Thus was born Children Now, a nonpartisan advocacy organization Steyer founded in 1988 "to move the issue of children's well-being to the top of the national agenda." Instead of working to build a mass-membership organization, Children Now deliberately targeted "opinion leaders"-politicians as well as key figures in media and education-with tools like its National Report Card on the state of children, which evaluates the success (or the lack thereof) of government policy on children's health, education, economics and safety. Children Now also lobbied for legislative change, particularly in California, where the group campaigned successfully for a tax on cigarettes to help fund children's health care.

Through public service announcements and ad campaigns, Children Now made deliberate use of the media to help shape public perception of children's issues ("something I learned from Ronald Reagan," Steyer says with a laugh). But as time went on, the organization also began to focus on the media's impact on children.

As Steyer lays out in scathing detail in The Other Parent, the 1980s was when TV changed forever-thanks, he writes, to the "Reagan administration's deregulation crusade" and the rise of cable television. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees the broadcasting industry, dropped its requirement that TV stations, in exchange for their broadcast licenses, carry educational and informational programs for kids; it also removed limits on the amount of advertising they could run during those shows.

Deregulation also made it easier for large corporations with no media experience to snap up TV networks, and to make the bottom line the bottom line in all programming decisions. This trend, Steyer writes, only accelerated during the go-go 1990s. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, passed during the Clinton Administration, "deregulated even more aspects of media ownership, trigger[ing] cutthroat competition and massive consolidation," to the point that "today there are only five or six huge megacorporations that dominate the entire media business: AOL Time Warner, Disney (which bought ABC), Viacom (which bought CBS), News Corporation (which bought Fox), Vivendi Universal and General Electric-NBC."

Blindsided by the Media

Meanwhile, the cable television explosion not only increased the amount of TV beaming into American households, but also loosened standards across the board for increasingly explicit material. To stand out in this increasingly crowded field, Steyer argues, media companies "routinely 'push the envelope' with sex, violence and provocative language, not because it makes the creative product better, but solely because it makes that 'product' stand out from the competition."

"When you see this business from the inside," Steyer says, "you realize it is one big, sophisticated marketing machine selling things to kids."

But what was good for big business was, in Steyer's eyes, terrible for kids. Nor was his interest in the issue purely academic: he and his wife, Liz, had begun to have children of their own (they now have two daughters, Lily and Carly, and a son, Kirk), and to witness firsthand "the incredible barrage of media that bombards kids"-not just television, but music, electronic games and the Internet. "Too often," Steyer writes, "parents feel blindsided by the media, surprised by what their kids have been exposed to and helpless to control the rate at which their children are pushed into the adult world."

Faced with a formidable problem and no easy solution in sight, Steyer did what he usually does: he went out and started his own company. In 1996, "armed with a little moxie and a terrific group of investors"-including his brother Tom, a founding partner of Farallon Capital Management, a San Francisco investment firm-Steyer launched JP Kids to create "high-quality content for kids on TV, the Internet, publishing and related platforms."

He was not, he readily admits, the creative engine behind the company. "Just as with Children Now," he says, "my job was to find partners who were smarter and more talented than me and let them do all the work." JP Kids has since produced the hit series "The Famous Jett Jackson," which airs daily on the Disney Channel; created content for Yahooligans, Yahoo's popular web guide for kids; and worked with PBS, Nickelodeon and Warner Bros., among other outlets.