In 1966, Joan Ganz Cooney was a documentary producer at Channel 13 when Lloyd Morrisett, then Vice President at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, offered her an opportunity that would change the landscape of children's media forever. The Carnegie Corporation provided funding for a three-month study during which Joan traveled the country to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate various textual characteristics of popular children television shows. More specifically, researchers examined both the quantity and quality of question asked (i.e., question training). Furthermore, several readability components among the different shows (e.g., narrativity, syntactic simplicity,…

Empowering children for a critical and judicious use and consumption of media is a main objective of media literacy. This paper aims to examine the range of television programs available for children in Portugal through a comparative analysis of the programming for children broadcast by the four Portuguese terrestrial channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC and…

For nearly four decades, Sesame Workshop has brought the joy of learning to the world's youngest citizens through the introduction of locally-produced coproductions of the preschool television series, "Sesame Street". Many of these television shows have been specifically designed to forward important prosocial messages directly linked to…

This chapter explains how the show "The Avengers," a popular British television program with an unusual female lead role, captured the imagination of women viewers in England from 1962 to 1964. After describing the show and then the research project investigating viewers' responses to it, this chapter explores the experience of watching…