I am a great mom. My life as a mother is rewarding, educational, and at times, messy. I realized as my daughter, Katy, matured, the more mistakes I made, the more I learned, and the more I realized that there is no such thing as a “perfect” mother. By trial and error I learned what I did as a mom that was good and bad. Personally, I feel the worst thing I did as a mom was expose my daughter to the media and its many forms – that being news, advertising, and entertainment.

This piece is Part I in a three-part series where I focus on the media’s effect on my daughter in regards to violence and war. Part II will view the media in regard to the focus on the media’s objectification of women and the materialistic and superficial focus the media has on a woman’s physical appearance. In all fairness, men are affected by the advertising media as well; however, I will focus mostly on women and young girls in Part II. Part III will focus on entertainment media and how we as human beings are desensitized by the violence we witness in film and video games compared to violence in real life situations.

I am a news junkie, but in that junk of mine, I didn’t realize how the media affected Katy until she was a sophomore in high school. Cleaning her room one day, I came upon her journal. Yes, I committed the ultimate mommy no-no and I read her journal. She already knows this (I admitted it to her recently as I began working on this piece), but let me say for the record that I did what I did out of love, and my utter inability to not be nosey. I publically apologize to Katy for reading that which was not meant for my eyes.

In this lapse of judgement, as I sat on her bed and read, I wasn’t struck so much by her words, but by the pictures she had drawn in her seventh, eighth, and ninth grade years. Drawings of planes flying into the twin towers, families standing, holding hands, with tears coming out of their eyes, with a bubble above their heads saying, “I hope they don’t attack again,” and a prayer for the families affected directly by 9/11, as well as a simple recognition of that terrible day. This revelation illustrated to me through my daughter’s most intimate thoughts and fears that several years after the attack I had exposed my daughter to too much news media.

This got me thinking. Katy was born in 1990. What else did I expose her to? How did the news media circus affect her? When did I have the television on and when did she watch what I watched, even as a baby or toddler? Besides 9/11, the partial list from only her first eighteen years stunned me. As a side note, as you click on these links, note that some videos I chose purposefully, as people take creative license on Youtube to make the media event even more dramatic than it already is—I chose many of these links for the dramatic music, the sensationalized reporting, and/or the content.

-1991 – Desert Storm

-1991 – Jeffrey Dahmer

-1992 – Rodney King beating

-1992 – Subsequent rioting after the acquittal of those who beat Rodney King

-1993 – Somalia – Black Hawk down incident

-1993 – The first World Trade Center bombing attempt

-1993 – The Branch Davidian raid

-1995 – The OJ Simpson trial

-1995 – Oklahoma City Bombing

-1998 – Bombing of the US Embassy in Kenya and Tanzania

-1999 – Columbine

-2000 – Bombing of the USS Cole

-2001 – 9/11

-2001 – The war in Afghanistan

-2002 – The second Iraq War

-2006 – The hanging of Sadaam Hussein

-2007 – The Virginia Tech Shooting

Even with all of these events, it wasn’t until Katy’s junior year that I truly realized the impact the news media has on us as human beings and how it can, at times, dictate our every movement in life.

One sunny, January day, Katy didn’t have first period so she stayed home from school and as we readied ourselves to get her to her second class, she began receiving frantic texts from friends. “Where are you?” most of them demanded. Katy texted back saying she was at home and asked what going on. The kids at Lincoln Sudbury High School in Sudbury, Massachusetts were in lock-down, but had no idea why. They heard there may have been a stabbing, but weren’t sure. Naturally, what did Katy and I do but head to the television. There, on all the local Boston channels was Lincoln Sudbury High School with reports that indeed, a student had stabbed another student and that is all they knew. Katy relayed this by text to her friends, who hadn’t heard this much yet.

Thirty minutes later, the news stations announced while standing outside Emerson Hospital in Concord, that the victim had died. Katy texted this to her friends who were still inside the school in lock-down and had no idea that the student had died. The relay of texts had us reeling. I remember thinking how bizarre it was that we could tell her friends what occurred in the building they were in because we could watch the immediate news frenzy occurring within feet of where they were being held in lock-down. I am not sure if that is technology at its worst, or best.

Once the kids were released from school, several of Katy’s friends came over to our house.  While sitting with approximately eleven teenagers watching the 12 o’clock news, we learned from the media that freshman student James Alenson, was the student who died, and that junior John Odgren was the student who stabbed and killed James. This news came to fellow classmates in my home, a mile and a half away from the school, by some reporter they did not know, about an incident that happened in their school, while they were in the building. It was incredibly surreal and terribly jarring.

This particular event led me to this idea of writing about how the media affected Katy as a child and young woman. The impact of this event as it was revealed was something that I believe still sits uneasy with Katy even today. Those images, I am sure, sometimes whiz through her memory with certain unpleasantness. In fact, no doubt, all the terrible images the media reveals to us runs through our minds as well. How many times have we seen the planes hitting the twin towers? How many times did we see the Rodney King beating? How many times have you seen the footage of those terrified teenagers running out of Columbine High School with their hands on their heads? The media has a special way of pulling us in, bit by bit, tooth and nail, while we look upon the carnage with one eye shut in gruesome interest. They reel us in, hook, line and sinker. It is difficult to get that hook out of our gut.

Some may say to what I have above—so what? This is the media! This is what they do! Why are you so critical? The news media was created to inform us, to help better our lives, and to give us a sense of what is occurring in the world. This aspect is why the news media is good. We can see what is occurring in Zimbabwe, or in Somalia, or in New Orleans, and we get an immediate understanding of information that, without this coverage, we would be utterly ignorant of. This is a good thing. However, when does the media cross the line? Does it really matter if we see it only on one station? Or, that one source gets the word out before the other? How responsible is the news media for bringing us accurate reporting, yet, at the same time, understanding the human condition and what images do to our psyches? How important is it for the news media to relate to us, the viewers, on a human level, and not on a dollar level? These are  very good questions, that no doubt, have different answers for different people.

What I do know is that the media my daughter witnessed in her first eighteen years was full of terrible, eye-wrenching material. Her viewing this is completely my doing as a parent and partly the media’s power to provoke us as humans to tune in and get the real story. The question I am left with in all this is: What is more important, the story, or the impact it will have on us and on our lives in the present moment and in the future?

Frankly, I don’t think the news media cares about that at all. As long as they have the story—sensationalized, repetitive, and unattached—then they are making their money. It is us, the viewer, that many times, is left with a choice to keep the television on, or turn it off. It is too late for me to change that I had the TV on when Katy was young, but now, I vote to turn it off. If this will make a difference or not, time will only tell.

Image courtesy of www.wikimediacommons.org, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATelevison_Hungarian_ORION_1957.jpg