Content Ratings Intended as a Guide for Parents

As an early proponent of the need to revise the TV ratings system, I seem to have become a particular focus of TV producer Dick Wolf’s recent diatribes on the subject (“Ratings for Content or for Control?,” Counterpunch, Aug. 4).

The perspectives Wolf expresses highlight the misplaced concerns of those who oppose the new revised system.

The basic difference between the original industry-developed system and the revised system criticized by Wolf is the addition of one-letter content descriptors like S (sex), L (language), V (violence) and D (suggestive dialogue) to the industry’s age-based ratings categories. Thus, for example, scenes from Wolf’s “New York Undercover” containing violence so graphic that it visibly shocked everyone, including Jack Valenti, when shown at a Senate hearing last January, would now be rated TV-PG-V, rather than simply TV-PG as they were under the original age-based ratings system.

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Understandably, Wolf does not like this. Wolf decries this as “tantamount to coercion. . . . It is not content identification; it is content control.” Let’s get real. Does government control the content of a can of soup when it requires that the ingredients be listed on the label? If consumers read the label and decide not to buy because there’s too much salt or fat or sugar, that’s the marketplace, not the government, at work. By the same token, if parents use the ratings system and decide not to allow their children to view certain shows, that’s an exercise of parental, not government, control.

Might the ratings for “New York Undercover” be affected if a large number of parents, based on the V descriptor, choose not to let their children watch the show? Sure. Wolf calls this “economic censorship.” I call it the marketplace working as it should.

What Wolf seems to forget is that it’s not only program producers and TV broadcasters who have 1st Amendment prerogatives when it comes to TV programming; parents have them, too. And these prerogatives have historically been exercised quite effectively by everyone involved in the process of producing, presenting and viewing mass-audience TV fare. That is to say, producers like Wolf have a 1st Amendment right to produce whatever kind of shows they want; networks like NBC have a 1st Amendment right to broadcast whichever of Wolf’s shows they choose, and then viewers have an absolute right to watch Wolf’s shows or not.

The only thing that’s changed in this 1st Amendment continuum is the fact that, as Wolf himself says, TV programming, like so much in life, isn’t what it used to be. Why? Well, one big reason is that competition for the hearts and eyes of viewers in today’s multichannel video world has forced broadcasters to push the envelope on the nature and content of the shows they present.

Fine. I wouldn’t want the government to deny broadcasters the right to show more mature and challenging programming, and nobody should try to homogenize by regulation the programming that adults may choose to see. But this ongoing change in the nature of broadcast television programming ups the ante on having a system in place whereby parents who wish to do so can be informed of the content of these shows and make decisions on their children’s television viewing accordingly.

That’s what the new content-based ratings system is intended to do. And although Wolf may be aggrieved if television networks choose not to broadcast what he calls “hard-hitting, issues-oriented adult drama” if advertisers refuse to support such shows because of their content, as a program producer he must surely know that that’s the way the system has always worked.

The only difference is that, amid the welter of new programs, they’ll know in advance whether the content of a particular show is likely to be more Beavis than the Beav. Parents, in particular, have a right to know that, and the content-based ratings system allows them to avail themselves of that right. There may be a problem if this happens, but if so, it’s a fiscal problem for Wolf, not a constitutional problem for the nation.

Wolf overlooks the fact that I am committed in writing to oppose any attempt by Congress to enact laws designed to regulate the content of TV programs as long as the revised ratings system is in use. I’ve done so because I agree with the statement of the production community, cited by Wolf, that, “We believe that our children’s television viewing should be monitored by their parents and should never be dictated, in any form, by the government.”

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Obviously, where Wolf and I part company is over the notion that the revised ratings system dictates anything to anybody. In my view, it doesn’t. It simply enables parents to make programming decisions within the context of their own social, cultural and ethical values. That’s as it should be, and that’s as far as the government ought to go.

Reduced to its essentials, Wolf’s argument seems to be that when it comes to content descriptors, a little knowledge in the hands of parents is a very dangerous thing. It’s precisely that kind of attitude that has made the organizations representing parents and children, as well as experts in the fields of education, medicine and child development, so uniformly adamant that parents be given this knowledge so that parents, and not the program production community, can decide what’s suitable for children to watch.