Children spend thousands of hours captivate

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates the advertising industry to ensure consumers' protection from false or misleading information (46). The question many assert is should the government be allowed to monitor what is legitimate simply because some do not approve (Hernandez 34). This question requires value judgments that can only be answered through constructing public policy (Kunkel 58). Most people in society recognize that advertising directed towards children is excessive, manipulative and unfairly takes advantage of children (Kunkel 60).

The American Dietetic Association conducted their study by viewing 52.5 hours of television during children's programming. In that time 997 commercials were for a product and a mere 68 were public service announcements. More than half (56.5%) were advertisements for foods while only 10 of the 68 public service announcements were nutrition related. On the average of the 19 commercials advertisements per hour, 11 were for food. This means a child views a commercial for food every five minutes (Kotz 1297).

Advertisers have even manipulated schools into a form of advertising. Schools are now often times allowing vendors of food and beverages to advertise within their confines in order to make up for revenue shortfalls (Schlosser 51). District 11 in Colorado Springs was the first public school to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of their buses (51). Many schools thereafter would follow in its footsteps in allowing advertisement in schools. Of course in light of its financial benefits, the downfall to the terms of the vendors would be the quota of beverages to be sold within the schools in a given time. If the schools did not produce the amount of profit written in the contract from students buying their products, the money given would substantially be lowered. The question is what should the limit be on marketing to be considered too far?

Findings indicate that the majority of children up to age five "experience difficulty distinguishing perceptually between programs and commercials" (Schlosser 47). It is noted that children at this young age tend to treat all television content as a one-dimensional type of message. For instance, child viewers do not begin to discriminate between fantasy or reality dimensions of television content at the most basic levels until grade school. Advertisers compound this issue by using perceptual similarities in program content and commercial content which adds to the difficulty children already have in distinguishing between the two variables. Secondly, the study implies that, "A substantial proportion of children, particularly those below age eight, express little or no comprehension of the persuasive intent of commercials" (Kunkel 63). This is a crucial argument in rega

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