The Brandcast

The Federal Communications Commission is ready to ask congress for a sweeping and broad expansion of their current regulatory powers over broadcast media, including television and radio programming. They contend that new research indicates a spike in short-term aggression in children exposed to violence.

The FCC wants to regulate violent programming in the same 6am to 10pm time frame during which they currently have restrictions against ‘indecent material’, including foul language and other situations best described as ‘wardrobe malfunctions’. The FCC has the power to levy huge fines against networks who violate their codes.

But Cable programming might be next on the chopping block. In an attempt to offer parents even greater control over their televisions, the FCC could recommend to Congress that new legislation force Cable providers like Time Warner and ComCast to give customers the option of paying for individual stations on an a la carte basis, rather than today’s customary lump programming packages–in addition to holding these Cable stations responsible for the higher FCC regulatory content standards.
This situation troubles me for a few reasons.

Programming today is already given a rating system, which appears in the top left-hand corner of the screen during opening credits. For the last 7 years, all TVs sold in the United States must legally contain technology called a V-Chip. The V-Chip automatically reads each program’s given rating. If the rating is above whichever maximum a parent has set as appropriate, the potentially inappropriate program is then blacked out and can only be accessed by a secret code.

But how much more censorship do we need here, folks? The first line of defense against a child watching inappropriate programming is a responsible parent. If mom is running an errand or dad is mowing the lawn, then the V-Chip will act as a backup, automatically censoring programs just in case.
If the FCC is granted broader powers to censor and reform programming, I can only hope that attorneys across the country will challenge the constitutionality of such a decision. While I’m not one to enjoy gratuitous amounts of violence or foul speech in a TV show, that shouldn’t mean that such situations should be eliminated from all programming in the 6am to 10pm time slot on all channels forever. Imagine how many great programs would be banned or moved because of brief, seconds-long violent situations which are critical to the plot of the show? Moreover, what would happen to the freedom of the press? Unfortunately, violence exists in the real world today. Would the news media need to censor their own reporting in order to comply with new anti-violence measures?

I think that the FCC’s research on children and violent programming is worthy, and that it should be leveraged in an effort to educate parents on how to be responsible with V-Chip technology and how to better supervise their young children’s TV watching habits.

The answer to this situation does not rest in increased censorship, where responsible adults stand to lose entertaining programming, and companies stand to lose even more marketing dollars from the decrease in available commercial time slots. So-called ‘prime time’ shows, with average levels of violence, would all get shoved into competing 10pm and 11pm time slots, and those advertising slots, being fewer, would skyrocket in price. Any companies or products attempting to target certain adult consumer subsets would also feel the pinch from less impressions overall, since, (and perhaps I am only speaking for myself) adults may lose interest in programming that has been so thoroughly sterilized, that it lacks major draw.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that the FCC and the government should not attempt to broaden their regulation of programming standards. We all look back on 1950s-era programming and laugh at how unrealistic it was; while baby-boom themed research seems to correlate the overly sterile ’50’s with people who grew up and rebelled heavily in the ’70’s. Programming regulations might even be too strict as they currently stand, which is unfair to responsible adult viewers and to advertisers who pay to support those networks.