Is That Man Paid To Say That?

The BBC reported today that 'Parents are not prudes,
but feared for their children and the amount of media
they consume e.g. popular music videos where, unsupervised,
their children repeatedly exposed their minds to violent and sexual images'.
1500 parents were surveyed and 82% of parents
said that 'The children repeated the sexualised lyrics
of the videos without knowing what they mean'.
Many parents tried to stop their children watching
said 'entertainments'. I would never take the Gradgrind approach
and reduce children's vocabulary and knowledge to their understanding.
I love language too much for that, and how can anyone understand more
except by openness? And I trulIy abhor the idea of the weak and poor
and passive being prostituted to the wealthy, and information rich,
by some sort of utilitarian controlled and role based determinist education.

Rather I would wish parents to follow the example of Mr Frank Zappa,
who from an interview I read in the 1980s that was done in 1967 for Rolling Stone
watched television with his children and taught Dweezil, then aged 7,
about advertising-what could be believed and what should not be-
by teaching his son to ask of the adverts,'Is that man paid to say that?'.
If only more parents would teach their children to critically ask
 a similar question of Rhiana, Eminem and the corporate interests behind them.