Thank you very much. I don't always get applause for that element of my bio (having 5 children). But, particularly in this town, my husband likes to joke and say that we're trying to solve the Social Security crisis all on our own.

There are a lot of challenges for us as we take on these questions of cultural influence in our society. It is easy to be on the side of just putting anything out there, pushing the envelope, dumping raw sewage into our society. It's not so easy to make wise judgments about what it is that we want to be seeing in our culture and in the media. So I'm just so thrilled that you're having this luncheon to talk about that question.

People ask me all the time in my position, what do you think we should do about these problems that we face in the media, and I don't have any easy answers for you.

Why do I say multi-faceted mediums? We really have to start with the definition of what is media. As a mother today a large part of the challenges we face is that media is so broad and diverse. Remember the picture that you're supposed to be seeing is that old-fashioned big box that we used to all have sitting in our living rooms? And I remember as a child watching the four grainy channels that we had. That's not the world we live in today.

We've got flat panel screen TV, we've got computers with streaming video, video games, DVD's, iPods, and now cell phones that are, as in Europe, streaming video. We're moving in that direction now. These multi-purpose devices make the definition of media really an amorphous concept it's hard to nail down. And it's not just the four channel television any more. It's mobile, it's on the go, it's media everywhere we look.

So it's expanding its role in our lives, in particular and most worrisomely in our children's lives. In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation did a study called Generation M, media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds, which interests me in particular because that's the ages of my kids. How many CD players do you think the average 8-18-year old has? CD players, 3.6: television, 3.5; radios, 3.3; VCR-DVD players, 2.9; 2.1 video game consoles and finally, 1.5 computers.

The next image I wanted you to see is about how culture has always shaped particularly our body images. I have three girls in addition to John and his little brother. And so girls in particular concern me, of how the media shapes the way they think about their body image. Think for a minute about the ancient Chinese. For 1,000 years they practiced foot-binding because having small feet was considered the height of feminine beauty. So women ended up having to walk with great pain and great sacrifice to their own health because the cultural message that they were being sent was as a woman that was the best way to present themselves in society.

Think here in America, let's bring it closer to home. The corset, that waspy figure that you see from the Victorian era, that was actually very, very painful to the woman. The fainting of the Victorian woman came from a very physical reason, that she was having difficulty breathing.

But we're still there today. Think about the messages television is sending young girls today. The swan. Extreme makeover. I want a famous face. Nip and tuck. All of these messages are that you're not okay the way that you are. There is this standard of beauty, nip and tuck, that requires a surgical knife to get there. It's not unlike this foot-binding and the corsets that we used to see. So it's drilling girls with the message that they're not good enough unless they go to the extremes.

The Journal of Adolescents in 2000 looked at this issue and they said that the factor exerting the strongest pressure on adolescent girls ages 9 to 14 to be thin is the media. One of the young women that they quoted in the article said, “I would rather be size 10 than have straight A's.” Now the challenge with this is the average American woman is a size 12, and I recently read an article about the women on Desperate Housewives. Even Longoria is a size 0. All of the women on that show are in that general range. They consider themselves to be getting fat when they hit size 2.

Now if you're naturally a size 2, God bless you. That's okay, to be naturally a size 2. The problem is that the vast majority of us don't come in those packages, and particularly our girls. This is one of the pictures – when you think about I'd rather be a size 10 than have straight A's, this picture on the left here is Lindsay Lowen, who is one of the reigning teen idols right now. She – this is what she looked like when she first started out in the movie “Parent Trap” that Disney did. She's playing twins in that role. Look at that beautiful fresh face. I don't know if you all saw Lindsey recently on Saturday Night Live. She went from that fresh healthy face to being absolutely skeletal. She was actually well known for being a little bit curvy, and that was I thought part of her appeal that she was so wholesome looking. Now she looks skeletal because she's trying to conform to these ideals.

Well, if it was just Lindsey and that was her own personal decision, fine. But she's going on Saturday Night Live and being held up as a role model for my daughters. Lindsey was really big in our house. Was she big in yours, Rebecca? No? Well, you're lucky. Now, we've kind of had to put Lindsey off to the side as a role model of what is unhealthy. And that's the challenge for us as moms.

Do the media really affect people's behavior? Well, here's an example. Brokeback Mountain was, as we all know, kind of a big deal this winter. And it was set in the mountains of Cheyenne, Wyoming. What they found – Michael Howard, who manages the Wyoming Business Council's film, arts and entertainment office, recently told the AP news service that they have been inundated with calls from people wanting information on how to come to Wyoming. And when he tells them that the mountains that they saw in Brokeback Mountain are actually in Alberta, Canada, they don't care. They still want to come to Wyoming. So the connection between reality and how people are influenced is a little tenuous.

Does media influence behavior? Well, sometimes it influences things in a very negative way, as we all know. CSI, the crime scene investigation, which is one of the top hits on television today, there's been quite a bit of attention paid to the fact that law enforcement officials are now very concerned because they're starting to see copycat killers and wannabe killers who are imitating things that they see on CSI. Even if they don't imitate it, they get the impression that it's easy to go around and to do certain things. In fact, an Ohio man was recently indicted on two counts of murder and he informed police that he was an avid CSI fan.

If the media is not affecting behavior of our children, why is it that the corporations out there are spending so much money on children's television to advertise and try to get them to eat cocoa pops? Well, if there's not a connection between media and behavior, we wouldn't be seeing them invest that much money in trying to influence what our children eat.

A multi-faceted problem requires a multi-faceted response. I'm going to go pretty quickly over the parental angle because Rebecca is really my hero in this. Her book is one of the most helpful manuals for parents out there in how to address these issues of how to work with your children on the media. But let me just set it up for her talk by telling you that children spend an average of 6.5 hours per day devoted to media, compared to the 2.5 hours that they spend with their parents. About half of under-18-year-olds say their families have no rules at all about watching television, and two-thirds of kids today have a television in their bedroom.

Parents are the first line of defense. As a conservative I believe that with all my heart, that it is my responsibility to protect what my children see and hear. However, I like to tell people, why as a conservative do I think the government should be involved in this issue? It's because you don't allow corporations to drop raw sewage into the water that we all drink, and you don't allow entertainment to dump raw sewage into our culture that we all live and breathe in, and it is continually affecting our children. I believe the analogy is completely apt. And in fact the Supreme Court has backed this up in a case called FCC v. Pacifica Foundation . Justice Stevens writing for the majority said, “Of all forms of communication, broadcasting has the most limited First Amendment protection. Among the reasons for specially treating indecent broadcasting is the uniquely pervasive presence that the medium of expression occupies in the lives of our world.” It's out there everywhere. Broadcasts extend into the privacy of the home and it is impossible to completely to avoid.

The FCC does have the regulatory power within the confines of the First Amendment to regulate what is out there and what we see. A perfect example is the so-called wardrobe malfunction that we're all so familiar with that Janet Jackson allegedly experienced at the Super Bowl. What was the result of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction? Twenty CBS stations were each fined $27,000, for a total of $550,000 fine in that case. When you think about the money that they spent to advertise on the Super Bowl, that's chump change. That's a slap on the wrist. That's communicating to them that they can go ahead and do it next time.

For that reason we are supporting the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. I know we're not here to talk about legislation today, but I will tell you that there are some really good efforts out there to increase these fines and to put real teeth behind the FCC's efforts to really clean this up. If the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act had been in place when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake decided to entertain America in this way, the total fines would have been $5.5 million. Which to me is more in line with the effect that that had on our culture. That bill is, by the way, being held up in committee by Senator Ted Stevens.

Lastly, because we are here with this terrific organization, I would say that it does also come back to the media themselves, and this is the most challenging one. But I always like to include the fact that we want to be out there saying there are good examples in the media, of media being responsible corporate citizens. We don't have to just say that you're going to constantly push the edge of the envelope. There are good people who have a sense of calling to the arts and to information and to the news that are working very diligently and that I'm proud to call my friends in the media. So I don't want to be entirely negative.