Television Program Ratings

Looking to resolve the lingering dispute that has pit the television networks and Hollywood against parents' groups, the White House is aiming to convene a meeting this week to finalize a new rating system for TV programs, administration officials said Saturday.

Television run amok is trouble. Just as alarming, though, are stampeding lawmakers. Of course, some of this is subjective, one person's pandemonium being another's creative freedom--a perspective that eludes intolerant moral absolutists blessed with the Gift of Knowing. Some of these are in the private sector, some more dangerously in Congress, spewing politically chic noise from Capitol Hill as part of the debate over the TV industry's embattled program ratings system.

Meet Crissy Brookhart, the woman who rates the ratings. She calls herself a "television analyst." The entertainment industry calls her a "Hollywood basher." Just 25 years old, Brookhart monitors sex, violence and foul language on TV for the unabashedly conservative Media Research Center, a watchdog group based in this Virginia suburb. It is a job that has taken on new proportions with the advent on Jan. 1 of television's first-ever ratings code.

The television industry's new system of rating television shows came under blistering attack from two directions--members of Congress and a coalition of children's advocacy groups--in comments directed to the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.

After months of controversy on Capitol Hill, the debate over the television industry's on-air parental guidelines today is moving to the viewers for whom they were intended: 300 families from Peoria, Ill., the city that is synonymous with Middle American values and market research, will rate the ratings in a televised, "Oprah"-style congressional hearing.

In a break with the White House, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt on Wednesday endorsed legislation calling on the television networks to reinstitute their old code of conduct, which included an early-evening family hour free of racy and violent programming. Broadcasters protested that their recent agreement to adopt a new system of rating television programs for sex, violence, foul language and suggestive dialogue should immunize them from such legislation.

On Feb. 29, 1996, after months of debate, the television industry announced at a White House press conference that it would begin applying movie-style ratings to TV shows to help parents screen out objectionable programming for their children. Part of the agreement was that there would be an "oversight monitoring board," composed of industry representatives who would review complaints about the ratings of specific shows to ensure consistency among the participants. The group has yet to meet.

Despite threats of government reprisal, NBC reiterated its opposition Wednesday to the new parental warning labels that the rest of the television industry has put into effect. In a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, NBC President Bob Wright said the network will continue its use of age-based ratings categories without adding new labels denoting sex, coarse language, violence and suggestive dialogue.

As the TV industry prepared to unveil its enhanced ratings for entertainment programming today, NBC came under fire in Congress on Tuesday for refusing to go along with the plan to add labels denoting sex, violence, coarse language and suggestive dialogue. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.

Sex. Violence. Protecting children. Morality, politics and culture. With all these enticing elements in the mix, why don't people seem to care about the V-chip? Perhaps because the debate, politicized from the get-go, has so seldom been waged in honest terms. This came to mind at a recent daylong seminar, "Filtering Out Sex and Violence," sponsored by the USC Law School.