This morning I turned on the Today show while I rushed to get my girls ready and out the door. While pulling a shirt over my toddler’s head, I noticed my 6-year-old daughter staring at a nude photo of Kim Kardashian on our TV. I hollered at her not to look at it while I scrambled for the remote to turn it off.
Apparently, you can’t safely watch the morning news with kids around. Why are we putting stuff like this on TV? What does it say about us as a society that nudity and bad behavior get you attention when brains and good behavior seldom do? That is not what I want to teach my daughters. It would be different if this were a rare occurrence, but we all know it isn’t. Our CEO had this experience with her own kids and Good Morning America not long ago.
Kim and her supporters are defending her actions by claiming that Kim is proud of her body and has a right to show it off. When did showing your naked body to millions become the same as having a positive body image? I mean, I want my daughters to feel good in their own skin, but I sure don’t want them to put naked pictures of themselves online. And I definitely do not want their young and impressionable eyes seeing naked images during a morning newscast.
What is the media’s responsibility here? Media, by giving attention to a photo like this, aren’t you in essence making Kim Kardashian a role model? You are telling our kids to look up to people like her. You are teaching our daughters what they should do to get attention. After all, being on TV is about as cool as it gets.
Wouldn’t we be better off as a society to have our daughters aspire to be like Oprah, Diane Sawyer, Duchess Kate, Taylor Swift and Malala Yousafzai instead of Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus? By giving so much media attention to the latter, aren’t we glorifying them?
Last year, we released a book called Unselfish the same day as Kim Kardashian’s Selfish. Our book was full of stories of unselfish acts from people of all walks of life. Her book was full of pictures of herself. I’ll bet you can guess which book got more media attention.
LeAnn Hamby is the vice president of Media Relations for SON Studios. She has worked with authors like Jack Hayford, Melody Carlson, Chris Fabry and Angela Hunt and publishing houses such as Charisma House, Howard Books, Tyndale and Abingdon Press. Before joining the trust, LeAnn was the Director of Publicity at Glass Road Public Relations and Publicity Coordinator at Charisma House where she pioneered the publicity efforts for its fiction imprint, Realms. Her authors have appeared on TBN’s Praise the Lord, Daystar’s Celebration, The 700 Club and Life Today.
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