Quack!

The American Academy of Pediatrics is so worried about technology, culture and kids that it wants to ban TV for small children, restrict access for all kids and start recording media histories of all the young. Even pedes are muddling technology, truth and medicine against a horrifying backdrop of bullets flying all over the country.

If America's kids aren't going to be the safest and most moral in the world, they are fast becoming the most harassed and regulated. And wait till the pedes get around to the Net.

Last week it was the nation's pediatricians' turn to show us how to muddle medicine, technology and truth.

No institution is above exploiting kids these days, it seems, even the ones supposedly responsible for caring for them.

Along with posting copies of the Ten Commandments in public schools and harassing teenagers at movie ticket booths and video stores, the world's richest and looniest country has taken another giant step towards "protecting" children from the technology-driven culture it creates and then peddles all over the world.

Journalism and politics have been the most enthusiastic practitioners of this art in recent years. Now the American Academy of Pediatrics has joined the clergy, V-chip manufacturers, blocking software makers, educators and theater owners in the booming movement to protect kids from cultural technologies like movies, TV and the Net.

Given all the people fussing over their well-being, American kids ought to be the safest and most secure on the planet. They aren't. That this nearly insane debate takes place against a backdrop of horrifying video of bullet-riddled children and innocent adults in cities all over America highlights the surreal nature of this discussion. "What a strange country America is," said a commentator for the BBC last Tuesday night. "People are regularly shot down like animals and they just keep making, then banning movies and TV shows and dirty pictures."

The BBC got it right, even if the American press rarely does. If there's a link among these episodic outbursts of violence, it isn't media, but the juxtaposition of emotionally disturbed teenagers and middle-aged men -- almost invariably white -- and lethal weapons.

The sad truth is that American kids aren't becoming safer, healthier or more moral as a result of all this "concern." They are simply becoming the most hassled and over-regulated.

Announcing that television viewing can affect the mental, social and physical health of young people, the Academy has, for the first time, unveiled a plan that will allow physicians and parents to manage children's media habits.

"As pediatricians, we are taking all the research concerns into account and trying to raise the bar a bit, as suggestions for optimal parenting," declared Dr. Marjorie Hogan, the lead author of the Academy's report. (The report appears in the August issue of Pediatrics, published on Monday, but is not available for free on the Web, of course.)

The report doesn't actually raise the bar, it simply lowers the boom on kids' freedom. The Academy has no plans for its members to ask parents how much time they spend with their small kids, whether they watch movies and trawl websites with them, or abandon them for hours to sophisticated new media.

Nor does the report suggest the future consequences - social, educational and economic - for children cut off from new media technologies. The report makes few useful distinctions between newborns and teenagers about to head off for college or the workplace - all patients would be subject to this latest in a growing list of mindless restrictions and petty harassment sparked by the rise of techno-driven popular culture.

And make no mistake about it: if pediatricians are asking parents to ban and restrict TV, the Net -- which links users to much more diverse kinds of information -- can't be far behind. This is, after all, how a Communications Decency Act is spawned.

The pediatric academy suggests that children under two shouldn't watch any television, older children shouldn't have television sets in their bedrooms, and - most astonishing - that pediatricians should have parents fill out a "media history", along with a medical history, at office visits. Thus in addition to being blocked from "dangerous" movies like "American Pie," teenagers would be denied the dangerous practice of watching TV alone in their rooms, forced instead into familial cable-surfing. The Academy doesn't offer suggestions for what ought to happen when Mom and Dad want to watch CNN when Kimberly and Justin want to see what's up on "Dawson's Creek."

Although the report didn't address the issue, these "media histories" could become a permanent part of the individuals' medical files, available to insurance companies, school doctors and psychologists, government agencies, employers, the military, or anyone else who might have any reason for checking into a person's past. Along with drug busts and drunk driving convictions, kids might one day have to explain to potential bosses or government investigators why they watched "South Park" when they were six, downloaded pirated MP3s or saw that postponed version of "Buffy" on the Web.

Mainstream media reports have long linked pop culture to violence. Perhaps it was inevitable that kiddie docs would climb onto the bandwagon. Nobody wants to be seen as missing the kids-and-morality campaign.

"Violence in movies and television has been linked to aggressive behavior in young people in studies by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health," reported the New York Times in its print and online editions.

Such statements have become an integral part of journalistic reporting on violence and the young, a major reason so many Americans link cultural technologies like TV, movies and the Net to horrors like the Columbine massacre.

But pronouncements like these are profoundly misleading.

For one thing, violence among children of all ages has been dropping for years and is now at its lowest levels in half a century, according to statistics released by the FBI just last month (and reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and elsewhere). Violence among the young isn't a growing, but a declining, medical problem. (Abuse of children by members of their own families, on the other hand, appears to be rising).

Also on the increase is the number of underclass children with no access to computers or the Net, kids who may therefore be forced into low-paying dead end jobs when they grow up.

As one who has waded through many of these studies, - I've written a book and too many stories to count on this subject - I've seen that they don't, in fact, conclude that movies and television cause youth violence.

Some have found links between such bad parenting practices as allowing excessive watching of violent TV and "aggressive behavior" in children; that is, a small child left alone for many hours with violent TV imagery will behave more aggressively towards peers in some situations than a child who isn't subjected to vivid imagery for so long. These same studies almost invariably show that small children who are supervised and well-parented rarely have problems with violence or aggressive behavior, regardless of what they watch.

Hardly any of these studies take us much past common sense. And none suggest that TV or movies are responsible for violence, and few even define "aggression" clearly. Most offer no specific instances of violent acts can be traced to TV; those that do include only a tiny handful. The idea that a well-parented, well-adjusted kid should be prohibited from having his or her own TV on the basis of these reports is ludicrous.

Besides, there are also scores of reputable studies - including one by psychologists at Brown University - which find that TV, movies and the Net have no impact on violence or sexuality in the young.

In the days following the pediatric academy's report on kids and TV, a number of respected neuroscientists completely dismissed the idea that television should be discouraged because, as the pediatricians suggested, "research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers (e.g. child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills."

Dr. Charles Nelson, a professor of child psychology, neuroscience and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota said there was no such data.

Dr. Steven Petersen, a neurology professor at Washington University Medical School of St. Louis told reporter Gina Kolata of the New York Times that not only was there no brain research to support the Academy's statement , but there was also no logical reason to ban television for the very young. Why, he wondered, no TV as opposed to one or two hours?

"Couldn't your child watch a little bit of TV and also get lots of interactions with caregivers?" Dr. Petersen asked. The pediatric Academy's position, he said, "is like saying that tons and tons of junk food is bad and so therefore kids should never have a hamburger."

Dr. Hogan, the lead author of the pediatric report, responded to a barrage of criticism from other physicians and researchers by conceding that there were no studies of young children that supported its recommendations. "We extrapolated," she said: that is, the pediatricians used other research to infer that children's brains are harmed when they spend their time gazing at television screens instead of interacting with humans.

And on the basis of this "extrapolation," responsible parents are supposed not only to ban TV for toddlers but to restrict older kids as well.

It's perfectly sensible enough for parents to encourage moderation in all things technological, especially when they're dealing with the very young. Hours of unsupervised TV a day is obviously unhealthy, as is 40 hours of Web trawling a week by eight-year-olds. Parents who don't know that have problems already. No small child - as in kids younger than eight or nine - should be left alone with any form of new media. All kids should be taught how to use new media technologies in a reasonable, safe and healthy way - and too few are.

But the unthinking institutional embrace of the idea that it's media that pose the primary dangers to children in the United States is a creepy but ascendant idea in American society. "Extrapolated" reports like the Academy's legitimize the notion that if we simply ban, filter or block access to new media technologies, then nobody has to bother looking at how children are raised, or at the structures, value systems or effectiveness of American schools - not to mention such bitterly divisive - and expensive - issues as public funding for day care or health insurance.

This noxious distraction, which keeps real problems from being addressed, is much more harmful to children than any media technology. Pediatricians aren't improving children's lives, only pandering to baseless fears about them.

As always, journalism is eager to buy into the idea. For the past half century, from rock and roll to hip hop, and from teen horror movies to cable programming, a central ideology of American journalism is that too much information is dangerous to children.

Kolata's reconsideration of the Academy's report, buried inside the Times' Week in Review section four days after the paper put the report itself on the front page, was a rare and not-very-prominent exception. So it's no surprise that many Americans believe that culture kills.

This cycle drives politicians to exploit the issue and pass Communications Decency Acts. It inspires Hollywood studios to adopt ludicrously arbitrary and useless ratings systems. It emboldens chains like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to ban "unwholesome" movies and CDs.

The idea that pediatricians may soon be recording whether your kid watches "Rug Rats" would be a hoot if its implications weren't so outrageous.

Children who have no political or other representation are thus subjected to wider restrictions and censorship than would ever be considered for adults (no politician proposed banning TV in the wake of the Atlanta office-building shootings ).

Pediatricians, like journalists, are supposed to provide clarity and rationality in discussions like these. By declaring media a health hazard, pediatricians cross the boundary between medicine and politics. They distort the boundaries of privacy, rational social policy and common sense.

As the news demonstrates regularly, they aren't protecting kids but exploiting technology, buying into voodoo moralizing that, in America, passes for confronting the real issues facing children.