Informed Parents Better Raters Of TV

If the gentle reader will forgive the use of an expression much in vogue among TV scriptwriters, their industry’s version of a rating system can best be summarized in language the studios will understand:

This proposal sucks.

Next week, TV executives plan to unveil a system to rate their shows. This fulfills a mandate in the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996. It also fulfills a promise the executives made in February after a ballyhooed visit to Bill Clinton’s woodshed, where he confronted television’s socially damaging fondness for ever seedier, bloodier, bawdier programming.

But the rating system now taking shape will not provide what parents want, nor will it do what the executives themselves promised.

What parents want is descriptive information about each program’s content. That’s also what the executives promised they’d provide.

What studios want to deliver, however, is a scheme to substitute their dubious judgment for the judgment of parents. It would rate programs according to age-group suitability. Shows would be rated in five categories: TV-K, for all children; TV-K7, children over 7; TV-G, general audiences; TV-PG, parental guidance suggested; TV-14, unsuitable for kids under 14; TV-M, mature audiences only. Studios that produce the shows would decide what rating they deserve.

All this offers is a vague judgment by an industry whose judgment is in question, whose abuse of discretion is the very reason the nation is having this discussion in the first place.

It’s parents who want to exercise judgment and discretion. To do so, they need explicit content information.

The executives rejected a proposal that would have rated each show’s content in each of three areas: violence, sex and language.

A National PTA survey found that, by whopping 80-percent margins, parents prefer specific content ratings over the studios’ approach. PTA found that parental concerns about language, sex and violence vary, depending on several factors. The studios’ plan leaves parents unable to exercise their different concerns.

This battle is important. It’s about parental rights, and public safety. It’s about reclaiming our culture from panderers who too often neglect television’s fine potential and make it an instrument of social decay. Social scientists have amassed convincing evidence that TV violence contributes to the rise in violent crime.

Responsible Americans ought to turn up the heat. Possibilities include another trip to Clinton’s woodshed, and organized efforts to use a neglected technological device: The “off” button.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board