In 2011, the creator of the MTV reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” wrote an article for CNN defending the show’s value in response to media critics claiming the two shows glamorize teen pregnancy.
“Three years ago, I was flipping through a magazine when I read an article that stopped me cold,” wrote Laura Dolgen, MTV’s senior vice president of series development on the West Coast. “Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy was a lead story in the news, but this piece talked about the 750,000 other teenage girls who get pregnant each year in the U.S., the ones who were not from wealthy, famous families.”
Viewers who follow “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant” — not, we might add, parents and older critics who never bothered to watch the shows — know that MTV isn’t glamorizing teen pregnancy at all. The shows offer honest and often bleak portraits of the lives of young women who choose to keep their babies after accidental pregnancies.
The show examines how the women’s lives play out after the babies are born: screaming matches with parents, drug problems, lawsuits against the fathers, struggles to finish school and difficulty managing their personal finances are all commonplace problems for the girls in each episode. Glamorous, right?
According to The New York Times, a new economic study of Nielsen TV ratings and birth records show that areas with a high viewership of MTV programming saw a rapid decline in the rate of teen births. The study focused on the period after “16 and Pregnant” was introduced in 2009. Although correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, researchers who reviewed the study said the conclusion seems sound.
Despite sensationalized claims that copycat pregnancies were inevitable, Dolgen maintained that she created the show to illustrate a cautionary tale to young American women, and she refused to allow copycats to appear on the show. Besides, young women, as these numbers show, are much more observant and intelligent than the mainstream media gives them credit for. While so-called pregnancy pacts make for juicy feature stories, the reality is that MTV has sparked an important national discussion: one among teens about the importance of contraception and responsible sexual health.
Even the Media Research Center begrudgingly admitted that MTV didn’t shy away from the gritty details of the lives of “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” subjects. Although MTV isn’t exactly NPR or PBS, the network that brought young adults the beloved trashy reality shows “Jersey Shore” and the long-running “Real World” series has used its influence to deliver smart advocacy journalism packaged as a teen-friendly reality show — complete with sketchbook fonts and a cute intro song.
Sure, the show isn’t perfect. The antics of “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant’s” stars appear regularly on the covers of tabloids, but it’s fundamentally wrong and unfair to assume that all — or even most — young American women aspire to achieve reality-TV fame.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 1/14/2014 under the headline "MTV’s ‘Teen Mom’ is effective advocacy journalism"
