ABSTRACT
Concerns about the social effects of media on children and youth are echoed everywhere, and this shared worry can only accelerate as the marketplace for media products becomes ever more global and homogenized across national boundaries. Critics complain that young people spend too much time with media products that are too violent, commercialized and of inappropriate quality. But proponents of television, as well as champions of some of the newer interactive technologies such as video and computer, argue that such media enhance children's education. In both Europe and the United States, children are heavy users of television and, increasingly, of all television programs accessed via the television set. Since that 1990 study, there is now more competition in production of children's television and more program diversity in the United States. Much of this has been prompted by passage of the Children's Television Act of 1990, intended to increase the amount of educational and informational broadcast television programming available to children.
