As both presidential candidates and a host of federal legislators take aim at Hollywood for marketing violent fare to children, it is instructive to look at the results of the government’s last major effort to rein in the entertainment industry: the V-chip.
The consensus among researchers and analysts about the device which represents President Clinton’s one major achievement when it comes to regulating Hollywood is that it has been largely a bust.
The reason? Not because TV manufacturers have failed to install the device, or because TV producers have failed to rate their shows. It’s because parents have largely failed to use it.
Experts say parents don’t understand the rating system, which pops up on their TV screens at the beginning of each show. Without knowing the rating system, which indicates the age group for which a program is appropriate, parents cannot program the V-chips that are required in every new TV set sold in the United States starting this year, under rules set by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center showed that two in five parents have a V-chip or other form of technology to block out objectionable programming on their TVs. But only half of those parents actually use the devices.
“There needs to be a concerted effort (to tell people) that this device exists, and how it can be used in conjunction with the rating system,” said Amy Jordan, a senior researcher who worked on the Annenberg study.
Kelly Schmitt, another researcher involved in the study, said many parents expressed concern that the V-chip would block out the shows they wanted to watch while their children were away.
“They didn’t understand that you could unblock the program,” Schmitt said. “Another concern expressed was that if they blocked the shows, their children would go over to someone else’s house to watch TV. Or they mentioned that it would be difficult to issue a new set of rules after all this time, such as if a 15-year-old had been watching R-rated movies for three years and then all of a sudden all shows with violence were blocked out.”
While the V-chip is relatively new, the television industry since 1997 has been using a voluntary set of parental guideline codes on all major network programming, spelling out a show’s appropriateness for various age groups. These codes Y, Y7, G, PG, 14 and MA appear in the corner of the screen momentarily at the beginning of each show.
The various codes
In addition, all the networks except NBC have a content code outlining the level of violence or adult material in each show. This code appears in a box along with the other codes. For example, the box might say PG with a small SD below it, meaning parental guidance for young children is suggested and the show contains sexual situations and suggestive dialog.
While the coding has been in place for three years, researchers said most parents are confused about the system. They have an easier time understanding the age-related code than the content-related coding. (V for violence, S for sexual situations, L for crude language, D for suggestive dialog, FV for fantasy violence.)
“A major reason parents don’t understand the codes is that the codes are not highly publicized. Consequently, there are no reliable sources parents can turn to about it,” said Emory Woodard, a communications professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Woodard is doing a year-long study of how 120 families use the V-chip.
He pointed out that most newspapers do not publish the TV parental guidelines with the TV listings. Consequently, perplexed parents don’t know where to turn to find out the difference between a D and an S, for example.
The TV industry has been fairly diligent about putting parental codes on each TV program, for fear that the government will come in and do the job for them if they slack off, said David Davis, an entertainment analyst with investment bank Houlihan, Lokey, Howard & Zukin. “Both the networks and the program providers are very cognizant of the threats that would face them if they didn’t do the codes,” Davis said.
But the government is also aware that it would be a Herculean task to create a regulatory body that would rate the thousands of hours of TV programs that are broadcast over America’s airwaves.
“There is 1,100 hours of prime-time programming a year on CBS alone,” said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS. “Multiply that across 70 or 80 channels and it would be impossible to monitor, unlike the movie industry.”
The Motion Picture Association of America, by comparison, rates approximately 700 to 800 films a year. The average cable carrier transmits more than 2,700 shows a week on 23 channels.
Attacking Hollywood
Despite TV parental guidelines, politicians in Washington, D.C. have been railing against the rapidly declining standards of the broadcast TV industry and its effect on children, who watch more than 38 non-school hours of TV per week. Vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman was one of four U.S. senators who asked the Federal Communications Commission this spring to consider whether broadcasters are serving the public interest with the TV shows they put on the air.
The senators would like the FCC to re-institute a voluntary code of conduct like the old National Association of Broadcasters TV Code, which was in effect from 1952 to 1983. That code stated that the industry has a particular obligation to children and should exercise care to avoid programming aimed at sensationalism, shock value or exploitation of sex. Since 1983, broadcasters have operated without a code.
That’s where the V-chip was supposed to come in. With the codes, parents were supposed to be able to program the chip located inside new TVs and block out objectionable material.
But given the technological skills of most TV viewers, many of whom still don’t know how to program their video cassette recorders, it might be a long time before the V-chip is widely used.
“Under the current situation, with the lack of promotions about the parental guidelines and the lack of parental involvement in monitoring their children’s TV viewing habits, the V-chip is not going to work,” said Woodard, the researcher studying V-chip habits.
“It is a brand new technology and only required since Jan. 1. There needs to be a concerted effort to get the word out that this device exists and how it can be used in conjunction with the parental guidelines,” said Jordan, the senior researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “It is a fairly easy device to program once you get through the various menus.”
About the only person not worried about the V-chip’s popularity is the inventor of the device, Tim Collings.
Collings, an assistant professor of engineering at Technical University of British Columbia in Canada, feels that with time the V-chip will be accepted and used.
“This is typical of most new technologies as they come on the market,” he said, pointing out that the caller identification system used in telephones was invented in 1981 but not widely used until the mid-1990s.
“The reality is, it is going to take some time to get the V-chip into the market and for people to use it,” he said. “So I’m not feeling so bad yet.”
