World Communications Day

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
25 May 2003

a was 15 when television was introduced to Australia, and can remember the days when we would sit around the radio in the evening listening to the serial before the seven o'clock news. Things have changed enormously since then.

Recent studies have found that Australian children start watching TV soon after they are born. At four months old, children are watching an average of 44 minutes of TV a day. This figure rises to 60 minutes at 12 months, and 2.5 hours by age four. A found these figures hard to believe.

By the time they are 18, the average Australian child has spent 14,000 hours watching TV, more time than they have spent at school (12,000 hours). When you add to this the time young people spend listening to the radio and accessing the internet, it is clear why the influence of parents, schools and parishes has declined.

a free press is necessary for a healthy democracy, to limit corruption, even when the media gives people too much of what we want; i.e. bad news and controversy. Competing voices reveal the truth.

Depending on their attitudes to a particular issue or story, the same persons can be either deeply cynical about the media or naively willing to believe everything they are told. Schools can do a lot to help here. Young people should be educated to discern fact from fiction, to recognise propaganda and "spin".

a child watching only 2.5 hours of TV a day will see over 25,000 advertisements over the course of a year. These messages are reinforced through radio, internet and glossy magazines. It is a powerful and effective tool for marketing. It extols individualism, but traps youngsters into one conformist mould.

This is often a concern to parents. Whoever tells the story controls the values and beliefs imparted. It is easy for parents to feel that they are powerless against a many-headed media monster for the hearts and minds of their children.

Ensuring that the family regularly has meals together, around the table rather than around the telly, is a start. Parents watching what their children watch also helps.

Putting the computer in the kitchen rather than in the kids' bedrooms is a simple way of monitoring what they are accessing and doing. And of course, there's no substitute for making time just to talk to your children and to be with them.

The media does bring many blessings. We cannot imagine life without it. But it is also a trap for the unwary.