The kids are not all right: family values via the V-chip

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 21, 1995 | by Woody West

Are we really ready for the "V-chip" -- V as in "violence"? The microchip is being hustled as a solvent in the squabble about violence and sex on the tube. If its use becomes law, the chip would be surgically implanted in the right frontal lobe of all infants -- just kidding there. But the envisioned use of this device has daunting implications.

In case you've been dozing, the V-chip would be required in new television sets and available for cable boxes to respond to encoded program ratings. If a parent activates the device to exclude certain programs and/or channels, the kiddies can't tune in.

President Clinton has endorsed the chip, intent on snugly saddling the "family values" horse. There is a V-chip provision in the telecommunications bill passed recently by the Senate; it was turned down by a House committee but still could come before the full House.

The gimmick's bipartisan popularity on Capitol Hill is quite pragmatic with an election bearing down: Who wants to be accused, in effect, of voting in favor of gory violence and raw sex by not shouting "aye" for the V-chip?

Not all the pols have joined the stampede, fortunately, and surely there are enough thoughtful Republicans in the House to stomp on this further increment of governmental guff. Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole denounced the gizmo as further nannyism, a position a New York Times reporter helpfully explained as Dole's "effort to build support among the Christian right" -- as if only that supposedly monolithic bloc could be interested in cultural debasement.

The temptation, however, to see this microchip as a deus ex machina to rescue us from the swamp of corrupt popular culture may be irresistible. We've gotten fond of mechanisms to evade personal and collective decisions about our society.

If the V-chip becomes law, there will be the arduous and delicate chore of ratings. All TV programming will have to be given a thumbs up or thumbs down -- or gradations thereof. Ratings might be similar to those for movies, which, aside from the rare "X" label, don't preclude expanses of anatomy and wonderfully grisly violence.

Just think about rating TV programs! There are 50 or 75 channels routinely available now with many more coming. The variety of offerings is stunning. Who's going to perform this herculean task?

The broadcasting industry under the Senate bill would have a year to develop "voluntary" ratings. "You can call this 'voluntary' if you want," says Robert Peck, a former counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, "but what happens when Congress decides it doesn't like the way the industry is carrying this out?"

To ask is, of course, to answer. Under the Senate bill, the president would appoint (as the Times straight-facedly put it) a "board of experts" to devise standards. Whether it's Clinton or a successor, have we become so intellectually incontinent that we want White House-selected "experts" deciding TV standards?

The V-chip groupies, though, don't view such a prospect darkly. "This would not be censorship," emoted the president, "this is parental responsibility." Come again? Well, he explained, parents often are unable to monitor their tadpoles' viewing. The dratted capitalist economy necessitates two-wage-earner households, don't you know?

This reasoning, such as it is, displays the fundamental liberal fallacy: that citizens are incapable of making the choices that shape their lives and those of their families.

The Washington Post applauded the microchip morality as "attractive." True, the editorialist murmured, an encoded signal "for violence, sexual content, bad language or theoretically almost anything else" might be a teensy bit worrisome. Theoretically almost anything else! What fecklessness from an editorial voice considered a trumpet of liberalism.

"Congress ought to frame its final bill carefully to avoid treading on the Constitution," the Post vapidly opines. "But giving parents tools to reassert control over their TV sets is a good idea."

Parents have, and always have had, the tools: the on/off switch. Those who are indifferent to it and to the other adjuncts of parental authority will hardly exert themselves to study precisely what to block and what to permit of the vast domain of programming. If parental duty is abnegated, state power is superfluous.

Actually, there is a feasible remedy to the frequent nastiness on the tube. The very progressive Friends of Bill dominate the industry. If they would mute the hypocritical warbling about freedom of expression and that the public wants trash, they might consider the social obligation that is the quid pro quo of their status and wealth: Halve the mayhem, and cut the lascivious, the relentless profanity and blasphemy by, oh, say, a third, and this fuss would fade. Indeed, art might be served.

Don't bet the farm on this happening any time soon. But the V-chip is a factitious, feel-good ploy -- and potentially a dangerous one.