Nun Shows Way to New Media Environment

Here’s one person’s plan to tend the environment.

Not the forests. Not the wildlife. Not the oceans, lakes, rivers and streams. Not the air we breathe. Something just as important, however.

The media environment. The ideas we breathe.

“We take care of other environments,” Elizabeth Thoman said. “Why not look after our media environment?”

With its thickening, ever-choking pollution, why not, indeed? Thus, Thoman, a Roman Catholic nun, is laying the groundwork for a not-for-profit Center for Media and Values that would be an ambitious extension of the Los Angeles-based Media & Values quarterly magazine that she has been guiding since 1977.

Thoman recently got authorization from the Media & Values board of directors to proceed with her plans for the center, which, if anything like the unique, visionary and amazingly smart quarterly she founded and still runs, would be a glowing, much-needed addition to the landscape.

With a paid circulation of only 3,000, Media & Values is no media giant. Yet the bulk of its subscribers are churches and schools, where its influence presumably multiplies as a resource for pastors, youth leaders, educators and family counselors.

While most recently exploring such critical issues as home videos, elections, the elderly and sex as they relate to TV, the quarterly has continued to encourage critical thought about the medium’s impact on society on a level that’s aimed at grass-roots America.

Operating from a small video production and publishing office, the center would do the same, but in vastly expanded ways.

Think tanks that study media and popular culture are hardly unprecedented. “But they’re not for consumers,” Thoman said. “They don’t tell you how to cope with slasher films.” Or “Film at 11.”

Too many of us are media dumb. We all know how to turn on our sets and watch TV, for example, but not how to watch TV.

But imagine a video on how to watch cartoons with your kids. Imagine one explaining the nuances of game shows or how to read between the lines of a sitcom. Imagine one explaining how to watch TV news critically and how to better understand where news ends and entertainment starts.

The center would provide such resources in its quest to help media consumers be “more savvy and make choices,” Thoman said.

It would be a “voice of values,” she said. It would develop training programs and conferences (“Can You Use TV as a Baby Sitter?”), and it would provide print and electronic materials for media education in homes, schools and religious organizations.

It would put out booklets. Thoman even envisions reaching ordinary Americans by deploying a 79-cent copy of “How to Watch Television With Your Children” next to the tabloids at the supermarket checkout. The potential seems limitless.

As does the need.

Thoman might consider putting those booklets in shopping malls, should “Video Toy Chest” pan out. Created by Vision Marketing of Ft. Lee, N.J., “Video Toy Chest” is the umbrella title for 40-minute home videos consisting mostly of made-for-TV toy commercials.

They’ll be distributed free Oct. 28 to 1 1/2 million kids in shopping malls across the nation, Paul Auerbach, Vision Marketing’s senior vice president, said from his office.

About 75% of each video will consist of toy commercials, with the remaining time filled by intros, public service announcements and prize-offering quizzes for parents, Auerbach said. Only kids accompanied by their parents will be given the videos, he said.

Of course, the timing is for Christmas. “We find that kids don’t view commercials as commercials,” said Auerbach, who foresees additional “Video Toy Chest” giveaways should the first one succeed. “They view commercials as entertainment and they view them as the toys themselves.”

Kids popping their personal toy commercial videos into the VCR? The thought boggles.

“Video Toy Chest” makes an airtight case for the video literacy lessons being taught third-graders in some Minneapolis and St. Paul magnet schools.

Some of the instruction is in TV commercials. A teacher in one class shows her students the same Saturday morning toy and game commercials again and again so that the charm and glitter fade.

Then the kids are split into four groups. One group is assigned to watch the foreground of a commercial, another the background. A third group listens to the audio message and the fourth the background sound effects.

Then they discuss what they’ve seen.

That’s a wonderful idea, and so is another exercise by the same teacher in which she sensitizes her students to violence by showing them old cartoons and having them shout “Ouch!” each time a character is hit.

This is exactly the kind of instruction that the Center for Media and Values could make available on a national level.

Already the recipient of a $75,000 grant for a membership campaign, the center is still a dream, not a reality. But if anyone can narrow the gap, it’s the talented and determined Thoman, a former journalism teacher with a master’s degree in communications management, who has made media awareness her crusade without becoming shrill or negative.

“I’ve studied how organizations form themselves,” she said. “The peace movement started by creating something positive, not negative. And the anti-smoking movement didn’t work until it became a movement to feel better.”

Now comes the media environment movement.

“I need some local gardeners who will nurture this little seedling,” said Thoman, who has already begun the center’s incorporation process and is seeking foundation money and corporate and business leaders to join the Media & Values board, which would be expanded for the center. “All we need are some major up-front names who would be committed to building a movement in the 1990s,” she said.

Thoman sounds almost as if she’s describing a revolution--and, in a sense, she is.