SUPPLEMENT - CHILDREN AND TELEVISION - A CONFERENCE SUMMARY

In June 1996, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with the Children's Television Workshop, hosted its first annual Conference on Children and Television. The con ference was organized around four discussions: (1) the elements that c haracterize quality children's television; (2) the problems that produ cers confront in creating, producing, and selling quality programming; (3) the dilemmas confronting advertisers; and (4) the dilemmas confro nting buyers and distributors. Conference participants included repres entatives from public and commercial broadcast and cable television in dustries, producers of children's programming, media buyers from adver tising agencies, and advocates and researchers of children's televisio n. Overall, the participants agreed that under the right conditions it is possible to create high-quality, educational programming that chil dren will watch. (The Federal Communications Commission's three-hour r ule was seen as a positive step toward achieving that goal.) However, most also recognized the hurdles educational programs must clear to ga in an audience and be seen as successful in the eyes of advertisers an d broadcasters.