Teens, the media, and Serge LeClerc

According to a survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, American young people, eight to 18- 53 hours a week – more than a working day and more than the time these kids spend in school. Because most of them multitask, they manage to pack 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those seven hours and 38 minutes.

Those figures fit with Canadian statistics used by Serge LeClerc, former Montreal drug lord who, having rehabilitated himself, is an MLA, an author, and an eagerly sought after inspirational speaker. He spoke to high school students and to community members in Foam Lake recently.

He told the high school students that from kindergarten to Grade 12, kids spend 20,000 hours watching TV. During the same time, they spend 10,000 hours in the classroom.

This is the most important time of your life, Le Clerc said. From the age of 13 to 18, your brain doubles in mass. And your morals, your philosophy, your beliefs, your ideology, your desires are being shaped, not by your teachers and parents, but by strangers with one goal – to separate you from your money. For every 22 minutes of program there are eight minutes of commercials. “You are a marketing niche,” he said. “You are being exploited to spend on clothing, skateboards, iPods. Your generation is a target market. We didn’t have that pressure.”

There are, he said, 100,000 hours of commercials aimed directly at girls, to look a certain way – cosmetics, hairstyle, clothes. “It’s all based on outward appearance, it pushes you as a sexual object, a body part. It’s a pressure that no woman has ever had before. It’s the first time in history that the number one disease of girls is anorexia and bulimia. Girls are trying to live up to the media image of them as a sexual product” he told the girls. His message to the boys: “Once we valued women’s insides, their values, what they believed. We didn’t see them as something there only for our pleasure.”

“You are the finest generation,” Le Clerc told the teens. “So how can you become the heaviest drinkers ever – even to the point of dying?”

He had an answer. “I was a drug dealer and I was probably more ethical than the alcohol business. I said, pay me and I’ll get you the best drugs you can buy, and if you don’t pay, I’ll hurt you. But the alcohol commercials show someone riding a horse across the prairie, sliding off, surrounded by dozens of girls because he drinks Bud, or girls running down the beach in tiny bikinis, surrounded by boys because they drink the right cooler. The ads show that you can be happy, popular, having fun only by using their product.”

“Do you honestly believe those ads?” he asked the students. “You must. They don’t spend millions on advertising if it doesn’t work. It does. Your generation are the heaviest drinkers.” Commercials never show teens on their knees, puking up their guts, he said. “They are never going to show you on TV the reality of alcohol,” he said.

The move to media was an insidious drift, Le Clerc said later during an interview.

“Look at the early ’60s, the popularity of the TV dinner. We bought TV trays. We moved away from socializing at dinner with the family, learning good communication skills. We talked at commercial breaks. TV became an easy babysitting tool.”

The problem with all that TV time is that children begin to form their identity at 11 or 12, they begin looking at who they are. “They have their own TV and computer in their own rooms. Who they are is being defined by a group of strangers.”

They call it the entertainment industry, said Le Clerc. “But it’s not entertainment. It’s an industry to make money. The higher the rating of the show the higher the cost of the commercial and the more money they will make. They will do whatever they can to get those ratings. It’s not about entertainment. It’s about making money. The focus is on product, on selling.”.

And about girls and anorexia and bulimia? “Clothes look better if they are hanging on sticks. Models are thin. Women have hips. The ads are pushing girls, telling them that they only look good rail thin so that their clothes look better. If you are normal, you can’t fit in. You are trying to change your biological genetic make up.”

The kids, he summed up, are being socialized to be a particular way. It doesn’t matter where you go – city or rural, the far north, reserves – the kids look alike and they all speak the same language. Interestingly, Le Clerc said, “Most of it comes out of black culture, Puerto Rican gangs in Los Angeles, the same place that rap music came from. Identity and self esteem is really important and adults are letting the media define our kids.”

Post by: Joan Eyolfson Cadham