ABSTRACT
Five decades ago, at the beginning of the introduction of television in the United States in 1946, two networks offered a total of 11 hours of programming weekly over a handful of outlets to about 10,000 households. Four years later, four networks-the familiar American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS), and National Broadcasting Company (NBC), as well as the short-lived DuMont Television Network (DTN)—were broadcasting 90 hours over about 100 stations to about 10.5 million households. Today, broadcast outlets typically exceed 18 hours of programming, daily, cable networks offer 24-hour services, the three major networks have been joined by a fourth (FOX) and several neophytes, and independent stations are plentiful. (p. 12)
The Annenberg Public Policy Center (1997) reported in a survey of more than 1,000 parents and 300 of their 10-to 17-year-old children the following: (a) nearly 80% of the households with children have an average of 2.5 working television sets per household; (b) two in five (40.7%) of the children have television sets in their bedrooms; (c) the VCR is the most common media delivery system in the homes with televisions; and (d) only half the households surveyed reported having a subscription to a daily newspaper, but nearly two thirds have video game equipment. Of the nine in-home activities measured, after sleeping (8.8 hours), watching television was the most common use of time by children, according to their parents. Children 2 through 17 spend on average 2.1 hours in front of the television, more than doing schoolwork (1.3 hours), reading a book (.99 hours), using the home computer (.87 hours), playing video games such as Sega or Nintendo (.75 hours), or reading a magazine or newspaper (.38 hours). Children also spend an average of 1.1 hours per day in front of their sets watching videotapes. Later findings suggest that U.S. homes and children continue to have an increasingly diverse media environment. Children between the ages of 2 and 7 are already using media for 3.5 hours each day (Kubey & Donovan, 2001). Nevertheless, even as the use of nontelevision electronic media is increasing, television has remained the dominant medium in the home (Woolf, 1999).
