This ‘V’ May Stand For Victory Coalition Believes Television Industry On The Brink Of Overhauling Ratings System

Anticipating that the television networks are about to adopt a new system for rating their programs, a coalition of parents and children’s organizations is claiming a David-and-Goliath victory over one of the nation’s most powerful industries.

Although the specifics of any deal are yet unsettled, a majority of industry participants seem willing to accept the principal demand of the citizens groups: a rating system that would recognize potentially objectionable sex, violence and language in programs.

“The force was with us; it is a tremendous victory for parents,” says Jeff Chester, who heads the Center for Media Education.

With considerable assistance from members of Congress, Chester’s group and others in his coalition - including the National Parent Teachers Association, the Children’s Defense Fund and the American Psychological Association - have worked tirelessly and skillfully over the past six months to force the television industry to change the voluntary system instituted last January.

But as industry insiders see it, it was the missteps of the networks themselves, more than the persuasiveness of the parents’ groups, that brought the TV industry to this juncture.

The industry’s biggest mistake, according to many people involved in the dispute, was to underestimate the depth of the anxiety that exists among American parents about the content of the programs their children watch.

“The fundamental error they made was not getting support from the parents,” says Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is pushing the networks toward a compromise. ” … They decided to devise a system without the support of the organizations that represent families in America.”

Television executives argue in their defense that congressmen, sensing a hot political issue, upped the ante. “Our biggest mistake was believing the assurances of congressmen (who said) ‘just introduce a movie-style rating system, and that will be it,’ ” one network executive said.

In addition, television executives have been divided among themselves on the issue, and they have managed to anger their supporters in Congress by giving a PG (parental guidance) rating to some of the raciest and most violent shows on television.

Devised last year by broadcast and cable representatives under the supervision of Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, the current ratings system was intended to lay the groundwork for the introduction of the V-chip, a device built into televisions that will allow parents to program their sets to block out programming that carries a rating they find objectionable.

But parents’ groups have refused to endorse the industry’s system, which divides entertainment programs into four categories: TV-G (for all ages), TV-PG (parental guidance suggested), TV-14 (may be inappropriate for children under 14) and TV-MA (for adults). The groups say these labels offer them no clue about the nature of a program’s objectionable content.

While the exact terms of the compromise remain unclear, insiders say there is no doubt the networks are strongly motivated to settle the dispute. Threatened with legislation that would impose onerous restrictions on them if they do not adopt revisions that suit parents, the networks began negotiating with parents’ groups this week in hopes of reaching an agreement soon - perhaps before a June 20 Federal Communications Commission hearing on the ratings.

According to McCain, the networks already have agreed in principle that the ratings system should be revised to disclose to parents the nature of the objectionable content.

So far, participants say the negotiations have centered on a proposal by some networks that would add the letters S (sex), V (violence) and L (language) to indicate why programs were rated inappropriate for certain age groups. But there is little support among industry officials for accompanying the letters with a scale of 1 to 5 to indicate the degree of potentially objectionable sex, violence and language.