It used to be called TV-Turnoff Week but that was so 1990’s. Now it’s Screen-Free Week — one week for families to turn off the screens and reconnect with old-fashioned in-person interaction, to look each other in the eyes, spend time outside, cook together, read books on paper, daydream, play board games and cards, and, perhaps most important, go for more than 20 seconds without being interrupted by buzzing, beeping, ring-tones, or tweets. It’s also a chance to participate in the many Screen-Free Week events organized around the country. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has a fact sheet for kids and resources for parents and teachers, including an excellent Live Outside the Box Toolkit from Seattle and King County. Screen-Free Week is endorsed by a wide range of educators and health professionals including the American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
my four children will be running wild around me, invariably losing their generally excellent ability to self-entertain and peacefully interact at approximately 5:00 daily, precisely the moment when I’m desperately trying to finish up the last bits of work for the day and start dinner—without once resorting to the highly addictive, all-child-inclusive form of entertainment that is Phineas and Ferb.
She doesn’t try to suggest that there is anything beneficial to her children in her decision. It is Dell’Antonia who wants to continue to rely on television to keep her children quiet and does not even want to take one week to try to teach them that they have other alternatives — like reading a book, drawing a picture, playing a game, or setting the table. She has to admit, “I support the idea of a “screen-free week,” but I support it as a family project, not a top-down imposition of a temporary new screen rule.” The entire idea of Screen-Free Week is as a family project. I am certain that children will be so happy to have their parents put down their Blackberries that they will be more than willing to miss another rerun of Phineas and Ferb and that it is well worth it for everyone to learn that media is not the only way to spend quiet time.
Interview: Candace Cameron Bure of ‘Truth Be Told’
Posted on April 13, 2011 at 8:00 am
“Family Movie Night,” sponsored by Proctor & Gamble and Walmart, has produced another fine film for all ages. Candace Cameron Bure (“Full House,” “Make It or Break It”) stars in “Truth Be Told,” the story of a marriage counselor who is not married. When she has a job opportunity that requires a husband, she tells a lie, and enlists an old friend and his children to pretend to be her family.
I spoke to Candace about the role and about her work and her ministry, speaking about her faith and giving back to the community.
Tell me about “Truth Be Told.”
I couldn’t have been more excited when I was sent this script. I had seen some of the Family Movie Night shows and said to myself, “I want to do one of those!” When I read the script, it was absolutely perfect. I fell in love with Annie Morgan, the character I play. She’s a family and marriage counselor. It was something I can totally relate to, and family and marriage are so important to me. I do a lot of speaking at conferences and churches about family and marriage, so it was a topic I am passionate about. The premise is that one little lie snowballs into this huge mess and honesty is always the best policy.
That’s what I love about this series. These are not kids’ films that adults can tolerate or movies directed at adults without offensive content but true family movies with characters and situations that everyone in the family can understand and will want to talk about later.
I appreciate it as a mom. I have 12, 11, and 9 year-olds. I loved the fact that Proctor & Gamble and Walmart teamed up to give us this time on a Friday night when we can sit down with our families and watch a movie that we don’t have to worry about. It gives us things to think about and to open up some conversations with the family. “What happens if you tell a lie?” Depending on the age of your kids it can be a very simple conversation but you can turn it to a situation you and your family have recently experienced. I can open the door for something else your child has been struggling with. You use it as a platform for whatever dialogue needs to be exposed in your family at this time.
What happens in the film?
My character is offered a job at a radio station and because she is a marriage counselor, they assume she is married. And family is very important to the man who owns the company. She is probably not going to get the job unless she has a husband. She runs into an old college friend who is a widower and convinces him and his children to pretend to be her family for the weekend. The relationship develops — it is definitely a romantic comedy.
What is your experience like as you speak to groups about your faith?
I’ve been speaking and sharing my Christian faith for seven or eight years, and now I am speaking to the bigger groups like Extraordinary Women and Women of Joy. I actually just got back from a conference with Extraordinary Women. Sometimes there’s anywhere from 1500-15,000 ladies I will speak to. It is an amazing opportunity for me to share my faith and what is important to me and ultimately the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think I am as encouraged or maybe even more to see that God allows me to be used in that sense. These ladies will tell me they are encouraged by hearing my story and yet I am in awe that I am just a person getting this opportunity so I feel very privileged. It’s a very different thing from being on television. Most people would think that you would automatically be comfortable if you’re an actress to go up on stage to speak but it is actually very different. It’s not the number of people that scares me. The more there are, the easier it is for me. But it is a very different thing to open your heart and share your heart and be exposed in that way, not reading a memorized script or acting a different character. I get much more nervous speaking live at an event. You throw a camera on me and I am comfortable!
I had an emotional attachment to food. I ran to food for comfort, to fill a void instead of realizing I had to run to God for those things. I learned to honor my body by eating healthily and exercising but really by putting my faith into the forefront of my relationship with food by honoring my body as a temple God gave me and learning to run to Him for those needs and not to turn to food for it. I don’t enjoy getting up at 5 am some mornings but I see it as a necessity to take care of my body. To eat healthy, that’s all about the choices I make whether in a restaurant or the grocery story. The food’s not making it for me. There are so many tools out there to get us on the right track and help us make better choices. We don’t value those choices as much as we should. One choice a day, one choice an hour. If you look at it this way, it’s not so overwhelming.
Do you have a favorite Bible passage?
I don’t like that question because there are so many good ones! But the one that’s been on my computer desktop recently is Philippians 1, Verse 6. I just go, “God’s good work is in all of us and He will carry that on.” I don’t need to worry about it, I don’t need to stress over it. I know God has a plan set before me and I need to obediently just follow the footsteps that he’s laid out and keep my eyes focused on Him and He will carry out that good work to completion. And whatever that is, it might not be my own expectation but He knows what that is.
It’s everything. We read the Bible together and we talk about verses that can help us focus for that day. If we have a need or a worry for that day we find verses where it talks about it. We go to church. My kids are involved in Awana and youth group. My daughter has started leading worship and singing at her chapel. They go to a Christian school. So it is in every aspect of our lives but most important, my husband and I try to be that example, to show them that it is not just words but by our own actions and what we do.
I loved the old PBS series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which ran from 1971-75 on the BBC. It was revolutionary because it gave almost-equal time to the stories of the servants (downstairs) and the wealthy Edwardian-era family they worked for (upstairs). Jean Marsh, who played a housemaid, was the series co-creator with her friend Eileen Atkins. A new 40th anniversary DVD set has been released by Acorn Media with more than 25 hours of new bonus material.
When the master of 165 Eaton Place, Sir Hallam Holland, carries his wife across the threshold of their new home, Lady Agnes exclaims with pleasure, “What a ghastly old mausoleum!” Neglect has strewn cobwebs everywhere and furred the surfaces with dust. But with a sumptuous renovation and the help of the indomitable housekeeper Rose Buck (Jean Marsh), the iconic address so beloved in the original series Upstairs Downstairs is soon restored to its former glory.
It’s 1936, a tumultuous time in Britain, and within the walls of 165 Eaton Place, characters from an orphanage, a damp Welsh castle, the heart of the British Raj and elsewhere together will face a changing world, not just upstairs and downstairs, but side by side.
Perhaps I am especially concerned with these issues because of my recent participation in the International Women’s Media Foundation conference at George Washington University. The event opened with a Kalb Report interview of Diane Sawyer, who spoke about the impact of budget cuts and new media on the nightly news broadcast.
Women from all over the world shared their stories about the way women were treated as reporters, editors, and managers and as sources and subjects of news stories as well. Domestic violence stories at one paper were characterized as “a family tragedy,” until women in the newsroom insisted that they be described like any other homicide: murder. A paper in Norway made a commitment to have at least one photo of a woman on the front page every day — and not an actress. A German newspaper requires that one-half of its staff be female and makes an effort at parity in sources and stories as well.
The IWMF released a major new report, the first comprehensive global study of women in media, covering not just the roles and ranks of women working in the media but the way stories are selected and covered. Conducted over a two-year period, the report is based on data gathered by more than 150 researchers through interviews with executives at more than500 companies in 59 countries based on a 12-page questionnaire. The report found:
In the Asia and Oceana region, women are barely 13 percent of those in senior management, but in some individual nations women exceed men at that level, e.g., in South Africa women are 79.5 percent of those in senior management. In Lithuania women dominate the reporting ranks of junior and senior professional levels (78.5 percent and 70.6 percent, respectively), and their representation is nearing parity in the middle and top management ranks.
The global study identified glass ceilings for women in 20 of 59 nations studied. Most commonly these invisible barriers were found in middle and senior management levels. Slightly more than half of the companies surveyed have an established company-wide policy on gender equity. These ranged from 16 percent of companies surveyed in Eastern Europe to 69 percent in Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Only a little more than half of the news organizations have adopted a policy on gender discrimination.
Conference attendees used the report as a baseline to develop goals and strategies for improvement to take back to their publications. Panel members from around the world talked about the importance of a public commitment to specific benchmarks — without imposing counterproductive quotas — that will cover not just reporters, columnists, editors, and managers but choices of sources and stories.
As with all debates on gender issues, there was a conflict between arguments that women are the same as men and arguments that they are different. A discussion on putting journalists in danger included the “genderized” treatment of the attack on Lara Logan. Participants complained that Logan’s injuries led to sweeping statements that women should not be sent to cover the Middle East, while attacks on male journalists are seen on a case-by-case basis.
But there were also many discussions of the different perspective that women bring to sources and stories, the importance of making women’s points of view available to both male and female readers, and the impact of women as visible, credible role models for the next generation of journalists.
The limited data available from earlier studies show some progress for women in media, more as reporters than as managers. This report, while incomplete due to the refusal by some news organizations to cooperate, especially on issues relating to compensation, provides the first meaningful baseline for measuring future progress.
But the measure of success is a moving target. The conference presentations made it clear that the challenges of strengthening the presence of women in journalism are small in comparison to the transformational changes affecting the industry as a whole. U.S.-based print newspapers, which have relied in the past on advertising and classified ads for the majority of their revenue and are now losing readers to the web, are at a disadvantage over newspapers in other countries with less internet access (so far) and more subscription-based business models.
In a luncheon speech, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, President Obama’s appointee for Global Women’s Issues, spoke about the mobile phone as one of the most powerful factors in providing access to the crucial information that helps women achieve equality. The conference participants recognized that the greatest obstacle to keeping well-researched information available is not sexism but the Gresham’s law-impact of avalanches of free online content.
We love those disheveled but indomitable women of the television world, from Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” to Mary Tyler Moore in her iconic 1970’s television series, Tina Fey in “30 Rock,” and Michelle Pfeiffer in the under-appreciated “I Could Never Be Your Woman.” Part Hermione Granger, part Cinderella, these are the girls whose hands were always raised in class turned women who inspire us with their determination, smarts, and skill. As Joan Cusack’s character says to Hunter’s, “Except for socially, you’re my role model.” On the outside, they may appear frazzled in a just-take-off-the-glasses-and-comb-the-hair-and-she’s-a-knockout mode. On the inside, they are super-capable, super-talented, and super-lonely. Hunter’s character scheduled crying time for herself each morning before spending the rest of the day keeping everyone on track and ahead of the competition.
And now there’s Becky (Rachel McAdams), dedicated, ambitious, addicted to her Blackberry — and about to be let go. When she’s called into a meeting with the boss, her colleagues are so sure it’s about a big promotion they have congratulatory t-shirts made. On the contrary. They love her, but in these days of tight budgets, they have other priorities. Becky’s mom (Patti D’Arbanville) is not encouraging. But Becky does not give up and soon she finds herself producing a network morning show (the good news) that is so awful half its viewers are “people who’ve lost their remotes” (the bad news). They cover stories like “Eight things you didn’t know you could do with potatoes” and chirpy interviews with celebrities.
Becky doesn’t get a very warm welcome. Co-host Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) greets her with “Enjoy the pain, Gidget.” The security guard tells her not to unpack. She has no budget. But she has an idea — the station has a contract with a legendary newsman named Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford playing a character somewhere between Walter Cronkite and Wolf Blitzer) who is currently being paid but not doing anything. She coerces him into sharing hosting duties with Colleen, and starts to shake things up.
Director Roger Michell shows the same gift for endearing light romance that he did in “Notting Hill.” Once again he has some sly, understated pokes at the media and some surprising cameos and clever lines. Ford and Keaton are pros who make their characters real and interesting and very funny. Patrick Wilson makes a sympathetic Prince Charming. But in every way the heart of the story is McAdams, who is a wonder, lit from within and utterly captivating.
