Okay, this blog does not and will not give a lot of time to issues involving so called, "tweenyboppers" but last week's focus on the Annie Leibovitz photos of one Miley Cyrus has made it a news story, if not an entirely legitimate one.
I have never watched Miley's show Hannah Montana other than in passing at my friend Jason's house where his young daughters were glued to the T.V. However, I am familiar with the concept of the show and I know that her dad is in it, and I remember absolutely loving "Achy Breaky Heart" back in the summer between 4th and 5th grade. That being said, I share the thesis of Slate.com's Meghan O'Rourke, that the show is weird in the message that it sends to its core audience. Here are some snippets from the article:
Who knew that 9-year-olds (among the show's core audience) were enthralled by efforts to find a balance between life and career?
This is the way the show works: It teaches kids to understand their own experiences—about growing pains, about being honest with their parents, and so on—through the narrow lens of teen celebrity, rather than through broader storytelling. Once, sitcoms taught kids to be true to themselves by showing what happened when, say, Greg Brady thought about cheating on a test, or how Sandy and Bud's adventures with Flipper shaped their character. Hannah Montana instructs them in the proper etiquette of endorsement deals.
. . . [T]he entire show is a canny celebration of pop culture masquerading as a story about hope and family life. What's most interesting about the scandal that erupted last week is that it's an example of the real dilemmas a 15-year-old celebrity has to navigate—one that will never make it into the plot lines of Hannah Montana. The squeaky-clean teen image that everyone keeps talking about was precisely that: an image created, managed, and assiduously maintained by Miley and her parents, at great cost to the product herself.
You can find the full text of Meghan's article here.
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