Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150052
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And it's not going away. Both the House and the Senate passed V-Chip legislation as part of telecommunications reform, so there's little doubt it will be part of the final bill presented to President Clinton, who also supports the idea.
House and Senate versions would make it mandatory for all new TV sets 13 inches or larger to have V-Chip circuitry installed, raising the price of a set by as much as $50. Parents, say legislators, could then program the chip to block out unwanted cable and broadcast programs based on a ratings system yet to be developed.
The ratings system, which technically is only recommended by the pending legislation, would address issues of violence, sex and language. Although V-Chip boosters pooh-pooh charges of censorship, there's no question that the legislation is intended to use governmental muscle to change what people watch.
``You know what,'' Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., told The Los Angeles Times, ``this does have the potential of changing the economics of producing programming.''
Senate sponsor Kent Conrad., D-N.D., has explained it this way: ``If advertisers know that a good chunk of the market might tune out programming because it has objectionable content, you might see better programming being produced.'' Of course, Conrad's idea is equally true in a V-Chipless world.
Beyond serious questions of governmental overreach, there's no reason to believe the V-Chip will have the effect envisioned by its proponents.
Consider the following:
TV manufacturers estimate that it would be decades before every set in use in the country had a V-Chip in it, not counting sets smaller than 13 inches.
(Of course, there are already about 20 models of TV sets or control devices currently on the market that let viewers screen out particular programs, channels and time slots.)
Any ratings system for television would be virtually impossible to maintain.
The Motion Picture Association of America, the organization that rates movies, handles between 200 and 400 films annually, roughly 600 hours of material.
By comparison, a single 24-hour-a-day broadcast channel airs almost 9,000 hours of material a year. Even assuming that reruns make up half of the total, that's still 4,500 hours per channel.
Ratings proponents say news programs should be exempt, even though they often contain many of the most violent and graphic images broadcast on television.
By the way, what would qualify as news? ``60 Minutes?'' Or ``Court TV?'' Or maybe ``Hard Copy?''
And what about reruns? ``You can't expose kids to 100,000 acts of violence and 8,000 murders by the time they're 12 and not expect it to have an effect,'' says Sen. Conrad.
If the problem is violence per se, then old shows must be blocked as well as current ones. And that doesn't just mean shows like ``The Untouchables,'' either.
Virtually every episode of the golden-age favorite ``The Honeymooners,'' for example, includes explicit references to spousal abuse. (``One of these days, Alice - Pow! Right in the kisser!'').
Add reruns into the mix, as the logic of V-Chip legislation demands, and raters will have to deal with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of hours of old programming.
And shouldn't commercials be rated since they employ images of sex and violence, too?
Just who will devise the ratings? Congressmen have reiterated that the government will not be involved in actually rating programs.
But what will happen if politicians don't agree with the ratings? Or if consumers don't find them a reliable guide?
Will the ratings be subtle enough to tell the difference between, say, ``Roots'' (a TV landmark as violent as it was educational) and ``Walker: Texas Ranger'' (a show as violent as it is ludicrous)? Because the chip is relatively unsophisticated, subtlety is highly unlikely.
Who will program the chip? Let's ignore for the moment that there's no good evidence that television turns kids bad.
It stands to reason that the children most likely to be affected negatively by television are precisely those living in environments least likely to contain parents who would decide what their children should be watching in the first place.
Such problems point to the likely outcome if the V-Chip passes: TV sets will be made more expensive to accommodate an ineffective potential ratings system that will have little or no effect on its targeted audience.
This is one government twofer that's no bargain.
Nick Gillespie is assistant editor of Reason, a commentary magazine based in Los Angeles.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
by CNB