Media Impact

Mari Yoon
Cecilia Deck
Journalism 2
19 April 2013

Elmo is and Evildoer

     There has been a growing fad of popular internet sayings expressing the extreme displeasure in which a person no longer has the desire to live. It may be displayed through a simple acronym such as FML, or circulated around the internet through a screen shot of people saying bewilderingly, and almost sinfully, stupid statements. (Ex: I don't want to live on this planet anymore.) Where does the root of this almost sinister sense of ignorance sprout from? In the LA Times article shown in the very top, author Joel Stein intelligently asserts his distaste for the popular kid's show icon of Sesame Street, Elmo.  Although this masterpiece of an article is without a doubt satirical,  Stein makes a very legitimate point, and argument towards the decline of quality in the TV shows watched by the kids of today.

     If there is one point that is an absolute necessity in thinking about after reading this, and the article by Stein, it would have to be that Elmo is the nurturer of the selfish and moronic ambitions. The pinnacle of this article would have to be when Stein and his colleagues express the fact that Elmo only teaches kids how to think about themselves. Stein's colleague John Lee even further elaborates:

"'Elmo is just a baby-voiced, self-obsessed character who is only concerned with Elmo,' says Lee. "He just passively observes things: 'Elmo is looking at a sandwich. Elmo is eating a sandwich. Elmo is crapping out the sandwich and writing his name on the wall with it.' " The last celebrity to so obsessively refer to himself in the third person was Richard Nixon."

As hilarious and trite as this comment may be, it doesn't take away from the truth that kids are being exposed to selfish, immature creatures like Elmo and being taught to do the same. Elmo is not the only proprietor in the illiteracy and ignorance being taught to kids; shows like Spongebob, and "Total Drama Island" teaches kids that it's okay to take advantage of other people, make up illogical words by adding suffixes like -ness, as well as excessively abuse the words like, dude, and totally in nearly all sentences, as if kids actually spoke like that before the influence of these shows. The quality of these shows and their subliminal moral of the story teaches kids nothing but how to be the extreme authority on what the word immature is described as.

    At the end of the article, Stein poses a very simple answer to the problem of the possible demise of the educational world: bring back kid's television shows that teach children how to be decent human beings. A solution I personally resonate strongly with.