Private ratings - V-chip

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Lewis M. Andrews

The real challenge is to adopt a system that gives parents the ability to choose a ratings source that best reflects their own tastes and convictions -- in other words, to privatize the input. Under such a system, parents would have the option of subscribing to a wide variety of rating scales -- including those provided by church groups, educational organizations such as the PTA, family-oriented magazines, even a home-school consortium -- with program classifications beamed directly to the family TV. Such a system not only would give parents optimum control over home viewing, but would liberate many program providers, as well. For example, those producers who wanted to film stories that might fail some technical definition of excessive sex or violence -- Hamlet, say -- would not be at the mercy of a single scale or of the board applying it.

The good news is that the technology to privatize the V-chip already exists. All that is needed to allow an evaluator of choice to pass ratings directly to the family TV is a wireless receiver that can pick up a broadcast of VCR-Plus codes with attached grades, similar to the cellular devices now used to control building temperatures, activate home alarm systems, set highway traffic signals, guide the routing of express mail trucks, and make possible the outdoor check-in of car rentals.

The idea of merging VCR and cellular technology to allow parents to delegate rating decisions to 'an arbiter of choice is already a very viable option,' says Paul Dawes, the Business Development Manager of the California software firm Sybase, who testified recently on the V-chip before the Senate Commerce Committee. Gary Shapiro, Group Vice President of the Electronic Industries Association, agrees, adding that 'there are a lot of ways parents could let their TVs be governed by a ratings service [of their] choice -- telephone lines, microwave transmission, even using a computer disk received monthly in the mail.'

Ironically, the one thing most likely to stall the rapid commercialization of such a parent-empowering super-V-chip is the current V-chip legislation. 'By forcing TV manufacturers to develop a chip that reads ratings encoded in the black bar of the broadcast signal,' explains Dawes, 'you're relying on (outmoded) analogue technology,' not digital. The effect will be to 'prolong the dependence of home entertainment on analogue technology for years to come,' erecting artificial barriers to advances that would offer parents real control over the family TV.

Unfortunately, these arguments do not seem to have much influence on politicians who are eager to prove they are 'doing something today' about media violence or who are simply more comfortable with hierarchical notions of regulation. When President Clinton said in his recent defense of the current V-chip legislation before the fourth annual conference on family issues in Nashville, 'I see no alternative to the problem,' he was, in all likelihood, telling us the truth. He probably doesn't.