Friday, June 14,2002
Single parent families trendy in TV says study
A story released today by the Associated Press reports that according to a study done by the Parents Television Council, television shows paint an unrealistic picture of American families by showing far more single-parent households than exist in society.
Researchers for the nonprofit group compared 2000 U.S. Census figures with data collected on broadcast network primetime series airing during the 2001-02 season, a total of 119 shows.
"Sadly, it's trendy in Hollywood to portray a broken family as hip, as a storyline," the group's president, L. Brent Bozell III, said Friday. "Television has the ability to promote the goodness and the health of the nuclear family. It ought to do so."
The study also found that fictional single fathers get a disproportionate amount of airtime. Among U.S. families, 6 percent are headed by single dads; the TV figure is 14 percent, more than double.
There's a smaller discrepancy when it comes to households with single mothers. Twenty-seven percent of TV families are headed by single moms, compared to 22 percent of real families.
Television apparently is more comfortable with death than divorce: 90 percent of single TV dads are widowers.
The Parents Television Council took solace in the fact that fathers as well as mothers are prominent on TV. The study found that 83 percent of all children in TV series have some sort of "father figure" in their lives, while 79 percent of TV children have a mother figure.
Bozell said, however, that he'd welcome greater emphasis on the role of men living with their wives and children.
