About ten days ago, I essayed the brief story of KiKa....Germany's young-kid public TV channel, and some reality show that had a 15-year old German girl and some foreign young man in some relationship. The fact that the network was designed for the 3 to 13 year old group in Germany....a fair number of Germans got whiny about the documentary and felt it was the wrong place to air a topic like this.
Well...KiKa got back into the news late this week with another challenging program.
The topic this time? They had a show which led to some ten to thirteen year old young boys taking on the subject of noticing boobs, boob sizes, and that all sizes are normal. At some point, the boys use a mannequin and go through the procedure of unhooking the bra to the dummy-gal. Oddly (you just kinda why)....all three of the young guys were non-white Germanic kids...looking...well...Syrian or Iraqi. Maybe there was no real intent and they just picked three young guys at random.
Amusing enough, several women's groups stood up and asked 'what the heck is going on here', and suggested that the video production could promote sexual assault and objectification of the female body.
Naturally, most of the commentary by ARD/ZDF was defensive in nature....yet oddly....they removed the video from the network library.
There are three things at work here, if you haven't figured that out.
1. The German media system has assumed a role in educating or dragging cultural groups into a progressive society. They've got pressure from the political leadership and the intellectual side to help bridge this vast divide and bring a number of people into a fairly progressive lifestyle. The landscape is vast, and 'shock-like' documentary pieces are part of the solution.
2. KiKa was designed in the mid-1990s to be a network for German kids (age three to thirteen). Various arguments exist over what's on the network today, and that maybe it needs to be split off into two networks....one for the really young crowd (say three to six years old), and one for the next step up (seven to twelve years old). No one ever cites who watches it although the claim is that the market share is 1.2 percent (2013 numbers). My humble guess is that it's mostly three to six year old kids watching, and very few kids above eight years old watch the shows.
3. There's a whole bunch of young migrant and immigrants kids who've come into Germany over the past four years and things are fairly different from the old country. How do you reach them and make them into German kids? Yeah....this question really hasn't been asked in public forums and it's obvious that a path has to be created. KiKa has to fill the role...whether they like it or not.
The end to this issue? No. There's probably going to be a committee meeting and some questions asked. Someone will appoint a monitor over the planning stage and try to stop them from doing stupid things that the public will complain about. Maybe someone will wise up and suggest splitting the network into two divisions, and create a second channel just for 'teenies'.
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