Television. It's the good ol' way to waste a few hours of spare time. I couldn't imagine what it could have been like to only have a few channels like my parents did back in the day, since I have over 500 of them. News, cartoons, movies, radio, etc. So many options! But are all these options really a good thing? I think so. Yes, on some shows or channels the content may be too graphic for the younger audience, but there are channels dedicated to just them as well. Many people believe that television content should be more censored, but I don't see the point. For example, I love the show Sex and the City. Of course it does not come on HBO anymore, so I watch the syndicated version on Style Network. Most of the cuss words and other choice words are bleeped out and whatever nudity was it in it edited out as well. My guess would be that no children are watching the show and the people that are are either grown up enough to not care about the content or are the same people that watch the trashy girls on Jerseylicious. Not a big deal if you ask me.
Then there is CBS. My favorite show - The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson - comes on that channel. I am a huge fan. He is my favorite comedian and I like how he uses social media to interact with the viewers. He has a special segment every night dedicated to "tweetmail," questions viewers tweet or email him and his awesome robot sidekick (who also has a twitter). The show comes on at 11:35 at night and I would hope that the parents who don't want to their kids to watch the show already put them to bed. So why bleep out some curse words? He's allowed to say "balls," "penis," and "damn." I guess the channel is trying to uphold their reputation no matter what time the shows come on...
Another show I watched the other night is Tia and Tamera, the twin sisters' reality TV show on Style Network. My brother is the production assistant and the show and he lets me know how much of the show is actually reality. Let's just say, not much is. There are writers that make up the storyline of the season and they are told to be very dramatic with each other. The whole show is a roller coaster that goes from sisters who love each other to crying cat fights and back again. They cry at least every ten minutes, and even though my brother said they do cry a lot, they really caked it on for the show. I understand that this is to make money, but being portrayed as over-emotional on national TV does not sound good to me.
People look at television for entertainment, and the amount of time each person spends watching it varies greatly. I'm not a big fan of censoring TV content because I believe that the parents should be the refs between their kids and what they watch. Besides, most channels, at least in my opinion, censor the wrong thing. Craig Ferguson has fun with it by inserting fun words, like "tutti fruit" or "ay caramba" instead of curses, but what are a few curse words opposed to the extreme partying shown on Jersey Shore? The cultivation theory states that the "constant exposure to the same images develops a commonality outlook." I am a fairly liberal person and I understand that cursing does offend a lot of people and that seeing it on TV may influence some kids to do it, but they have plenty more exposure to it than just TV, like movies and video games. This generation is way more uncensored that the ones in the past, that's obvious, and that is because our exposure to violence and sex in everything we watch, but I think that people need to take a closer look at what exactly they censor rather than how much of it.
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