[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 136 (Monday, October 24, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2153-E2154]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 STATEMENT OF INTRODUCTION: CHILDREN AND MEDIA RESEARCH ADVANCEMENT ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. EDWARD J. MARKEY

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Monday, October 24, 2005

  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce, along with 
Representatives Hart, Baca and Ford, the Children and Media Research 
Advancement Act, or CAMRA Act.
  This bill has also been introduced in the Senate by Senators 
Lieberman, Brownback, Clinton, Santorum, and Durbin.
  Our children live in the information age, and our country has one of 
the most powerful and sophisticated information technology systems in 
the world. While this system entertains them, it is not always harmless 
entertainment. Media have the potential to facilitate the healthy 
growth of our children. They also have the potential to harm. We have a 
stake in finding out exactly what that role is. We have a 
responsibility to take action. Access to the knowledge that we need for 
informed decision-making requires us to make an investment: An 
investment in research, an investment in and for our children, an 
investment in our collective future. The benefits to our youth and our 
Nation's families are immeasurable.
  In order to ensure that we are doing our very best for our children, 
the behavioral and health recommendations and public policy decisions 
we make should be based on objective behavioral, social, and scientific 
research. Yet no Federal research agency has responsibility for 
overseeing and setting a coherent media research agenda that can guide 
these policy decisions. Instead, Federal agencies fund media research 
in a piecemeal fashion, resulting in a patch work quilt of findings. We 
can do better than that.
  The bill we are introducing today would remedy this problem. The 
CAMRA Act will provide an overarching view of media effects by 
establishing a program devoted to Children and Media within the Centers 
for Disease Control and Prevention. This program of research, to be 
vetted by the National Academy of Sciences, will fund and energize a 
coherent program of research that illuminates the role of media in 
children's cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and behavioral 
development. The research will cover all forms of electronic media, 
including television, movies, DVDs, interactive video games, cell 
phones, and the Internet, and will encourage research involving 
children of all ages--even babies and toddlers. The bill also calls for 
a report to Congress about the effectiveness of this research program 
in filling this void in our knowledge base. In order to accomplish 
these goals, we are authorizing $90 million dollars to be phased in 
gradually across the next 5 years. The cost to our budget is minimal 
and can well result in significant savings in other budget areas.
  This legislation has strong support among researchers and children's 
advocates. Ted Lempert, President of Children Now, a national nonprofit 
organization which for years has focused on the need for policymakers 
to keep pace with the rising influence of media on children, writes: 
``CAMRA's establishment of a program on children and the media within 
the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will provide invaluable 
insight into the role and impact of electronic media on the children's 
development. Kids are spending more time with media than on any other 
activity except for sleeping, yet there are sizeable gaps in what we 
know about the role media play in children's cognitive, physical and 
behavioral development.''

  Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a leading non-
partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting a healthy 
media environment for children, supports CAMRA, saying ``We 
enthusiastically endorse the funding of coherent research which will 
better illuminate the role of media in children's cognitive, social, 
emotional, physical and behavioral development. In an increasingly 
digital world where convergence of technologies provides entertainment, 
information and interactive possibilities to consumers, there are 
discernable knowledge gaps about the role of media on children's 
healthy development.''
  Michael Rich, Director of the Center on Media and Child Health at 
Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, also wrote 
the following in support this bill: ``As a caring society we assess and 
respond to the quality of the air children breathe, the water they 
drink, and the food they consume. You and your co-sponsors are to be 
commended and supported for your foresight and leadership in directing 
the National Institutes of Health to investigate what we are feeding 
our children's minds and how that is likely to affect their health and 
development, now and in the future.''
  From the cradle to the grave, our children now live and develop in a 
world of media--a world that is increasingly digital, and a world where 
access is at their fingertips. This emerging digital world is well 
known to our children, but its effects on their development are not 
well understood. Young people today are spending an average of 6\1/2\ 
hours with media each day. For those who are under age 6, 2 hours of 
exposure to screen media each day is common, even for those who are 
under age 2. That is about as much time as children under age 6 spend 
playing outdoors, and it is much more time than they spend reading or 
being read to by their parents. How does this investment of time affect 
children's physical development, their cognitive development, or their 
moral values? Unfortunately, we still have very limited information 
about how media, particularly the newer interactive media, affect 
children's development. Why? We have not charged any Federal agency 
with ensuring an ongoing funding base to establish a coherent research 
agenda about the impact of media on children's lives. This lack of a 
coordinated government-sponsored effort to understand the effects of 
media on children's development is truly an oversight on our part, as 
the potential payoffs for this kind of knowledge are enormous.
  Consider our current national health crisis of childhood obesity. The 
number of U.S. children and teenagers who are overweight has more than 
tripled from the 1960's through 2002. We think that media exposure is 
partly the cause of this epidemic. Is it? Is time spent viewing screens 
and its accompanying sedentary lifestyle contributing to childhood and 
adolescent obesity? Or is the constant bombardment of advertisements 
for sugar-coated cereals, snack foods, and candy that pervade 
children's television advertisements the culprit? How do the newer 
online forms of ``stealth marketing'', such as advergaming where food 
products are embedded in computer games, affect children's and 
adolescents' eating patterns? Cell phones are one of the latest 
emerging high-tech gadgets to own,

[[Page E2154]]

and cell phone/iPod combination devices are now on the market. What 
will happen when pop-up advertisements begin to appear on children's 
cell phones that specifically target them for the junk food that they 
like best at a place where that food is easily obtainable? The answer 
to the obesity and media question is complex. A committee at the 
National Academy of Sciences is currently charged with studying the 
link between media advertising and childhood obesity. Will the National 
Academy of Sciences panel have the data they need to answer this 
important question? A definitive answer has the potential to save a 
considerable amount of money in other areas of our budget. For example, 
child health care costs that are linked to childhood obesity issues 
could be reduced by understanding and altering media diets.

  After two adolescent boys shot and killed some of their teachers, 
classmates, and then turned their guns on themselves at Columbine High 
School, we asked ourselves if media played some role in this tragedy. 
Did these boys learn to kill in part from playing first-person shooter 
video games like Doom where they acted as a killer? Were they 
rehearsing criminal activities when playing this game? There is rising 
concern about extremely violent video games. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger 
signed a bill October 7 that will prohibit the sale of ``ultraviolent'' 
video games to children under 18 without parental approval. In August, 
the American Psychological Association passed a resolution calling for 
less violence in computer and video games sold to children, citing 
research suggesting that the games contribute to aggressive behavior. 
The Federal Trade Commission reports that 40 percent of children under 
18 play mature-rated video games. A person who plays mature-rated video 
games at least 40 minutes per day views 5,400 incidents of aggression 
per month, according to the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic 
Media. With so many of our children immersed in an electronic 
environment saturated with violent images, we have cause for serious 
concern.
  In the violence and media area, Congress passed legislation so that 
research was conducted about the relationship between media violence 
and childhood aggression, and as a result, we know more. Even though 
much of this database is older and involves the link between exposure 
to violent television programs and childhood aggression, some answers 
were forthcoming about how the Columbine tragedy could have taken 
place. Even so, there is still a considerable amount of speculation 
about the more complex questions. Why did these particular boys, for 
example, pull the trigger in real life while others who played Doom 
confine their aggressive acts to the gaming context? We need to be able 
to answer questions about which children under what circumstances will 
translate game playing into reallife lethal actions. Investing in media 
research could potentially reduce our budgets associated with 
adolescent crime and delinquency as well as reduce real-life human 
misery and suffering.
  Many of us believe that our children are becoming increasingly 
materialistic. Does exposure to commercial advertising and the ``good 
life'' experienced by media characters partly explain materialistic 
attitudes? We're not sure. Why then are we exposing children to heavy 
doses of advertisements in many of our nation's schools through 
Channel1 Network where ``free'' television sets to schools are provided 
in exchange for a small fee: unfettered access to advertise to children 
during school time? As streaming video programming proliferates on 
computers, cell phones and personal digital assistants, advertisers 
have more avenues to reach our children and bombard them with pro-
consumption messages. As technology advances and becomes increasingly 
widespread among younger children, parents are justifiably concerned 
about losing control over the messages their children receive. Recent 
research using brain-mapping techniques finds that an adult who sees 
images of desired products demonstrates patterns of brain activation 
that are typically associated with reaching out with a hand. How does 
repeatedly seeing attractive products affect our children and their 
developing brains? What will happen when our children will be able to 
click on their television screen and go directly to sites that 
advertise the products that they see in their favorite programs? Or use 
their cell phone/iPod to download music or pay for products that they 
want immediately? Why should they wait? Why should they work for long-
term goals? Exactly what kind of values are we cultivating in our 
children, and what role does exposure to media content play in the 
development of those values?
  A research report linked very early television viewing with later 
symptoms that are common in children who have attention deficit 
disorders. However, we don't know the direction of the relationship. 
Does television viewing cause attention deficits, or do children who 
have attention deficits find television viewing experiences more 
engaging than children who don't have attention problems? Or do parents 
whose children have difficulty sustaining attention let them watch more 
television to encourage more sitting and less hyperactive behavior? How 
will Internet experiences, particularly those where children move 
rapidly across different windows, influence attention patterns and 
attention problems? Once again, we don't know the answer. If early 
television exposure does disrupt the development of children's 
attention patterns, resulting in their placement in special education 
programs, actions taken to reduce screen exposure during the early 
years could lead to subsequent reductions in children's need for 
special education classes, thereby saving money while fostering 
children's development in positive ways.
  We want no child left behind in the 21st century. Many of us believe 
that time spent with computers is good for our children, teaching them 
the skills that they will need for success in the 21st century. Are we 
right? How is time spent with computers different from time spent with 
television? Or time spent with books? What are the underlying 
mechanisms that facilitate or disrupt children's learning from these 
varying media? Can academic development be fostered by the use of 
interactive online programs designed to teach as they entertain? In the 
first 6 years of life, Caucasian more so than African American or 
Latino children have Internet access from their homes. Can our newer 
interactive media help ensure that no child is left behind, or will 
disparities in access result in leaving some behind and not others?
  The questions about how media affect the development of our children 
are clearly important, abundant, and complex. Unfortunately, the 
answers to these questions are in short supply. Such gaps in our 
knowledge base limit our ability to make informed decisions about media 
policy.
  We know that media are important. Over the years, we have held 
numerous hearings in these chambers about how exposure to media 
violence affects childhood aggression. We passed legislation to 
maximize the documented benefits of exposure to educational media, such 
as the Children's Television Act which requires broadcasters to provide 
educational and informational television programs for children. Can we 
foster children's moral values when they are exposed to prosocial 
programs that foster helping, sharing, and cooperating like those that 
have come into being as a result of the Children's Television Act?
  We acted to protect our children from unfair commercial practices by 
passing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act which provides 
safeguards from exploitation for our youth as they explore the 
Internet, a popular pastime for them. Yet the Internet has provided new 
ways to reach children with marketing that we barely know is taking 
place, making our ability to protect our children all the more 
difficult. We worry about our children's inadvertent exposure to online 
pornography--about how that kind of exposure may undermine their moral 
values and standards of decency. In these halls of Congress, we acted 
to protect our children by passing the Communications Decency Act, the 
Child Online Protection Act, and the Children's Internet Protection Act 
to shield children from exposure to sexually-explicit online content 
that is deemed harmful to minors. While we all agree that we need to 
protect our children from online pornography, we know very little about 
how to address even the most practical of questions such as how to 
prevent children from falling prey to adult strangers who approach them 
online. There are so many areas in which our understanding is 
preliminary at best, particularly in those areas that involve the 
effects of our newer digital media.
  By passing the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, we can 
advance knowledge and enhance the constructive effects of media while 
minimizing the negative ones. We can make future media policies that 
are grounded in a solid knowledge base. We can be proactive, rather 
than reactive.
  In so doing, we build a better Nation for our youth, fostering the 
kinds of values that are the backbone of this great Nation of ours, and 
we create a better foundation to guide future media policies about the 
digital experiences that pervade our children's daily lives.

                          ____________________