Interviewing: Mike Wallace Was Here

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Today’s WORD on Journalism, April 9, 2012

Mike Wallace, Super Hero, 1918-2012

“It’s hard to believe, but when Wallace was born in 1918 there wasn’t even a radio in most American homes, much less a TV. As a youth, Wallace said, he was ‘an overachiever. I worked pretty hard. Played a hell of a fiddle.’

“At the University of Michigan, where his parents hoped he’d become a doctor or lawyer, he got hooked instead on radio. And by 1941, Mike was the announcer on ‘The Green Hornet."” . . .

“It was 65 years from Mike’s first appearance on camera—a World War II film for the Navy—to his last television appearance, a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Roger Clemens, the baseball star trying to fight off accusations of steroid use.

“65 years!

“It’s strange, but for such a tough guy, Mike’s all-time favorite interview was the one with another legend, pianist Vladimir Horowitz. The two of them, forces of nature both: Sly, manic, egos rampant. For Mike—a red, white and blue kind of guy—Horowitz played ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“It almost brought tears to the toughest guy on television.

“‘It’s astonishing what you learn and feel and see along the way,’ Wallace said. ‘That’s why a reporter’s job, as you know, is such a joy.’”

—Morley Safer, newsman and longtime Wallace colleague,
“Remembering Mike Wallace, 1918-2012,”
CBS News Sunday, April 5, 2012
Image: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

• Editorial Comment: Green Hornet, hunh? Evil-doers everywhere are breathing easier today. RIP, bulldog.

More on Mike Wallace
• The Associated Press obit: “NEW YORK (AP) — ‘Mike Wallace is here to see you.’”
• The “60 Minutes” obit
• Video: Best of Mike on “60 Minutes”
• NPR’s Scott Simon with Wallace on tough interviewing, 2005
• New York Times obit
• Video: “Last Word: Mike Wallace,” New York Times
• TIME: “Mike Wallace and the legacy of 60 Minutes”
• In Memoriam, ABC News video
• Wallace Reaction.
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‘Go, unlearn the lies we taught you’

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Professors have got to be nuts

By Ted Pease
© 1998
Updated 4/29/11

As has been my custom ever since I started teaching, every year about this time, as my students froth and gambol their way through final exams toward summer break, as seniors suddenly start smiling again (some for the first time in my experience), I am drawn to revisit an old theologian.

Confronted by the end-of-year angst of both students and faculty, Jake sometimes sounds like one seriously burned-out, cantankerous old crank.

Back in the 1980s, when he was a professor of religious studies at Brown University, Neusner sent an article to the student newspaper. It was a commencement address he knew would never be delivered, but which he believed needed saying anyway. I reread it every Spring as a way to reflect on the school year just completed, and on what I have chosen to do with my life.

Neusner, a noted scholar and the kind of no-nonsense professor that most students avoid like the plague, lamented the erosion of standards in higher education, not only among students but in the ranks of faculty, who he said could restore academic excellence, but won’t. Or anyway don’t. It is the kind of complaint that simultaneously offends and resonates with professors.

“We the faculty take no pride in our educational achievements with you,” Neusner told his phantom graduating class. “We have prepared you for a world that does not exist, indeed, that cannot exist. You have spent four years supposing that failure leaves no record. You have learned at Brown that when your work goes poorly, the painless solution is to drop out.

“But starting now, in the world in which you go, failure marks you,” he said. “Outside Brown, quitters are no heroes.”

I think a bit sheepishly of crusty old Professor Jake every year at commencement time, when we the faculty bless our students, help them shift their tassels from the left to the right (or is it the other way around?), and send them on their way from their cloistered academic careers into the real world. I wonder if I’ve really prepared them for the “Outside,” or if I’ve just helped them get by. Some will set the real world on fire, but others (we know) will crash and burn.

One of the reasons I dug through my files to find Jacob Neusner this year is that I have received messages from several students that call him forth. One came from a senior, who gave the university a C after her four years here — perhaps a more honest grade than we professors are willing to give. “I can’t believe the poor writing I saw from students in my group!” she wrote. “These were seniors. There should be more writing courses.”

Amen to that.

I don’t know where Neusner is these days, or if he’s still living [Note: Professor Neusner was alive and well, apparently, at Bard College, blogging in March 2011] but he would have loved the letter I got last week from a student who had been forced to read one of my columns, and took exception to it. I wrote back, commending him for getting mad enough to send what was at least a well written letter, even if he missed the point.

The piece was called “The Dumbing of America” when it came out in September 1996, and it seems that embattled English 200 students are required to read the thing as an example of persuasive writing. It makes some of them mad, I am pleased to report.

The column was about a UCLA study that found that U.S. students are “increasingly disengaged from the academic experience,” “frequently bored” in their classes and “considerably less willing to work hard” at learning than they were a decade ago. My point, coming at the topic from the perspective of someone who tries to teach, was that while this was hardly news to us in the trenches of academe, it may be for parents, employers and the larger society. Certainly, if true, it bodes ill for all of us.

My letter-writer thought I was making fun of students; he found the column “degrading,” he said, and pointed out that there are many factors involved in making unmotivated students, including poor teachers, bad facilities, early class times and the fact that some students shouldn’t be here anyway, but came only for social life or to find a spouse. He actually said that.

I’m thinking that he got my point — and Neusner’s — quite well, even though I really wasn’t criticizing students as much as myself and my colleagues. Whose fault is it, after all, if salesmen can’t sell, if welders can’t weld, if teachers can’t teach — the buyer’s, the metal’s, the student’s? No, as grumpy old Father Jake put it: we teachers have been pulling a fast one on students for a long time.

“For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded,” Neusner told the Brown University students who never got to hear him. “When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When your work came in beyond the deadline, we pretended not to care.

“Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. When you were garrulous and talked to hear yourself talk, we listened as if it mattered. When you tossed on our desks writing upon which you had not labored, we read it and even responded, as though you had earned a response.

“When you were dull, we pretended you were smart. When you were predictable, unimaginative and routine, we listened as if to new and wonderful things. When you demanded free lunch, we served it.”

The reason we professors let students get by, Father Jake said, was that we get worn down. “Despite your fantasies,” Neusner wrote, “it was not even that we wanted to be liked by you. It was that we did not want to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense: smiles and easy B’s.”

Well, as the 1997-98 academic year concludes, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Professor Jake’s unhappy harangue. Despite what lawmakers think about the cushy life of academe, having scores or hundreds of 20-something-year-old bosses who can’t pay attention in class because they were out late “studying,” whose homework was eaten by the dog, who can’t make the exam because of a surprise family reunion in Cancun . . . well, it’s wearing. And many of us feel more than a little wrung out at the end of the school year.

But then come the farewell messages from other students, like this e-mail I received yesterday from one departing senior, who has come through: “I have nothing to gain any more by sucking up, so this is for real: thank you. (And I’m sorry I gave you such s**t about the ethics class.) Thanks.”

As I pointed out to my English 200 critic, we don’t disrespect or even dislike you, and keep in mind that we keep coming back. Some of us, like Jacob Neusner, finally burn out and probably need a sanitarium and about a decade of sabbaticals. But most of us were right there for our students when classes started last Fall, and we were there yesterday at commencement, cheering and teary right along with the Class of 1998 and their parents. You students may drive us nuts sometimes — and I know we make you crazy, too — but we’ll be back for more when classes start again. It’s a little warped, maybe, but it’s what we do.

—Ted Pease (ted.pease@usu.edu) is head of the Department of Journalism & Communication at Utah State University. This column originally appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald Journal (6/7/98).

The Ostrich Syndrome

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Don’t Sanitize Our News. We Did It, We Should Own It

Letter to the Editor
The Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, 4/26/11

To the Editor:

I was glad to read HJ managing editor Charlie McCollum’s discussion of graphic photos in the Sunday’s newspaper [“Sensationalism played no part in publication of photo,” Sunday, 4/24/11]. Specifically, the question was about running the image of a bloody Syrian boy shot in the head by troops during a protest.

Like many HJ readers, I caught my breath when I saw the photo. I’d seen it the night before on NBC’s evening news, but the broadcasters had fuzzed out the gore. And there it was on my kitchen counter, in all its bloody detail.

But Charlie’s right in supporting the decision to run it. And if the photo made HJ readers mad, then all the more so.

Much of the problem with the way this country makes policy is that it happens in a safe, sanitized vacuum. We aren’t permitted to see the coffins coming home in the middle of the night from our foreign wars. We don’t want to see the outcomes of policies conducted in our name—and in our ignorance—that end in deaths and despair.

Out of sight and out of mind has become our national attitude toward unpleasant realities. Too many news organizations recognize this, and sanitize the news to “protect” us from unpleasantness. For years, international versions of U.S. news media—CNNi, Newsweek international and more—have offered global audiences much more complete, and graphic, reports on war and violence than appear in U.S. editions. We Americans apparently don’t have the stomach to confront the world—and our role in it.

In either the news media or ourselves, this ostrich mentality is dishonest. People—like that child murdered in Syria while demonstrating for the kind of freedom we say we support as a universal right—are fighting and dying, or living in horrible conditions and dying slowly all over the world. Often, these struggles have something to do with policies of our own government. They are far from our clean and safe kitchen counters, and too far from our consciousness.

Americans need more, nor less, awareness of the struggles and conflicts that are central to the lives of so many people worldwide. Seeing and hearing about those people is the responsibility of the press, and it's our responsibility not to turn away. We need and deserve more reality in the news media, please, not less, and must learn to take responsibility for our own role in it.

—Ted Pease
Petersboro

Resource: Photo Ethics/Framing

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Errol Morris, filmmaker/columnist

This is a fascinating and important conversation by filmmaker/director Errol Morris (Fog of War, about Robert McNamara’s decision to bomb Cambodia in the 1970s, The Thin Blue Line and others, including upcoming Tabloid, about a Miss Wyoming who fell in love and kidnapped her Salt Lake City Mormon boyfriend from his mission in England so they could have sex (!)) as part of The New York Times’ Opinionator blog.

Morris deals with photo ethics and image manipulation over some real cases of photos of children’s toys amid rubble in Iraq and other Middle East war zones.

Good for all journalists in considering how to present information effectively yet ethically, and for media consumer as a reminder to take all information with skepticism.

• Part 1: “It Was All Started by a Mouse” (1/3/2010)
• Part 2: “It Was All Started by a Mouse” (1/4/2010)
• Postscript: “Thought Experiment #2” (1/12/2010)

Teachable Moments

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Learning Begins with the Tough Questions

By Edward C. Pease
© 1996

“Judge a man not by his answers, but by his questions.” Gender bias aside, that’s one of the mantras of the classroom—for the professor, anyway. Or it should be. And in the context of “values” and learning, it represents a crucial tenet of education: curiosity and critical thinking.

At USU, as at any good university, the quality of the end-product—education—is measured not so much by what the professor tells the student, as by what the student is motivated to ask. And the worth of the outcome is not necessarily just in getting the answer right, but in students having the freedom and the will to ask the question in the first place. In that freedom to ask questions resides an element of risk for both the student and the professor, because asking tough questions is an inherently subversive activity that, when done right, both implies a challenge to what is accepted as “conventional wisdom,” and reflects a desire to seek new answers.

When I moved to USU from New York City two years ago, some of my friends and colleagues thought I was nuts. Aside from the East’s regional chauvinism (stronger on the East Coast, which considers anyplace west of the Hudson or Potomac rivers “the hinterlands,” than in any other part of the country), I got the usual battery of Mormon jokes, and concerns from well-meaning people about how an avowed liberal Democrat would survive in the arid conservative climate of the land of Orrin Hatch. Was I doing “missionary work”? they joked.

In a way, that’s what any teacher does. But more than that, I have learned to appreciate more fully than before the text of a poster I got from a mail-order place in Minnesota: “Minds are like parachutes: they function only when open.” As a teacher, I am in the mind-opening business; and, over the past two years at USU, my students have served the same mind-opening service for me.

Take Amy. When she and I met, she was a sophomore political science major from Idaho who, after an internship in Republican U.S. Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s Washington, D.C., office, decided she wanted to become a lobbyist for conservative causes. Despite her misgivings about left-leaning journalists, she wanted a second major in communication to pursue her career goals.

Amy knew within the first five minutes we met that she disagreed with me on just about everything from politics to primetime. Over the past two years, I don’t think I ever changed her mind about anything, but we like each other, enjoy butting heads, and both have learned something in the process.

Amy lives to bait me: “Rush Limbaugh said...,” she’d say.

“Pompous windbag,” I snort.

“Where is he wrong?” she challenges.

“Where not, Ditto-Head?” I retort.

“Oh, you liberals....” She waves me away.

And we’re off to the races.

The reason Amy and I like to torment each other is the process, the exchange, the joy of disagreement, and, as the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill said, the value of defending what each we each know as “truth,” which makes learning happen.

This process of questioning, of disagreement, of examining one’s beliefs, and, finally, either reaffirming or altering them—that’s the joy of teaching and learning. It’s not that we professors necessarily know “the truth”; the best we can do (on a good day) is to force our students—kicking and screaming, if that’s what it takes—to learn facts (which are different from beliefs), and make them decide for themselves what they believe.

Amy is not the only student at USU whose worldview conflicts with my own, and she also is not the only one willing to debate me. In the process, both my students and I find our minds opening like parachutes, and discover a willingness to reexamine what we thought we “knew” in the context of each other’s new ideas.

For me, a child of the activist, anti-establishment 1960s and ’70s, this process recalls the counterculture mantra of my youth, “Question authority,” now reborn as my favorite teaching tool in the 1990s. In some ways, it is an alien concept in Utah, where so many young people are raised to do just the opposite. But for students like Amy, a willingness to distinguish between facts and beliefs, and a growing enjoyment in questioning everything (including whatever the professor says in class), healthy skepticism becomes a valuable tool for learning, and for life.

I despair when I see students relentlessly scribbling down everything I say, because I know they think they’re getting the answers without ever having had to figure out the questions. So when I sit in my office or classroom and have a student bristle at me, get in my face, disagreeing, pushing back, questioning what she’s been taught as “common knowledge,” starting statements with, “BUT...!” and trying to change my mind. Well, that’s a good day for teaching and learning.

This willingness to question and examine and then reexamine is particularly critical in my teaching area—the mass media. Because the journalist who simply writes down what the mayor or the police chief tells him is a scribe, not a watchdog on society. And the TV viewer to moviegoer or voter in a presidential campaign year who simply absorbs and unquestioningly accepts what he or she hears in the information age isn’t a citizen, but a sheep. For me, teaching about the mass media is the same as teaching about life. It is a playground for the curious and socially conscious. And, if done correctly, it is prime territory for teaching students to question what they think they know.

For example, if “more Americans get their news from ABC than from any other source,” as the network claims, what then? What about this new study that finds kids learn about sex from TV, not from their parents or schools or even the older kid next door? Will the Internet cause intellectual birth defects? If children spend more time with “Barney” than with Dad, will the next generation talk and walk like purple dinosaurs? Does the “v-chip” defend kids against TV violence, or against parental neglect, or both? Should women look like Barbie or Elle McPherson or Rosie O’Donnell? Can you believe anything politicians say on television? What about Martha Stewart? Do movies really make people go nuts and kill their parents? Why does TV portray African Americans as criminals or buffoons, and women as sex objects or Donna Reed? And so on.

Questioning what we’re told—whether in the classroom or on TV—is what learning and good citizenship is all about. And it is an especially crucial life-skill in an age when most of what we learn or think we know about the world comes to us second-hand, in soundbites and images transmitted to us from far from our own lives, by people we don’t know. For students like Amy, whose generation has been raised by the mass media, honing a healthy skepticism is new and exciting, and a critical survival skill in the electronic age.

And for teachers like me, who are lucky enough to have such students in their classrooms, this is the joy of the profession—watching students challenge what they’ve always accepted as the way things are, and seeing them come up with their own answers, arrived at not because that’s what they’ve always been told, but because they’ve done their own thinking about the questions, and not just memorized the answers of others. Provoking questions is a noble and enduring profession, and students, if they are engaged, ask better questions than professors do.

So when Amy wants to fight about politics, when Ken declares that he “gets it,” when Evan gets angry at the evening news, when my students ask tough questions for which I have no good answers...that’s a good day on University Hill.

• Edward C. Pease is professor and head of the Department of Communication at USU. This appeared in the USU Magazine, Fall 1996.

Column: Halloweinies

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I’ll take Martians over media illiteracy
By Ted Pease ©1996

For students of mass communication, Halloween is a time of year to stop and ponder anew the public’s astonishing gullibility, and to reaffirm the media’s responsibility not to mislead.

The reason that the holiday is so revered has nothing to do with its attractions for most Americans (who now spend more money on Halloween than on any other holiday but Christmas). Journalists and media scholars love Halloween because it is the anniversary of one of the all-time greatest media hoaxes—the day that Martians invaded New Jersey.

You remember the story: On the night before Halloween 1938, radio director Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre actors reenacted H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds” over 151 CBS radio stations nationwide. Unidentified flying objects had taken off from Mars and were “moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity,” landing near the farming community of Grovers Mill, N.J., according to breathless “newscasts” created by the Mercury Theatre cast in New York City.

Martian heat rays incinerated the innocent and destroyed Trenton, N.J. Giant Martian machines “as tall as skyscrapers” and emitting poisonous black smoke, marched on New York, wading across the Hudson River into Manhattan. The National Guard was called out, but the troops were helpless against the horrible Martian weapons. Other Martian spacecraft were reported near Buffalo, St. Louis and Chicago. By the time the Mercury broadcast ended, 40 minutes later, the aliens had taken over the country.

Big practical joke, right?

An estimated 6 million radio listeners heard the broadcast, and social scientists later said about 1 million of them believed it. In New York City, families rushed together to await their death. New Jersey farmers armed with shotguns crouched behind barricades of hay bales and grain sacks to repel the aliens. Police and National Guards troops mobilized all over the country. The New York Times received 875 phone calls from frightened citizens. The Memphis, Tenn., Press-Scimitar published a nighttime “extra” edition about the invasion of Chicago and St. Louis. Meanwhile, New York City police officers who rushed to the CBS studio were stunned to see the actors, “stoically before the microphones, reading their scripts, ignorant of the havoc they were creating throughout the land.”

Afterward, Orson Welles innocently expressed surprise that anyone had taken his broadcast seriously: “How could they?” he said. “They were told several times it wasn’t real.” The show was just the actors way “of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!’” he said.

Today, 58 years later, I’m thinking that for all our sophistication in the “information age,” Americans actually may be less savvy about what we hear, see, read and experience in the media than we were in 1938, simply because media have become such an accepted part of our daily lives.

Sure, we probably wouldn’t buy into Orson Welles’ radio gag today (even though promotions for the movie “Independence Day,” about aliens attacking Washington, D.C., prompted similar hysteria in some markets), but in many ways we are even more malleable now than we were in the 1930s.

The reason is that so much of what we take as “reality” and common knowledge—whether political ads and spin-doctoring during election campaigns, or the importance of Barbie and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in our kids’ lives, or our insatiable need for new cars, clothes, appliances or other gadgets—comes to us through the mass media. Like the radio listeners that night in 1938, our daily lives are formed by the environment created for us by mass media messages, and our impressions of the world around us derive from the media’s version of “reality.”

Radio listeners of the 1930s generally knew to use the medium as entertainment, or as an “electronic hearth” around which families, friends and strangers gathered to form an extended national community. Radio helped hold a nation together during the Depression and World War II, and it became a part of the family.

Ironically, in 1996, for all our electronic sophistication, we are in some ways less critical consumers of mass media messages than we used to be. That’s because so much of what we do every day is based on knowledge we get from the mass media, which is no longer an activity we select but has become ubiquitous electronic wallpaper. There are nearly six radios in every American home, and more TVs than toilets. Aside from sleeping, we spend more time with television and radio than doing anything else. We eat, breathe, talk, think, swim in a biosphere of mass media messages, so much so that most of us think about our media diet about as much as we think about the air we breathe.

We might not fall for Martians in 1996, but ultimately we fall for much more. Item: 80 percent of fourth-grade girls say they are on diets, and the same percentage of American women think they are overweight. Item: More than half of white conservatives and 45 percent of white liberals think “blacks are aggressive or violent.” Where do you suppose those perceptions come from?

Most of what we think we “know” comes from the mass media. Here’s a true or false quiz:

T/F 1.) Rapists and welfare recipients are more likely to be black than white.
T/F 2.) Handguns are used more often for self-defense than for suicide.
T/F 3.) Violent crime in the United States is on the rise.
T/F 4.) Teen-age pregnancy rates are higher today than they were in the 1940s and ’50s.
T/F 5.) Most drug users in the United States are minorities.
T/F 6.) Most divorced fathers are “dead-beat dads” who don’t pay child support.
(See answers below.)

In 1996, much more than in 1938, we Americans learn about the world and about each other and about what matters most to us not from real people, but from the images and impressions we absorb from our mass media diets. This is not to condemn the media or technology, but it is a fact of life in the information age. Far from being savvier and more discerning in our use of information that comes to us from television and the Internet and newspapers and radio, we are increasingly likely to take such “knowledge” at face value. And—like oxygen from the air or vitamins from our diets—this “knowledge” is absorbed into our lives, and may warp our attitudes and skew how we see the world without our knowing it.

When Orson Welles and his radio actors dressed up in sheets and yelled “Boo!” for Halloween in 1938, the impact was much greater than anyone expected. In many ways, 1996 audiences aren’t much better informed than they were then, but the larger social consequences of such blind acceptance today may be much greater than the mere invasion of bloodthirsty Martians.

PS: (Quiz answers: All items are false.)

• Ted Pease is head of the Department of Communication at Utah State University. His column appears on the Opinion Page every other Sunday. This appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal on Nov. 10, 1996.
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Column: TV & the ‘Virtual Childhood’

Hope for kids on a TV diet

By Ted Pease
©1996

There’s more to life in the information age than a TV diet of Twinkies and Nutrasweet. So says Hope Green, vice-chairman of the national board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service.

When she appeared at Utah State University last week to talk about “The ‘Virtual Childhood’—Growing Kids on a Television Diet,” Green could have lambasted TV as the symbol of the end of civilization. Or, as president of the PBS system in Vermont and a national leader of public broadcasting, she could have stalwartly defended TV as a misunderstood and maligned educational tool.

Instead, she did neither, and both. Her reasonable moderation may have sent away unfulfilled both those who wanted the demon tube soundly whipped, and others seeking reassurance that there’s hope for their kids who watch TV six hours a day. Because parents and educators who want to blame social woes on television, as well as those who would like to grasp at educational TV as the answer to their kids’ problems all are bound for disappointment.

Anyone who watches even a little bit of television knows that at least a portion—perhaps entire continents—of the TV world is a “vast wasteland,” as former FCC chief Newton Minow put it in 1961. Just five years ago, Minow revisited the “wasteland,” and said TV—and the rest of us, too—still fails in at least four areas.

“We have failed 1.) to use television for education; 2.) to use television for children; 3.) to finance public television properly; and 4.) to use television properly in political campaigns,” he said.

And it is such a waste of potential, because television could be “the most important educational institution in America,” Minow said. “More people learn more each day, each year, each lifetime from television than from any other source. All of television is education; the question is, what are we teaching and what are we learning?”

Hope Green’s answer to that might be that the responsibility lies with how we use TV, and how we let our kids use it, whether kids watch 10 hours a week or 40, and whether TV is an activity that parents and children share. The Vermont broadcast executive, who has only one TV set in her house (and it’s on the third floor), preaches and practices moderation.

There is another, perhaps more comforting answer to the dilemma of how to grow kids on a television diet and in a mass media world, and it comes from two teams of researchers at the universities of Massachusetts and Kansas.

In the early 1980s, the researchers studied kids aged 2 to 7 in Springfield, Mass., and Topeka, Kan. The concern was (and still is) that a lot of TV watching, even of educational programs like “Sesame Street,” would impair children’s learning ability in at least two ways: 1.) because it is a visual medium, TV would slow down kids’ language development and reading/writing skills; and 2.) because TV is so active and busy, it might reduce kids’ ability to concentrate and pay attention in school.

In 1994, the researchers—led by Daniel Anderson at UMass and Aletha Huston and John Wright at Kansas—hunted down 570 of the kids from the earlier study, who were by then in high school, to see how they turned out. The question was whether those who had been heavy TV viewers as kids had become vegetables in the classroom.

Parents of kids who watch a lot of shows like “Sesame Street” will like the results. Instead of contributing to a generation of poor learners and uninterested readers, the study found exactly the opposite among the high school students who had watched “Sesame Street” and other educational shows as kids.

“Viewing educational television in preschool appears to contribute to children’s academic performance many years later,” the researchers found after interviewing the students and examining their high school transcripts. They also talked to parents and teachers, and evaluated the students’ “academic self-concept” and how much they valued learning.

“It is obvious that the content learned at age 5 cannot influence high school performance directly,” they said. “Instead, a rich diet of educational television may help children to enter school with the academic skills required for the tasks they encounter, increasing the likelihood of early success.”

“This early positive experience in school may set a child on a trajectory of success, self-confidence, and positive reputation among teachers that has long-term consequences for later academic achievement.”

It turns out that kids who watched “Sesame Street” or other educational programs five hours a week (once a day) when they were 5, performed an average of a one-quarter grade better in high school than kids who didn’t grow up on “Sesame Street.”

Of course, none of this gives parents a license to plunk their kids down in front of the tube and use it as a baby-sitter—kids who watch five or six hours a day, which is one reported national average, probably aren’t doing much or anything else, and most of that is probably not “Sesame Street,” “Nova” or the Discovery Channel anyway.

That’s where Hope Green’s moderation message comes in: Twinkies won’t kill you, unless that’s all you eat. Neither will TV ruin our kids’ lives and turn their little brains into mush, unless that’s all they do with their childhoods.

• Ted Pease is head of the Department of Communication at Utah State University and co-editor of the 1996 book Children and the Media. This column ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal on Nov. 24, 1996.