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Children’s TV review “a missed opportunity.”

Commercial free to air networks weren't very taken with the findings of ACMA's Children’s Television Standards review.

kids  tvSeven, Nine and TEN weren’t particularly taken by yesterday’s revised Children’s Television Standards (CTS) by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Free TV Australia, which also represents regional commercial networks, issued a statement describing it as “a missed opportunity.”

It claims it fails to take into account our changing media landscape or the imminent launch of the kid’s channel, ABC3.

ACMA upheld quotas for children’s television and extended C programming to 8:30am weekdays.

But Free TV says the environment for children’s screen time activities has changed significantly since the CTS was first introduced in the 1980s. It argues child audiences are fragmenting and moving to ‘unregulated media environments’ (read internet…).

In its statement, Free TV said: “No other media platform here in Australia, or in overseas jurisdictions, is subject to the same level of regulation with regards to children’s and preschool programming as are the Free TV broadcasters.

“The CTS has not kept pace with children’s screen time choices and imposes a high burden on broadcasters. It is disappointing that the ACMA has not seen fit to amend the CTS further to ensure their relevance to the Australian child audience in the 21st century.”

Of course it did manage to thank ACMA for not banning junk food ads, a significant source of its revenue.

Meanwhile Rob Moodie from the National Preventative Health Taskforce disagreed with its decision not to ban junk food ads. He told The Australian, “They’ve said they couldn’t find the evidence but, from our point of view, they didn’t look hard enough.”

3 Responses

  1. Any bans or limitations on junk food advertising are pointless, it is up to parents to provide healthy meals. Children usually aren’t buying the grocceries, or cooking their meals. Children will be exposed to all sorts of advertising when they get older anyway.

    The real issues are complete missed:
    Children’s programming on free to air TV couldn’t get much worse, with the requirements of C programs only making the situation worse. In particular a large amount of animated content was wasted by Nine in the past, due to these requirements. Animated content rated PG ended up been shown in the early hours of the night on Nine in the distant past, with the most inappropriate commercials possible.

    Most of the series (ie Bakugan, Bratz, Chaotic, Horseland, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX) on Toasted TV in the mornings are little more than commercials for the merchandise. When a decent series (ie Avatar – The Last Airbender) is shown, the series is edited to allow more time for the commercial breaks and host segments. While the ABC is usually all repeats in the mornings, rarely offering any new content as an alternative.

    There seems to be less new children’s programming each year, especially in terms of quality. With far too many repeats, especially of Australian series for children. The ABC is the worse, focusing more on online content, and hardly offering any new content on TV in the afternoons for children anymore.

  2. I really want a job where I get paid to say the opposite of what the ACMA say regardless of reason or common sense. Quotas aren’t for kids who are off surfing the net, it’s to protect younger kids, who through the previous study that was released recently “Use of electronic media and communications: Early childhood to teenage years” (On July 15th, and I think it was covered on TV Tonight) we see that the early childhood use of the internet is negligible.

    What a “missed opportunity” to stop protecting the interests of young children!

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