, kids are adultified kids. How is this to the marketer's advantage to write parents out?

Well, the object of the game for marketers is to appeal to children and teens as decision-makers. Because in the end you want these kids to make choices about what they buy. You want kids to feel that their consumer choices matter.

So what you have to do in making a TV show for children that's going to make them into better consumers is create a universe that doesn't have adults or at least has adults that don't matter. Even the adult in "Buffy" who used to be her advisor, her mentor, is now this sort of little, meek, surrogate parent, but Buffy's in charge. So you need to make kids feel like this stuff matters so that they actually pay attention to the ad, so they pay attention to their consumer choices and don't make them lightly. If kids make their consumer choices lightly, then all this money going to advertising is for naught. If kids take their consumer and consumption choices seriously, then it justifies spending all this money marketing to them.

It's very different from when we were kids. When we were kids, there [also] were no adults in the world of Charlie Brown ... it was more to throw the kids into the existential dilemma because Charles Schultz was kind of an existentialist. When it comes down to it, Charlie Brown is relying more on Linus than on his teachers or his parents to tell him what's going on in this world. He was a kid trying to know sense of reality.

You've still got kids doing that, but now they're being given tools to do it. Instead of it being a little vacant world of little heads going around thinking, it's a world of shampoo and perfume and clothing, where making these purchases can ground you again, can make you feel like you're in charge of what's going on in your life. You don't realize that you're really just choosing between Nike and Airwalk.

 

media critic and the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV

Some might want to argue that the elimination of adults from the scenarios of teen TV is a profoundly realistic development, because, after all, there are no adults hangin' around in teenagers' worlds. So it's really more grown-up in a way, more realistic to write them out of the story.

But I think that while that might be the case in some instances, the fact is that it serves other purposes. I think there's a commercial logic behind that elimination. For one thing, it is profoundly gratifying to feel like you and your friends, your peers, are the center of the universe. There is a kind of implicitly fantastic appeal here that you, in that vicarious way, by watching TV can live in a world where you don't have to be bothered by those figures.

You also live in a world where those figures, when they do come up, are morons. They're insensitive, they're bullies, they don't get it, and so on--which is, of course, often true in life. ... But it suits the purposes of the advertisers and the media managers to concentrate only on the lurid, only on the most colorful kinds of problems. It serves a kind of pornographic function really, even though we often like to tell ourselves that it's simply a reflection of increased realism because there are such problems in the world.



a founding partner in Look-Look, a research company specializing in youth culture

Most parents, they're really time poor. They're both working. They're not there. So they're physically not there to monitor what's going on so the kids have a lot of free time. Economically, they're given a lot of what's called "guilt money" -- "Here's a credit card. Why don't you go online and buy something, because I can't spend time with you?" There's a lot of that going on.

And now [teens] can work parents. It's not just the dad who has a credit card. Mom and Dad both have several credit cards and also when you're working all the time and you're tired, you don't really want to haul to the mall and spend four hours shopping with your kid. Sometimes it's easier to sit down with catalogs that are really specific to the young audience and go, "Oh, you know, isn't that great?" And "We like this and let's order it from the catalog or let's order it online." And so there's lots of credit card spending.

It seems like companies once used to have to go through parents to get to kids. And now it's direct? ...

...If you're talking to an under ten year-old kid, you always have to be concerned that what the parents are thinking and feeling are still a great influence. By the time they reach 14-15-16, parents will tell you themselves "they don't really care what I think." So it's pretty much they're on their own path and they have a really big mind shift and most companies will just go directly to them.
 

Excerpts from interviews with marketers, media executives and cultural critics.

How does corporate America's obvious focus--their deep research into how young people live and think--does that affect these young people?

It's hard to answer that because there's so many factors in people's lives to really evaluate, you know? Does it make kids happier and healthier or does it hurt them?

I think if you look at the American Pediatric Association, which is really young kids, or American Psychological Association, when they do their studies, I think that the evidence is increasingly clear that being awash in sort of a commercial marination as American children and teenagers are today, does not make happier people.

I mean the evidence is clear that we have a generation that's not especially happy and it should be a troubling sign for all of us. And it's a tough area, because there's so many other factors you hesitate about sounding like a vulgar social critic. But, in 1970 some sociologists did surveys of teenagers all over the world to see who are the happiest teenagers? Who feel best about their world their lives? And the three groups of teenagers that were regarded as the happiest teenagers in the world in 1970 were in Israel, Cuba, and Chile. And those were highly non-commercial cultures, all three of them.

But it's interesting to look at Chile. Chile at that time was a very democratic society, very high rate of voter turn-out, the most political society, arguably, in the world, certainly the Third World. They had a coup d'etat, they established a so-called "free market economy", and they consciously tried to de-politicize the people when they reinstated democracy. And now it's a highly commercial culture.

If you go to Chile today, the middle class of Chile is brand name conscious. They don't know anything about politics. And now they've got one of the most depressed teenagers in the group. But it's considered a great victory in The New York Times and in our media because it's a free society now. It's a democracy, but it's also a society where people aren't very happy and it's obsessed with brand names.

I mean that's anecdotal evidence. I would never use that in the court of law to convict. But I think there is considerable evidence that this type of world does not produce happy people. This isn't really what people are meant to be, basically recipients of marketing messages to define themselves by purely commercial terms. And it really should surprise us.

I mean look at every major religion, every theology. I mean none of them would define a good life or a happy person on the basis of something as meaningless as their possessions, what they own, or how many they own more than someone else, or they have a different brand name.

So what is the emotional-spiritual-ethical effect of having all of your authentic cultural artifacts sucked up in to this machine?

Well, it really promotes the sort of world in which you don't think anything matters, unless it serves your material gain. Why be honest? Why have integrity? Why care about other people? That's for chumps. It's all about taking care of number one. The dominant institutions in society, the values they send out is, "We're just here to make money off of you. We're just here to take advantage of you." The message that goes out to everyone in that system is, "Yeah, everyone should be everyone for themself. Just take care of number one. Why should I care about that other person, you know? What's in it for me?"

And that's not a healthy environment for society. People are not islands. We're social creatures. When we stop caring about each other, we just think what happens to us is all that matters, ah, it creates very unhappy people.

For the parents and teens then, what are the first steps towards eradicating that?

The first steps would be hard to say. I mean ultimately I think we have to change the nature of the system. When you talk about cable television, when you talk about over-the-air television, this is public property. These companies that rule it are there because they've got monopoly licenses from the government either to have cable systems or access to channels on a air waves. So the public has a right to intervene there and say, "These are the terms we want."

For example, in Sweden they allow no advertising to children under 12 as the condition of broadcasting. You can't advertise there to children under 12. The public has a right to do that here. We have a right to set real limits on the amount of advertising and commercialism that reach people under 18....

So I think we have to think big and really get to the root of the problem. Just eliminate this hyper-commercialism aimed at children, at teenagers, and I think that's the direction we need to go in. But that seems probably far off, maybe even impossible, given the strength and power of these media companies.

But there are things you can do at the local level. You can go to your school board, and the same companies that are hyper-commercializing MTV are interested in commercializing your schools. Try to keep advertising out of your schools. Those things that are non-commercial, like public television, try to limit the advertising and commercialism in public media that are supposed to be ad-free. Keep those as a sector, as an island of non-commercial entertainment, news, and journalism in our culture.

Likewise, you can do things like insist that your schools do media literacy, and real media literacy. There's two types of media literacy. There's the type that actually teaches you how the system works, what advertisers are trying to do, understand it to be a critical participant. Then there's the type that the media companies want to do, which is basically to train you to like certain types of shows, but not question the system.

Get real media literacy done by honest intellectuals and academics, not by PR people for the media companies and the ad industry. That can help, too. Make people aware of what to do.... That's why something like media literacy in schools can be so important, to make kids aware at a very early age it isn't natural, it wasn't always like this. Think of it critically. Someone's doing it 'cause they benefit by it. This is what they're trying to do to you. So you can arm yourself and understand the nature of the relationship early on.


a writer for The New Yorker and author of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing--The Marketing of Culture

I think that we all sort of still crave the kind of quiet, non-commercial space in our lives. We treasure them and whether we're aware of it as adults or whether we just sort of do it spontaneously as kids, I think that there the still those distinctions made in everyone's life that this is all part of MTV and that this is not.

I think if you sort of think about the progress of MTV through the years, it's been to gradually push that boundary so that the quiet, sort of non-commercial space is shrunk more and more and now I think kids social life is made up of commercial culture to a very large degree, whether it's, "Oh, I see you're wearing Tommy Hilfiger," and "Why are you doing that and not wearing, you know, Polo?" Or, you know, "Did you see the Limp Bizkit ad video on MTV?"

I mean these are the reference points. It's no longer, you know, "Do you want to go down and see if we can see some turtles at the lake?" I think that those kinds of experiences are discouraged partly because they're not as exciting and fun and not as many people engage in them, and also because you don't seen them on MTV.

And so when we talk about the sort of feedback loops, I mean there it's very clear people are seeing what they think of as life on MTV and then they're going out and trying to live that sort of life, which would be a kind of a cultural non-commercial version of that. But because what MTV shows you is very limited in terms of the choices that you can make, the life that you try to lead based on MTV becomes very sterile and homogenous and boring. And then all you have to do is watch more MTV and it's sort of like the loop gets tighter and tighter....

It becomes an enclosure.

It does seem very suffocating and although MTV does represent... you do see people of different races together and that's good. But its versions of African American and white life are so sort of narrowly constrained in terms of what MTV chooses to show you about those lives that in a way it'snot as diverse as it seems. It seems like it's a picture of diversity, but the reality of it is fairly kind of homogenous.

...What's the "marketer within"?

The "marketer within" was a core concept for me when I was writing No Brow . I think it's a really, really important distinction and it's a generational distinction and I feel like I'm slightly on the far side of it.

On that side, you have people who see marketing as an essentially external manipulative force that's trying to get you to do something that you wouldn't ordinarily do. It's the voice of the pitch men. It's the blaring radio hawker. It's the billboards that you're surrounded by and you don't really feel that is part of your folk culture. You feel that what's authentic and what's true to you is not that. You're not quite sure maybe what it is, but it's not that.

Then on the other side of that, you have a group of people who grew up mainly through television absorbing a marketing voice, absorbing that pitch man's voice almost before they knew language. I mean I think that there's been studies done that show that two year-olds can recognize the difference in volume and tone of the commercial voice on television and know it intimately in a way that they don't respond to the editorial voice.

And you sort of internalize that voice so that marketing no longer seems like an alien sort of external manipulative force, but, rather, it's just part of your world. It's part of something that goes on inside you and outside you and the marketer within is the artist who sort of realizes that he doesn't need to use some sort of external sort of advertising to sell his product or his art, that his art can be made out of that voice, that voice that's somewhere sort of still rattling around, the voice of the pitch man, and it doesn't necessarily need to sort of diminish the art -- it doesn't necessarily sort of need to be something that's sort of grafted onto the art. That it becomes sort of part of the art and that the artist of the future will make their art with that voice, you know, in mind.

Is something lost?

Well, I think something's lost because I sort of stand on the other side of that commercial divide and I find it very hard to accept that someone can make art with the notion of selling it--intimately sort of involved with the creation of it and not make some sort of diminished form of art. But, see, I am willing to accept that that is perhaps an old-fashioned notion and that there is another way of looking at art that comes from a another kind of relationship to marketing that sees marketing as a valid form and as an integral part of the making of art.

And it is true that almost every artist that makes something wants people to experience it and -- and many of them actually want to make money on it, too. So we can't sort of say that there are all these sort of pure artists that never thought about it and then there are all these sort of, you know, compromised artists that think about it all the time.

I think that it's a world in which that distinction is kind of broken down and, you know, we'll see more marketers within.



head of programming for MTV

What you find is a surprising resourcefulness to be able to process. Because this is not a phenomena that hit them when they were 15, it's been the reality since they were 5. On the other hand you see--I don't want to say resentment of it--but there is sometimes an undercurrent that says, "I'm 13. Do I really need to be running around with my Palm Pilot worrying about all of these things I hear about on Dawson's Creek?" ...

I can't help but be worried that we are throwing so much at young adults so fast. And that there is no amount of preparation or education or even love that you could give a child to be ready. That said, I think I'm just a person who's getting older talking, because my parents would have undoubtedly said the same thing about the world I grew up in. And young adults don't really see it that way. They don't express particular confusion over it. They don't express that they're being overwhelmed by it.

 

a founding partner in Look-Look, a research company specializing in youth culture

How does this generation feel about being sold to?

It's a mixed bag on that actually....You can't say, "Oh, they hate being sold to and they hate all marketing." That's not true. That's one perspective on it. They're very sophisticated consumers, meaning they know what's being marketed. They know all about marketing. They were raised with deconstructing advertising since they were little kids.

And so you have to assume that they're very sophisticated and so you can't trick them ever. What you want to do is create some sort of emotional connection with them where they are interested and they respect and you have a dialogue going on. And what they get incensed about is if there's not that level of respect. If they're treated like, "You're just a stupid consumer and we're gonna not bother to learn about your culture but we're gonna market to you in a way that is insulting," then they get upset about that. ...It's a very superficial understanding of the culture. It is disrespectful.

... The other thing, too, that's been interesting that we have seen happen with trend-setters [is] that we see them actually researching what companies are about. Finding out what type of like managing policies they have or how they manufacture their products and really finding out like the history and all the specifics. Do they use [child labor?]... Are they doing stuff to mess up the environment? These are all that concerns for young people now. They're all very aware of what's happening around the world, because they look up these things on the Internet.



a media critic and the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV

If you watch Saturday morning kids' TV, you can see it in programming that is unrelievedly frantic, hyped up, hysterical, in its own way quite violent and pervasively commercial. It's all about selling, and this, I think, is the primary reason why there is something of a cultural crisis involving children. It is not because there are fugitives from the '60s generation who are in control of the media. It's not a communist plot. It's not because bad people are involved in those industries. It's because of the inordinate influence of commercial logic and the commercial imperative overall.

Now I think we have to appreciate the enormous difference between life for young people and life for young people a few decades back. Because now kids grow up in a universe that is utterly suffused with this kind of commercial propaganda. And by that, I mean not only the ads per se, but the shows that sell the ads.

What this system does is it closely studies the young, keeps them under very tight surveillance to figure out what will push their buttons. Then it takes that and blares it back at them relentlessly and everywhere, because these are interests with a tremendous amount of power and technological sophistication. And these are kids who are, to an unprecedented extent, hooked in through their gimmicks, their toys, their computers and so on. So there's really very little space that these giant interests can't completely fill up with this kind of message.

The bombardment is amazing. It's hard, therefore, to keep that kind of crucial distance. It's hard to be critical. It's hard to think about what might be going on at the top, especially if the media doesn't tell you. It's hard to figure out who you are and what you really want. It's hard to make your own music because that thing is always there listening, watching, taking notes, and packaging something so that it can sell you more stuff.

Kids feel frightened and lonely today. It's because they are encouraged to feel that way. Advertising has always sold anxiety and it certainly sells anxiety to the young. It's always telling them that they are not thin enough, they're not pretty enough, they don't have the right friends, or they have no friends, they're creeps, they're losers unless they're cool. But I don't think anybody deep down really feels cool enough ever. That's the nature of advertising, to keep you hungering for more of the stuff that's supposed to finally put you there, but never does.

It's so thoroughly about being on display. It's about how you look. We all imagine a million cameras facing us and recording everything. There's this acute self-consciousness that constitutes a tremendous psychological burden because you can never really feel like you're alone with yourself. You can never really feel like someone's not overhearing what you're thinking. ... Even in the deepest privacy of your own mind you'll often find a team them from some advertising agency, you know. That's the most criminal aspect of this whole system -- it seems to have colonized or tries to colonize the very consciousness of its young subjects.

A Related Reading: an excerpt from the book NoLogo which examines other aspects of marketing to teens.
 

Media executives and cultural critics discuss the changed culture in which kids are growing up today, and the forces influencing this change.

There's been a striking edge to some of your programs. Was there a need to make programming pop to get the attention of the kids? Was that a conscious thing to have to do?

The programming absolutely had to pop. And the word "edge," while it's loaded with implications, has always been an important part of the brand promise of MTV. And certainly things like "Celebrity Death Match" and Tom Green and some of the other things that we've done have received due attention as edgy programming.

One thing we've tried not to do is to shock for shock's sake. There are definitely shows that are doing that now, and I don't have to name them for you to figure out what they are. That's not the right brand promise for MTV, and I don't think it's right exactly for this demo. ...

At MTV we are absolutely in a constant internal discussion about our role in the media. ... It is a non-stop discussion, because we take the responsibility very seriously to not put dangerous things out there. At the same time, the reason the audience trusts us in the first place is because we don't censor. We present their art in the most honest way. . . . We won't cross violence lines. We won't cross certain language lines. But otherwise, we will let the art express itself as purely as possible....

I have to ask you about..."Undressed." What is the genesis of that show, and what was the idea there?

The genesis of "Undressed" is interesting. We had a show four years ago called "Singled Out," which was a very hot show. And it ran its course. We said, "We have to be talking to our audience about relationships. Somehow we have to have that reflected on our air." We'd like to do it in a way that isn't "Singled Out" and isn't some sort of cheesy game show that was great in its day, but let's move on.

And at about the same time, Roland Joffé came in and pitched the show "Undressed." And his pitch was really interesting, because he is fascinated by these small conversational moments that ultimately really say volumes about a relationship.

His pitch was that you don't get honest until you get home at night and you start to get in bed. Once you . . . get undressed--which was his metaphor--that's when you start to get real.

. . . When we saw "Undressed," we realized that he went to a place that was deadly honest and that dealt with things like you would deal with if you were 21 years old. Most of the situations are organically provided by writers who were in that demo, situations that they either lived or friends had lived.

So we made the decision simply to put it on at 11:00 because it was perhaps racier than we originally envisioned. At the same time, that was the artistic vision. It was appropriate for after 11. And it's certainly true to the reality of what it's like to navigate sex and dating for this audience today.

So your assumption is that kids are not watching this.

That's our assumption, yes.

 

a media critic and the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV

In a thoroughly commercialized environment, there is very little incentive to be careful of the sensibilities of particular segments of the audience.

Thirty years ago, a certain kind of commercial approach to children would have been unthinkable. Thirty years ago, children's TV programs were, by our standards, largely laughable in how slow and elementary and often sentimental they were. People marvel at the miracle that is Mr. Rogers, because he is such an unusual kind of figure in today's media world. Once the commercial logic takes over, children are fair game along with everybody else.

I can give you a very dramatic example from the world of book publishing. Bantam Books was the second mass market paperback company to be formed in the United States just after World War II. And it was conceived deliberately with large masses of young readers in mind. Books like The Grapes of Wrath, Shakespeare's Greatest Comedies, Jane Eyre, sold for 25 cents with the aim of making sure that young people who weren't rich could get hold of really good books. And it did very well.

Well, by now Bantam Books is part of the Bertelsmann empire, which is the largest book publisher in the world, a commercial entity based in Germany that dominates the American publishing landscape. A couple of years ago, Bantam came out with the Barfarama series for young male readers 12 to 15 with titles like Dog-Doo Afternoon and The Great Puke-Off. These are all brainlessly scatological books that were packaged just to make a buck. Now some of the people who do them claim, "Oh, at least we're getting young people reading." That's a very disingenuous thing to say. This is going deliberately and systematically for the lowest common denominator, and the logic there is purely commercial. It has nothing to do with literary quality or with introducing the joys of reading to the young.

The same kind of callousness, the same kind thoughtlessness, the same disregard for propriety and the same uninterest in what kids really need and like dominates throughout the culture industries. If you watch Saturday morning kids' TV, you can see it in programming that is unrelievedly frantic, hyped-up, hysterical, and, in its own way, quite violent and pervasively commercial. It's all about selling, and this, I think, is the primary reason why there is something of a crisis nowadays, a cultural crisis involving children. It is not because there are fugitives from the 1960s generation who are in control of the media. It's not a communist plot. It's not because bad people are involved in those industries. It's because of the inordinate influence of commercial logic and the commercial imperative overall.

... How does the concentration in a few companies fuel a kind of hypercommercialism and lowered standards?

When you've got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take, they are going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down. They're not going to be too nice about what they choose to do. They'll go directly for the please center. They're going to try to get you watching and buying right away, and what this means is that they are going to do as much trash as they can, because that will grab people.

The word "trash" is old-fashioned, because this is a state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated venture that we're talking about. They're using all the most brilliant means of measurement and surveillance to figure out what we're all about. They focus group everything in a million ways. So we have a highly sophisticated enterprise that's engaged in a kind of regressive project. They're trying to sell as much junk as they can by appealing to the worst in all of us, but they do it some extremely civilized means.



a media critic and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

.... I think music gets better and culture gets better when people engage socially and politically. The two go hand in hand. So I think if there's a broadening of interest in social and political issues among people, the music, even within the crummy commercial system, will get better, if you understand the relationship. There are other factors besides just EMI's research and marketing department that influence the nature of music.

When those factors are systematically removed by corporations, do you find that music and the sentiment around it coarsens?

You mean when it's more commercialized? I'm not a great culture theorist. I'm not even a bad cultural theorist. I'm not really a cultural theorist. So I'd be careful to give the answer to this, but my hunch--as sort of a political economist assessing these industries--if, in fact, the political critique of music is zapped out, the people want controversy in their lives. They want that sense of struggle and conflict. Then you replace it with sort of the Howard Stern-Eminem stuff, a lot of misogyny, a lot of violence, which gives the illusion of conflict and tension and excitement without the real thing. It's just picking on the weakest members of society. That seems very controversial, and it's commercially viable, but it's not the real thing.



Iovine is co-chairman of Interscope Records. His label includes cutting edge gansta rap and rage music stars such as Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and Eminem.

If I understand you correctly, you respect the kids' culture. You do try to understand it, but you don't try to moralize about it from the adult perspective. You sort of accept it and try to get to the bottom of it and service it as a record company.

We do a lot of things here. And I do a lot of things personally. There's just no way to stop a movement in popular culture. It's going to happen, with or without you. There's absolutely no way to stop that train.

Now, having said that, do I think that everything is for kids of all ages? Absolutely not. I don't believe that. I think that we need parental supervision. I think people should watch their kids. I think they should watch what they eat, watch what they drink, watch what they watch on TV, watch what they listen to--absolutely. People that work in stores or in theaters should pay attention to parental advisories and to ratings. Absolutely. They should pay attention. They should follow what the rules are. And if someone doesn't like the rules, they should change the rules. They should raise the bar or lower the bar, whatever suits their fancy.

... You're saying the culture can't raise your kids. . . .

It doesn't try to. Your kids are creating the culture, actually. It's not the other way around. The question you pose is a very interesting question, because I don't know the answer. I don't think anyone knows the answer. ...

One man's improper lyrics are other man's political message.

Or another man's sense of humor . . .

 

a writer for The New Yorker and author of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing--The Marketing of Culture

The traditional role of the tastemaker was, in part, in keeping a certain level of proprietary in place in terms of the television that everybody watched. We think of the Walter Cronkites ... people who represent as much tact and politesse and decorum and a gentility that seems very much a part of a different age than the age we live in today.

I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too. I do think that is something that's really changed in our world today--that so-called tastemakers or programming executives are not using those standards anymore in deciding what to put on the air. It's not important anymore to reinforce some notion of propriety for an MTV audience. I think if you asked them, they would say, "We don't think it's important at all." They would say, "We just think it's important for the family to do that, and it's not our job."

That is often the argument that, for example, Eminem makes, when he's asked how can he put this level of coarseness into his music. His argument is, "Well, it's up to the parents to see to that. If they don't want their children to watch me or listen to me, then they should not have the television set on."

But in reality, that's not possible for a lot of families, because they have one television set. It's in the central area. It's on because they want to watch the news or they want to watch the latest election count or the latest compelling docudrama. And so the kids want to watch MTV. How can the parents say, "Well, we want to watch Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton," and maintain that that's somehow a level of decency and propriety that's much higher than what the kids are watching on MTV? It's hard to make that argument. So it's probably not just MTV that this . . . promotes this coarseness. It's part of the world of today. It's just that the barriers tend to not be there anymore.

Is there something about the hegemony of today's marketplace that leads to that coarsening?

In a crowded marketplace, where everyone is trying to be heard and where there's an amazing number of choices, the loudest, coarsest, most shocking voice does tend to be the one that at least grabs your attention for a moment. And since moments are the currency within which modern media trade, that's all that really matters.

Now that we have the web, where there are plenty of websites like "darefordollars.com," where you can pay someone to do something really gross, like cover themselves with dogshit. It puts together the audience with the people that are willing to do that. And so there you see something beyond MTV. . . . I don't think it's entirely driven by the needs of programmers to get people's attention.

I also think that it's part of the reality TV, the aesthetics of reality that people want to hear--people speaking the way they speak on the street, or they want to watch sports and they want to hear what the guys actually say in the huddle, or they want to hear rappers rapping how they really rap and not how they rap for TV. A lot of people are fed up with the attempt to filter out by tastemakers and they say, "Just give me the real stuff. Give me what the real language is, and I'll be the one that decides whether it's coarse or not coarse." So that's another element in that, too.

. . . I find Eminem to be remarkably gifted, verbally. I'd almost call him a poet, but like a verbal performer. As a writer, I find the way he uses language and rhythm to be very inspiring. But at the same time, the content of his music, of his words, is extremely troubling. And people my age wrestle with that. How can you like the performer if you find the message to be so disagreeable?

And then I think to myself, well, maybe this is another difference between people our age and younger people. They do grow up in this environment saturated with these angry messages, many of which are concocted for marketing reasons alone. They have a radar and an ability to make a distinction between the performer and his style, and the words and their meaning. And so they can like the one without necessarily buying into the other. Or they can even recognize when the other is playing a game with them. Eminem's lyrics are so over the top that perhaps one can see him as parodying the violent content of a number of gangsta lyrics. But then other adults will say, "Oh, but you're being a Pollyanna about this. You can't for a moment allow people like Eminem to be an influence on our kids. We have to keep this out."

I do think that kids have developed a more sophisticated ability to filter out some of the anger and rage and see it from what it is, which is just manipulative or even a joke. They can take what's good about the music, and they do that much more efficiently than we do.

Another thing that's different about today is that there are so many more channels for music and for culture and art than there used to be, but there's not necessarily that much more talent. Talent, rare talent, is a constant from age to age, and there just aren't that many people who are truly gifted.

But today we have much more space to fill up with the not-so-gifted people than we did before. So you, as an audience, become the filter that the technology and media used to provide, just in terms of having a limited number of channels. Now you have a massive number of channels and, therefore, you have to have content on all of them. So you have stuff that's really total dreck and is pure marketing, and then you have stuff that actually does have a kernel of some artistic integrity inside it. But it's all smushed together and thrown at you, and it's up to you to make the choice. And that's different from the way it used to be.