Be afraid of FCC plan

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 28, 2007 | by Scott D. Pierce Deseret Morning News

The federal government is gearing up to regulate TV violence.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Given the abysmal track record both Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have in dealing with programming content, this ought to frighten anyone who owns a TV.

I am not suggesting that violence on TV is not a problem. There are any number of studies -- not to mention anecdotal evidence -- that indicates that violent programming affects behavior.

And it's absolutely disingenuous for anyone in the television industry to argue otherwise. The multibillion dollar commercial TV business is built on the assumption that advertising influences viewers' behavior.

If you're selling commercial time based on that assumption, you cannot argue that programming does not influence behavior, too.

And I'm not arguing that television executives have done a good job of policing themselves. They have not.

But the only thing that could possibly be worse is allowing the government to do the policing for them. Congress has, over the years, proved that it was only good at grandstanding TV issues, conducting hearings and issuing statements that were nothing short of a joke.

The FCC has spent years working up a report suggesting that Congress could grant it the power to regulate TV violence. Whether it could survive constitutional challenges remains to be seen.

(Will the FCC regulate real-life violence on news programs? Possibly.)

But we do not want to be granting more power to the same people who have bungled the regulation of sexual content so badly. The people who have spent so much of your tax money trying to wring fines out of CBS for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" -- an incident that was blown all out of proportion because of political pressure applied by dishonest, disreputable interest groups falsely claiming to represent American viewers.

What we have now is complete disarray. Some ABC affiliates were too afraid to carry the network's broadcast of "Saving Private Ryan" because of the language; the FCC later said it wouldn't have fined them. Yet PBS stations are facing the prospect of millions of dollars in fines when they air Ken Burns' documentary about World War II this fall because of three words the FCC doesn't approve of.

There is far more offensive material in your average half hour of MTV than that or than there was in that Super Bowl halftime show.

And that's another problem with the FCC's proposal -- it wants to regulate cable television, as well. You could certainly argue that in the vast majority of American households, there's no difference between broadcast and cable channels.

But if you pay a cable or satellite subscription fee every month because you want to watch "The Shield" on FX -- if you pay an additional fee to HBO because you want to watch "The Sopranos" and R- rated action movies -- do you really want the FCC telling you that you can't?

I am 100 percent in favor of regulating television. No child should be allowed free access to every channel and every program.

But parents should be doing the regulating. Even lazy parents can still do their job, because every television set 13 inches or larger manufactured since 2000 is equipped with a v-chip; all you've got to do is use it.

I am not suggesting that the current system is good. It's broken, and I don't have the answer for how to fix it.

But this proposal is like trying to fix a broken watch with a sledgehammer. It won't work.

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com