Media Literacy, Regulations Needed to Mitigate Effects of Advertising on Children

Research led by Erica Weintraub Austin, professor and interim director of the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University, is cited in the American Association of Pediatrics’ (AAP) policy statement “Children, Adolescents and Advertising.” The new policy statement, published in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics, calls for more media education and restrictions to ads to mitigate some of advertising’s negative effects on children.

Austin has conducted research that suggests that ads increase cigarette and alcohol use among young consumers and has also worked to understand how media literacy can help children dissect and understand media and advertising.

“Media education needs to happen at all levels and at all ages,” she said. “Parents who grew up with television often don’t realize how influenced by the media they are. This makes them both a focus for media education and an important source for media education. Parents and teachers are very receptive to the need for media education.”

Coinciding with the AAP publication about advertising and youth, Austin’s article “Why Advertisers and Researchers Should Focus on Media Literacy to Respond to the Effects of Alcohol Advertising on Youth” appears this month in the International Journal of Advertising, along with an article from Stacey Hust, a WSU assistant professor.

In her article, Austin says that 75 percent of the beverage ads seen by adolescents promote alcohol and that parents can not afford to wait for regulations to control the amount of children’s  exposure to the media without helping them with media literacy. “Researchers and educators are finding that the skills needed to use media messages effectively in personal decision making must be learned and can be taught…children who receive media literacy lessons can master these skills sooner,” she wrote in the journal article.

She advises to use media literacy not as a tool to demonize media, but as a way to teach how to use them. “The important thing is to teach that media are tools, not toys, and like any other tool need to be used with care,” Austin said. “As with other tools, we don’t want to teach that the media are bad. The media are extremely useful, essential tools. They can be used for good or for ill, and sometimes they can have both beneficial and problematic effects at the same time.”

Children up to eight years old can’t tell the difference between content in a commercial and a program, which makes them easy targets for advertisers. “They [children] can ‘label’ an ad but don’t really understand that the intent of an ad is to persuade and not to inform. In other words, the advertiser might not have the child’s best interests in mind.”

The AAP calls in its statement for measures such as limiting junk-food advertising on children programming, banning tobacco ads from all media and restricting alcohol advertising to product only, without attractive cartoon characters or women. The AAP’s suggestion for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission or Congress “relates to the responsibility of using public airwaves in the public interest and -within reason- is perfectly legitimate,” Austin said.

Although some might label the efforts to control advertising targeting children as a free-speech issue, Austin does not agree. “Most of their recommendations are based on advocacy and voluntary cooperation. Applying such pressure is part of living in a democracy and a capitalist economy.”

Austin can be reached at eaustin@wsu.edu or (509) 335-8535.