How Can Our Family Set Standards for TV Viewing?

Here are some standards to apply to your TV viewing:

The Reality Test

Even in comedy, unrealistic plots and stereotyped characters often indicate a warped moral perspective. Programs that don’t depict the painful consequences of wrong actions distort reality. Just as we shouldn’t spend our lives aimlessly associating with evil people and fools (1 Corinthians 15:33), we shouldn’t invest valuable time watching immoral and frivolous programming.

Every family member should learn to be a critical viewer, ready to switch off “junk” productions that are done in poor taste. We all should be willing to explain our viewing choices to other family members.

The Value Test

Relaxation is a legitimate need, but some kinds of relaxation are better than others. It is for good reason that TV has been called the “plug-in drug.” Even recreational time shouldn’t be squandered.

Can we justify the time we spend watching particular television programs (or movies) as compared to other more active forms of recreation—like reading, visiting with friends, playing a game with the kids, taking a walk, or tending a garden? Does the time we spend watching TV make us more productive and balanced people, or is it draining our vitality and undermining our creativity?

The Morality Test

We live in a fallen world. Consequently, all good art acknowledges the reality of evil. Art that ignores evil has no depth. The greatest writers and playwrights of the ages—people like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Melville—have always grappled with evil. But they portrayed evil without glamorizing or sensationalizing it.

Sometimes actors need to play roles portraying immorality. But a good program distinguishes between acting and exhibitionism. As more and more “soft” pornography is promoted by the commercial networks to boost ratings, we should keep in mind the simple insight that fornication “acted out” by professional actors and recorded on film for public entertainment is still fornication. Human sexual intimacy is too precious to be prostituted by the media under the guise of “realism” or “artistic freedom.” Similarly, both the testimony of common sense and academia affirm that media violence, even when simulated, has the effect of desensitizing viewers, lowering their inhibitions, and creating an appetite to see more.¹

Today’s media, like the Roman circus, often exploits evil rather than exposing it, gaining viewers by inflaming their passions.

If we regularly test our TV viewing by these three standards, we’ll probably find that it will be greatly reduced—or even eliminated altogether.²

Your family’s use of the media says a lot to your family and friends about its values, priorities, goals, and dreams.

1. “The links between pop culture and behavior are tentative and indirect at best. Still, academics who study such things widely agree that exposure to media violence correlates with aggression,callousness, and appetite for violence—even among adults, to say nothing of kids, who have a harder time distinguishing real from vicarious. (And on some TV shows—say, Cops—there is no difference.) These studies were primarily completed before the spread of cable, Nintendo, and the Internet into many a 14-year-old’s bedroom. As social critic Sissela Bok writes in her book Mayhem: Violence As Public Entertainment: ‘These sources bring into homes depictions of graphic violence . . . never available to children and young people in the past'” (Quotation from “Of Arms and the Boy,” Time magazine, by John Cloud). Back To Article
2. Michael Medved, the well-known movie critic, and his wife Diane (a child psychologist) have taken this approach with their children. Instead of permitting the corrosive effect of network television in their home, the family votes to select 3 hours of movie video viewing a week. They are co-authors of the book, Saving Childhood, Protecting Our Children From The National Assault On Innocence (Harper Collins/Zondervan). Back To Article