Saturday Morning Television: A Profile of the 1974–75 Children's Season

An analysis of the behavioral content and character portrayals in children's Saturday morning television programs was conducted on two Saturdays representative of the 1974–75 broadcast season. A high amount of aggression was found on the commercial networks. In contrast, the public broadcasting network offered less than 25% of the amount of violence shown on the commercial stations. Of five categories of positive social behavior, only two appeared with meaningful frequency: altruism and sympathy/explaining feelings. Character analyses revealed bias, both in the frequency of appearance of different sex and racial/ethnic groups and in the character portrayals of those groups. The findings are discussed in terms of potential socializing effects on children.