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Television Alcohol
Advertising & Portrayals:
Influences on Children

By Jim Hetherman

"Television is the most awesome means of communication devised by man," boasted an opening line in Television Night at the Hollywood Bowl II (July 9, 2004). The night was rich in such self-congratulatory remarks as the academy took pride, once again, in its members and industry. Although the industry is quick to claim credit for its accomplishments, its spokespersons rarely, if ever, accept any degree of responsibility for exacerbating social problems. The defenses that I often hear go like this: "We don't cause anything, we just mirror what is already there." It's hard to blame any one person or group for such knee-jerk reactions. Television provides economic livelihood for a great number of people, and to challenge the industry may be seen as threatening to many smart, hard-working people and their families. Yet, as most parents and teachers should know, the interests of children come first. As important as it is for children to grow-up and find good paying jobs such as those the media industries provide, it is much more critical for children to grow-up free from substance abuse.

Can your child withstand pressure like this?

At a future AA meeting when your child, grandchild or student hears "Hello, my name is Susie and I am an alcoholic," you want her to attend as an observer and not as a participant. It is inappropriate for the mass-media industries to brush-off any responsibility for early onset of drinking because the evidence that exposure to alcohol ads causes children to start drinking may not be as extensive as the industry requires. Professionals involved with the well being of children must apply the criterion of the least dangerous assumption. The criterion of the least dangerous assumption (LDA) states, "In the absence of conclusive data, education decisions should be based on assumptions which if incorrect, will have the least dangerous effect on the student" (Donnellan, 1984, as cited in Heron, T. E., & Martz, S. A., 1996). On the question of the effect of exposing children to alcohol advertising, if the television industry is wrong and the industry continues its current alcohol advertising practices, we will likely have more and earlier adolescent drinkers, more child injuries and deaths, and ultimately more adults with drinking problems as well. If the television industry had a change of heart and eliminated or severely limited alcohol advertising because such advertising may have a deleterious effect on children, children would be safer, and when our children grow up, we may have fewer alcoholics with fewer of the attendant social problems. Which assumption about the relationship between exposure to alcohol advertising and drinking behavior do you think would be least harmful to children?

The news media has not been very friendly to children either. Under the category of Junk Science, Fox News Channel published a "news" article that reported as established fact that alcohol advertising does not target underage drinkers and does not cause alcohol abuse (Milloy, 2004, May 21). The so-called "Junk Science" was in reference to recently filed lawsuits claiming that alcohol advertising targets underage drinkers and causes alcohol abuse. There is a growing wealth of studies that have established evidence of a relationship between alcohol advertising and adolescent drinking, yet Fox News Channel does not mention even one of these studies. And while it may be true that a causal relationship may not have been proven as yet, that is far from the assertion by the Fox News Channel article that such a relationship does not exist. Fox's tagline Fair and Balanced appears to be, in this case, neither fair nor balanced. It is not fair to all the researchers who are engaged in the discovery and reporting of alcohol related problems and relationships, and it certainly is not fair to all our children whose interests were neither mentioned nor represented. The Fox News Channel did not stand out; it was simply following a pattern of unfairness towards children set by the mass media in general and television in particular: When it comes to looking after or even recognizing children's interests, the maxim of making the least dangerous assumption regarding the effect of alcohol media exposure on children is completely ignored by the television industry. Think of that the next time you pay your cable bill.

This pervasive unfairness of the media towards children may have dire consequences. The earlier children begin drinking, the more likely they are to misuse alcohol or become alcohol dependent. Adolescents who drink are more likely to suffer or cause injuries or die from automobile crashes, falls, burns, drowning and other accidents. Early alcohol use may cause physical harm including a delay in the onset of puberty, bone growth retardation and weaker bones. Alcohol use among young people leads to arguments and other relationship problems with friends, teachers and parents; unwanted sexual experiences; and delinquency problems including fights, victimization by robbery, trouble with police and driving under the influence. Young people have less experience with the consequence of drinking and often engage in binge drinking; when combined the lower muscle mass of teenagers, binge drinking can cause alcohol poisoning and death. These physical and behavioral consequences of alcohol use by young people have been well documented by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2001). It is a poverty of our rich western culture that our children must die so that people in the media industries can live as they wish. Yes, television may indeed be the most awesome means of communication devised by man, but, unfortunately, its frequent images of death and destruction are not limited to its portrayals.  [TOP]

Age of Initiation

Television's objective is to generate advertising revenue for its owners and the industry does not particularly seem to care what it sells or who gets hurt as long as the dollars continue to flow in its direction.

Alcohol industry spokespersons make defensive comments such as "We are deeply committed to fighting underage drinking…" and "…show us the evidence…" [that we target underage drinkers] (Lawton, 2004). So far no one has claimed that the mass media industries literally pin our children to the floor as the alcohol magnates pour booze down our children's throats, but that imagery may not be far off the mark. In the U.S., the average age of first use of alcohol is 13.1 years (WHO, 2001). Using information from the Johnston study, the US Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS, 2000), reported that 52 percent of 14-year-olds and 80 percent of 18-year-olds admitted using alcohol at least once. "So a drink or two," some may say, "what is the problem with that?" The problem is that drinking  involves a progression from one's first drink to one's latest drink: 15 percent of 14-year-olds and 31 percent of 18-year-olds admitted binge drinking (consuming five or more drinks in a row) at least once during the past 2 weeks, and 9 percent of 14-year-olds and 33 percent of 18-year-olds admitted being drunk at least once during the past 30 days. Over their teenage years children have a large number of experiences getting familiar with alcohol, using it, seeing others use it, and receiving encouragement to start and continue drinking (USDHHS, 2000). Effective marketing is the key to encouraging children to take their first drink, liking it, thinking it's cool, continuing with the progression, one step at a time, until they are hooked. Through marketing, alcohol companies create an intimate relationship with the young consumer and build loyalty to their brand. These companies are in business for the long run. Today's underage samplers, little bingers and drunks are tomorrow's long-term customers, and the industry loves them, all the way to their graves by way of their pocketbooks. Television, the most awesome means of communication devised by man, plays a critical role in this morbid process. Television introduces children to the world of beautiful blondes, fast cars and cultural heroes. The child's admission ticket to this coveted adult paradise can be as cheap as a bottle of beer, a tall glass of wine cooler or a sweet "alcopop." The world of "Booze, Babes and Bands" is just around the corner (WHO, 2001). Television's objective is to generate advertising revenue for its owners and the industry does not particularly seem to care what it sells or who gets hurt as long as the dollars continue to flow in its direction.  [TOP]

The Right Side

"We've got to own the emotional heartland…and connect with the consumer in a way that goes beyond the rational aspects of [our] brand," said the director of global commercial strategy for the producer of Johnny Walker whisky (WHO, 2001). It seems that marketers are well schooled in neuroscience and psychology. The right side of the brain forms extensive connections with the limbic system--where emotions and feelings, like wrath, fright, passion, love, hate, joy and sadness originate, along with some important aspects of perceived personal identity. This system derives subjective information that guides behavior. The right side not only is instrumental in the control our own emotions, it helps us to perceive the emotions of and empathize with others as well. The right side generates self-awareness and self-recognition, is responsible for self-regulation when interacting with others, assigns significance to our rational thoughts, and regulates motivation (Schore, 2002). The right side is the affective side. "The attempt to regulate affect--to minimize unpleasant feelings and to maximize pleasant ones--has been defined as the diving force in human motivation" (Westin as cited by Schore, 2000). The higher levels of the right side contain cognitive as well as affective components, and function as a mechanism to create significance out of our cognitive experiences (Main; Kaplan; Cassidy; Pribam; Schore; and Joseph as cited in Schore, 2000). It is precisely these features of our affective side that alcohol marketers use to undermine prosocial advertising messages that are intended to help children stay away from alcohol. Alcohol companies claim that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to rectify underage drinking (Willing, 2004, May 13). However, marketers know that young people will not be able to relate to those boring anti-drinking messages, and the more such messages they receive, the more that they will like and act upon the lively pro-drinking messages that promise happiness, satisfaction and fun (Austin, Pinkleton & Fujioka, 1999). Such is the power of the right side.  [TOP]

Message Interpretation Process

A theoretical model has been developed that successfully explains how children interpret alcohol advertising and how the interpretation process influences what children expect and how they behave vis-à-vis alcohol (Austin et al., 1999). The Message Interpretation Process (MIP) model assumes that children and adolescents engage in an active, logical decision-making process as they interpret advertising messages. Identification with the portrayal of characters, especially with those that are positively rewarded for their behavior, is a powerful predictor of drinking expectancies and behavior. Children assess realism of the ad and the similarity that they see in the ad to their own life. The greater the degree of similarity, the more likely the child will identify with, want to be like, and behave like the characters in the ad. The more the child identifies with the ad, the more desirable the characters and activities in the ad become. The greater the identification and desirability, the more powerful the expectancies for drinking become. The greater the drinking expectancies, the sooner and more that children will drink.  [TOP]

Pro-Drinking Advertising & Portrayals

Alcohol advertisements link drinking with highly valued personal attributes such as sociability, elegance, and physical attractiveness, and with desirable outcomes such as success, relaxation, romance, athletic prowess and adventure. Portrayals of alcohol use are particularly prevalent in prime-time programming, and during television coverage of professional sports events. Alcohol use is portrayed by attractive, influential and successful people and often is associated with sexually suggestive content. Alcohol use is rarely portrayed in a manner suggesting negative consequences. Although very young children may not be aware of the subtle connections between drinking, personal attributes and desired outcomes, adolescents from age 14 up perceive such messages just as the advertisers intend that they do. By age 16, adolescents consider alcohol advertisements as their favorite commercials, portrayed with fun lifestyles, celebrities, humor, animation and, of course, rock music. Alcohol advertisements associate drinking with activities such as driving, swimming, boating, lounging by the beach or poolside. Children interpret such ads as implying that drinking takes place during these activities. Adolescents heavily exposed to alcohol ads tend to believe that it is acceptable for teenagers to become intoxicated, are more likely to drink, are more likely to drink heavily, and are more likely to drink in the same kind of hazardous situations that they perceive in the alcohol ads (Grube, 1993; Robinson, Chen & Killen, 1998).

Television alcohol advertisers know what commercials appeal to young people and what do not. Adolescents like commercials that are delivered with humor, celebrity endorsers, animated characters, animals, youth-oriented characters, and rock and rap music. Adolescents interpret alcohol commercials as an encouragement to purchase the product based upon its relationship to sexual attractiveness--attractive young adults drink in order to achieve rewarding ends. On the other hand, adolescents dislike product-oriented elements of alcohol commercials-aspects of commercials that deal with the product itself, how it tastes, how it compares to other brands (Waiters, Treno & Grube, 2001). If television advertisers were not targeting young people in their ads, they would design their ads to be strictly product oriented and not use imagery that is appealing to adolescents.

It appears that television advertisers have a keen knowledge about the importance of emotions in the decision-making process of young people. The decision whether to drink or not to drink is a social decision, and social decisions occur in an emotional context. Although an individual child's choices depend on the interplay of both logical and emotional processes, television advertisers bias the individual's logical processes by using image-based and emotional appeals that cut the child's logical decision-making short (Pinkleton, Austin & Fujioka, 2001). The desirability of what the adolescent sees portrayed in the alcohol ad overwhelms the child's more logically based decision-making criteria by directly influencing the extent that the child wants to emulate the attributes and outcomes of the characters that the child sees in the ad. The child develops his or her own expectations about the benefits of imitating those alcohol-using characters in the ad, and those positive expectations lead the child to drink (Austin et al., 1999). Whether or not there is a causal relationship between alcohol advertising and portrayals on television and the total quantity of alcohol sold may be debatable. But whether there is a causal relationship or not, it is obvious that television advertising is a formidable proponent of alcohol consumption (Andsager, Austin & Pinkleton, 2001). Children are especially vulnerable to these messages, and more times than not, they respond to television by joining the drinking club.  [TOP]

Television & The First Drink

Unger, Schuster, Zogg, Dent, & Stacy (2003) concluded, "…the act of forming a favorable emotional response to alcohol advertising might be a crucial step in the process of adolescent experimentation with alcohol." Television does lead children to drink, but very few researchers are willing to unequivocally say that television advertising causes underage drinking. The reason for this caution is that most studies that link exposure to alcohol advertising with adolescent drinking are cross-sectional--data from particular subjects are obtained at one point in time. Cross-sectional studies can show that a relationship may or may not exist between two variables, but they usually cannot prove, at least in most social science surveys, that a change in one variable causes a change in another variable. For example, Collins, Schell, Ellickson & McCaffrey (2003), in a cross-sectional study involving 1,530 8th graders, found that adolescents exposed to beer advertising were more advertisement aware than those who were less exposed to such advertising. Their analysis was correlational, but it did not find evidence of a causal association between the two variables. The researchers could say that exposure to beer advertising was linked to advertising awareness, but they could not conclude that exposure to beer advertising caused advertising awareness. It is possible that the opposite was true: Advertising awareness may have caused teenagers to watch more television programs that pushed beer. Or, possibly, there were other unmeasured variables that caused children to both be more aware of beer advertisements and to watch more beer advertisements on television. This design feature of cross-sectional studies is particularly troublesome when there are culprits such as alcohol and television firms demanding "show me the evidence" before they would consider reducing the risk to children in their product advertising and promotion. This evidence usually cannot be uncovered from cross-sectional studies.

Some studies that link exposure to alcohol advertising with adolescent drinking are longitudinal--data from particular subjects are obtained over a period of time. A longitudinal study was used by Robinson et al. (1998) to determine if watching television, watching videos in a VCR, playing computer or video games, or watching music videos were risk factors for either the onset of drinking or continued alcohol use. 1,533 ninth-grade students participated in the study over an 18-month period. Baseline measures were established for hours of media use and drinking. Eighteen months later, for these particular individuals, measures for media use and drinking were obtained once again. During the follow-up at 18 months, 36.2% of the nondrinkers began drinking, and 50.7% of the baseline drinkers continued to drink. The study found that each increase of 1 hour per day in television viewing was associated with a 9% average increased risk of starting to drink over the next 18 months, and each increase of 1 hour per day in music video viewing was associated with a 31% increased risk of starting to drink over the next 18 months. Each increase of 1 hour per day in VCR viewing was associated with an 11% average decreased risk of starting to drink over the next 18 months, and playing video and computer games were not associated with the onset of drinking. There were no associations found between baseline media use and maintenance of drinking over the next 18 months for adolescents who were already drinkers at baseline. Note that television and music video exposure frequently involves substantial exposure to alcohol portrayals, while watching videotapes and playing computer and video games do not.

Since this study was non-experimental, it is not possible to directly determine causation from the data. To be experimental, our young subjects would have to be treated as though they were rats or guinea pigs, and that, of course, would be unethical. However, this longitudinal study was able to conclude that watching television and watching music videos--activities that involve substantial alcohol portrayals-- were significant risk factors that are causally related to adolescents starting to drink. These conclusions could be made because (1) the media exposures were made prior to the onset of drinking; (2) the strengths of the associations were high and increased as media exposure increased; (3) the factors were very specific with separate variables identified for different types of media exposure and for onset versus continuation of drinking; and (4) the results were plausible and consistent with cognitive theory: Prior to beginning drinking, adolescents used the specific media exposure to help them to decide whether to start drinking, but if they were already drinkers, adolescents relied on the drinking experience itself to help them to decide whether to continue drinking.

The television and alcohol industries have apparently chosen to ignore results from either cross-sectional or longitudinal studies that establish links between mass media alcohol advertising and adolescent alcohol use. The evidence may not be considered good enough for the media and alcohol industries purposes; however, reasonable people, without a vested financial interest in those industries, are likely to agree with Robinson et al. (1998) that in young adolescents overall exposure to media that contain representations of alcohol use is associated with increased risks of starting to drink. Reasonable people may also conclude, appropriately, that the most awesome means of communication devised by man helps drive many children to drink.  [TOP]

Counter-Advertising

Television alcohol advertising, promotions and portrayals influence our children to drink. Multi-million dollar campaigns reach adolescents with sophisticated means and seductive messages that render the child's own logical defenses useless. We owe it to our children to challenge such marketing activities, so that alcohol is no longer ignored as the number-one health and safety risk for young people. One strategy used to limit the harm of exposure of young people to alcohol advertising is pro-social advertisements (PSAs). PSAs are counter-advertisements that warn young people about the hazards of alcohol. For PSAs to be effective, they must compete with commercial alcohol advertisements in terms of quality, interest and frequency of exposure during the times and programming that young people watch television. An analysis of PSAs intended to counteract pro-alcohol advertisements were found to be ineffective, unimpressive and boring by their target audience (Grube, 1993). PSAs are at a considerable disadvantage when competing against the big budgets of the alcohol companies. In the Austin et al. (1999) survey, young adults who reported a higher frequency of alcohol use also reported higher levels of desirability, identification, expectancies, enjoyment, visual appeal and effectiveness of alcohol advertisements. These same young people also reported lower overall effectiveness of PSAs.

Pinkleton et al. (2001) found that adolescents rated the content (persuasiveness, memorableness, trustworthiness, and lack of stupidness) of pro-social advertising messages more positively than the content of alcohol advertisements, but this favorable affect did not have a consistent and sizeable association with adolescents' attitudes and behavior towards drinking. Adolescents rated the production quality (visual effects, acting, music, appeal and fun) of alcohol advertisements more positively than pro-social advertisements, and this favorable affect did have a consistent and positive association with adolescents' attitudes and behavior towards drinking. Counter-advertising is at a considerable disadvantage not because of the content of the message, but because of the delivery of the message. "Adolescents knew that the information in the pro-social advertisements was more truthful, but their wishful thinking outweighed their logical processing," according to the authors. Counter-advertising messages alone may never be able to compete with "Booze, Babes and Bands," but they will be better equipped to succeed if they are carefully targeted, attractive, emphasize rewards, make use of colors, music, action and humor that are appealing to teenagers, and are frequently delivered. Pro-social ads that use humor, especially sarcastic ads that mock the unrealistic and harmful portrayals in some pro-alcohol ads, can be particularly effective in getting children to think about how they can be manipulated by the pro-alcohol media (Andsager, Austin & Pinkleton, 2002). Effective pro-social campaigns cannot be limited to television messages, but instead must be multi-modal and involve parents, peer groups, teachers and the community.   [TOP]

Our Drinking Culture

Thanks in large part to the mass media, alcohol use by young people is becoming both expected and accepted by our culture. This is a disaster for children. Flooded in alcohol, we are now a culture where children are exposed to intoxicating agents from their very beginning. When a child becomes involved with a psychoactive drug such as alcohol, that child can have a very short childhood. That child is changed forever. We see token efforts by the media to promote "responsible drinking," but the media knows that those efforts won't deter children from starting to drink. The media knows what types of messages appeal to children, and it apparently purposely designs its own social responsibility messages to be ineffective, while using television to constantly attack the affective areas of our children's brains to implant their brands.

The research of Austin et al. (1999) discovered that perceptions of media content matter more than exposure to media content itself. Austin & Chen (2003) found that because family communication constitutes a child's first learning environment, family communication could create a way for the child to think about and interpret what the child sees and believes in television messages. In fact, children cited parents as their major source of information about alcohol other than the media. It would appear that parents could act as a buffer to media messages. Unfortunately, many parents intensify the harmful effects of television content by endorsing the pro-alcohol messages or failing to refute them. Parents or other adults can endorse television messages by their own behavior--drinking too much, drinking often, and getting high and enjoying it. Regardless of parental verbal communication about alcohol, what parents actually do is far more important. Non-verbal communication by parents through their own substance use is a more powerful form of communication than what they say (Ennett, Bauman, Foshee, Pemberton & Hicks, 2001). Parents also endorse pro-alcohol messages by identifying with the characters in the alcohol ads themselves, by appearing to enjoy alcohol ads and programming where alcohol plays a positive role. When children grow-up in these kinds of pro-alcohol learning environments they are not as skeptical of alcohol advertisements. "To the extent that parents lead their children to interpret media messages less skeptically they may encourage their children to find appeals of alcohol more appealing, thus leading their children to more risky behaviors" (Austin & Chen, 2003), and making them easy marks for the television alcohol pushers.  [TOP]

Conclusions

When the Bill of Rights was drafted the most awesome means of communication devised by man may have been a guy delivering messages on a galloping horse. Since then, the First Amendment has been used to defend perpetuators of the most vile of human communications. The television industry has no more right to bombard, intentionally or not, children with messages designed in such a way to cause them to start drinking than an anarchist has to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. The alcohol and media industries denials that their methods of building brands and market share can cause great harm to children are arrogant and insulting. They are arrogant because they place the importance of their own profits far ahead of the health of our children. They are insulting because they contemptuously disregard the work of health, communications and other professionals who have been working hard identifying the risk factors between media exposure and underage drinking. Where do we go from here?

Strasburger & Donnerstein (1999) reported that parents do little to control the media their children are exposed to, but nevertheless, appear to be concerned about the influence of television on their children. Co-viewing can be an effective method for parents to mediate the effects of television on their children, but is limited to the programming that is viewed together; 44% of television hours are viewed separately. Parents should limit all media use to no more than 1-2 hours per day (American Academy of Pediatrics, as cited by Strasburger & Donnerstein, 1999). Raising children is primarily a parental responsibility and it appears, that as far as unsupervised media use is concerned, parents are not doing a good job. Perhaps these parental failures are due in part to the long neglected responsibility of our schools to provide proper education for their former students, many of whom are now parents themselves.

Schools are often reluctant to take on the responsibility of providing comprehensive media education programs. Many school officials feel that they do not have either the time or the budget to take-on what they see as extra-curricula activities. "Viewed in the context of protecting children and adolescents against crucial public health problem," Strasburger & Donnerstein (1999) report, "…such programs take on a new urgency." Failure to provide media education leaves children and parents exposed to the rapacious media and unprepared for life.

Pediatricians should become more actively involved in treating alcohol use as a health issue by routinely discussing hazards of alcohol use with parents and discouraging parents from allowing underage drinking at home or other locations; they should discuss positive and negative role modeling with parents, and actively participate in school and community efforts to promote alcohol-abuse prevention programs (American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Abuse, 2001). Pediatricians should also routinely include comprehensive media education in their practice with patients and their parents, and actively participate in media education programs in schools and in the community (American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, 1999). For these recommendations to be effective, insurance plans and other payers may need to provide additional funding for these professional services; for example, health plans based on the PPO (preferred provider organization) model, such as Blue Shield of California, may have to pay higher fees for services to doctors; IPA/network model health maintenance organizations, such as Blue Cross HMO - California Care, may need to build the cost of these activities into the capitation payments that they make to pediatricians; and staff model HMOs, such as Kaiser Health Plan, may have to hire more pediatricians. Underage drinking is a major health problem and solving this problem will need the focused leadership of all health and health insurance professionals. In America today, going after the pocketbook may be faster and more effective than appealing to moral imperatives alone.

Because alcohol producers and their advertising conduits in the television industry are not voluntarily meeting their obligations to children, new regulation efforts, under the control of the pubic health community, need to be initiated. When regulation of the media is mentioned, First Amendment violation cries go out right away. It took a great depression to stimulate Congress to regulate securities advertising with the Securities Act of 1933. Today, underage drinking is a major health problem, and our children need at least the same level of protection that investors receive from unscrupulous advertisers. Pro-Alcohol advertising is commercial speech and is not automatically protected by the First Amendment (Strasburger & Donnerstein, 1999). Congress should empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate all alcohol related mass media advertising. The FDA would not desire to keep consumers in the dark about or censor relevant alcohol product information. On the contrary, it would require full disclosure of all major health issues linked to use of alcohol products. Regardless of the advertising medium, the FDA would require that all pro-alcohol advertising be limited to "tombstone" advertising that includes black and white text only, with no use of human or animal images, cartoon characters or music. Regulation would include promotional portrayals of alcohol use wherever such portrayals would be receiving media coverage, such as at televised sporting events. Such regulation would allow businesses to advertise consumer information such as price and ingredients without enticing people, especially children, to endanger their health. Restrictions on alcohol advertisements would be similar to what has been proposed for tobacco advertisements (Paralusz, 1998).

Make no mistake about it: The fight for fairness in alcohol advertising will be long and hard. These types of regulations and restrictions would undoubtedly be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court. Proponents must be prepared to take their cause to the level of a Constitutional Amendment if needed. Regulation of overt alcohol advertising will not solve all social problems that are made worse by portrayals on television and in the mass media generally, but such regulation will be a start. When the health of children is at stake, we must make the least dangerous assumption: Unrestricted television alcohol advertising causes children to drink, and underage drinking is both dangerous and often deadly to children and others. At some point in the future, when television starts performing in a socially responsible way, the most awesome means of communication devised by man may actually become our friend.  [TOP]

[Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score is 12.0]

References

American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education (1999). Media Education. Pediatrics, 104(2), 341-343.

American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Abuse (2001). Alcohol use and abuse: A pediatric concern. Pediatrics, 108(1), 185-189.

Andsager. J. L., Austin, E. W., & Pinkleton, B. E. (2001). Questioning the value of realism: Young adults' processing of messages in alcohol-related public service announcements and advertising. Journal of Communication, 51(1), 121-142.
 
Andsager. J. L., Austin, E. W., & Pinkleton, B. E. (2002). Gender as a variable in interpretation of alcohol-related messages. Communications Research, 29(3), 246-269.

Austin, E. W., & Chen, Y. J. (2003). The Relationship of Parental Reinforcement of Media Messages to College Students' Alcohol-Related Behaviors. Journal of Health Communication, 8(2), 157-169.

Austin, E. W., Pinkleton, B. & Fujioka, Y. (1999). Assessing prosocial message effectiveness: Effects of message quality, production quality, and persuasiveness. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 195-210.

Austin, E. W., Pinkleton, B. & Fujioka, Y. (2000). The role of interpretation processes and parental discussion in the media's effects on adolescents' use of alcohol. Pediatrics, 105(2), 343-349.

Collins, R. L., Schell, T., Ellickson, P.L., & McCaffrey, D. (2003). Predictors of beer advertising awareness among eighth graders. Addiction, 98(9), 1297-1306.

Ennett, S. T., Bauman, K. E., Foshee, V. A., Pemberton, M., & Hicks, K. A. (2001). Parent-child communication about adolescent tobacco and alcohol use: What parents say and does it affect youth behavior? Journal of Marriage and Family, 63, 48-62.

Grube, J. W. (1993). Alcohol portrayals and alcohol advertising on television. Alcohol Health & Research World, 17(1), 61+. 

Heron, T. E., & Martz, S. A. (1996). Ethical and legal issues in consultation. Remedial & Special Education, 17(6), 377+. 

Lawton, C. (2004, February 5). Lawsuits allege alcohol makers target youths. The Wall Street Journal Online. Retrieved July 5, 2004 from http://online.wsj.com.

Milloy, S. (2004, May 21). Junk science: Lawsuits, advertising and money. Fox News Channel. Retrieved July 5, 2004 from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120514,00.html

Paralusz, K. M. (1998). Ashes to ashes: Why FDA regulation of tobacco advertising may mark the end of the road for the Marlboro Man. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 24(1), 89-122.

Pinkleton, B., Austin, E. W., & Fujioka, Y. (2001). The relationship of perceived beer ad and PSA quality to high School students' alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 45(4), 575-597.

Robinson, T. N., Chen, H. L., & Killen, J. D. (1998). Television and music video exposure and risk of adolescent alcohol use. Pediatrics, 102( 5).

Schore, A. N. (2000). Attachment and regulation of the right brain. Attachment and Human Development, 2(1), 23-47.

Schore, A. N. (2002). Advances in neuropsychoanalysis, attachment theory, and trauma research: Implications for self psychology. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 22(3), 433-484.

Strasburger, V. C., Donnerstein, E. (1999). Children, adolescents, and the media: Issues and solutions. Pediatrics, 103(1), 129-139.

Unger, J. B., Schuster, D., Zogg, J., Dent, C. W., Stacy, A.W. (2003). Alcohol advertising exposure and adolescent alcohol use: A comparison of exposure measures. Addiction Research & Theory, 11(3). 177-193.

US Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS, 2000). 10th special report to the US Congress on alcohol & health: drinking over the life span: issues in behavior and risk: alcohol involvement over the life course (chap. 1b). Retrieved August 4, 2004 from http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/
10report/chap01b.pdf

Waiters, E. D., Treno, A. J., & Grube, J. W. (2001). Alcohol advertising and youth: a focus-group analysis of what young people find appealing in alcohol advertising. Contemporary Drug Problems, 28(4), 695-718.

Willing, R. (2004, May 13). Lawsuits target alcohol industry. USA Today. Retrieved July 5, 2004 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/
2004-05-13-alcopops-usat_x.htm

World Health Organization (WHO, 2001). Global status report: Alcohol and young people. Retrieved July 21, 2004 from http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2001/
WHO_MSD_MSB_01.1.pdf

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© 2004 Jim Hetherman

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Open doors in your mind
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