On January 19, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a hearing on broadcast decency. Much of the testimony focused on the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act (H.R. 310), which would raise the Federal Communications Commission’s fines on incidents of indecency. The House approved the measure last February, but the Senate has not yet considered the bill (see The Source, 2/18/05).
Chair Ted Stevens (R-AK) explained that the committee held a forum in November to examine violent and sexual programming on national network, cable, and satellite television, adding, “That forum was for the purpose of exploring what we could do to stimulate some voluntary action, because it’s my opinion that we could go for hard mandates and if we (go) for the hard mandates, that would be in court and it would be years before anything takes place that would affect the demands of the American public and families for some change.” He added, “From my point-of-view, the industry and Jack Valenti personally, are to be commended for their efforts to make it easier for parents to control what their children watch…I understand that we’re going to hear today about a new initiative to educate parents on how they can really govern what their children watch and they have the tools to do that if they’ll just learn how to use them.”
Pointing out that “racy” programming remains “increasingly prolific,” Ranking Member Daniel Inouye (D-HI) stated, “At a minimum, we hope to provide parents with the information and tools to control the flood of materials they can view at home. We also have a number of legislative proposals before the Committee that would raise fines and impose other remedies.” Sen. Inouye expressed his concerns regarding violent programming and urged the committee to approve the Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act (S. 616).
Jack Valenti, former chair of the Motion Picture Association of America, summarized a cooperative venture undertaken by all media broadcasters and the Ad Council “to communicate to parents that they have the power to control all TV programs in their homes.” Under the plan, the Ad Council will create public service announcements to demonstrate how to use parent-control technology on all forms of media. Mr. Valenti said that “these messages will be carried by every distributor of programs in whatever form it comes into the home. This means that over and over again parents will be visited by simple, easy-to-grasp instructions for use of the V-Chip as well as cable blocking mechanisms. These instructions will [be] so simple that even the most technology-innocent parent can, very quickly, get the hang of it without complications.”
Comcast Corporation Executive Vice President David Cohen highlighted his company’s efforts to self-regulate: “We are absolutely committed to meeting the needs of families. We have shown this by providing flexible parental controls; by working with PBS to create the PBS Kids Sprout Network, the premiere service for young viewers; and by working with the cable and programming industries to constantly improve the information available to parents about how to manage the programming available in their homes. As another step in that commitment, last month Comcast announced our plans to offer a new ‘Family Tier’ service. Subscribers to the ‘Family Tier’ will receive 35 to 40 channels, including many of the premiere brand names in family programming, such as Disney, Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS Kids Sprout…We carefully selected channels that offer primarily TV-G content in all parts of the day, and channels with less programming that is ‘live’ and therefore unpredictable.” Mr. Cohen also discussed the difficulty of offering à la carte cable service, stating that it “would violate the laws of economics, contracts, and physics.” He explained that à la carte services cannot be delivered to analog cable boxes, programming contracts for tiered cable service would have to be negated, and consumers would pay more money for fewer programming choices.
Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, argued that consumers “should be free to pick and choose and pay for only those cable networks they want. This ensures that indecent cable programming is indeed an ‘invited guest’ into the home. Some call it ‘Cable à la Carte,’ others calls it ‘Cable Choice.’ We don’t suggest that the cable industry be prohibited from selling programming in bundled tiers; we do suggest that they must offer unbundled programming as one choice for their subscribers.” With regard to “family tier” services, Mr. Bozell stated, “The cable industry executives who have concocted this plan will be hard pressed to find many consumers, even their own employees, to whom the proposed family tier would hold any great appeal. After Time Warner released its ‘family’ tier lineup, we documented no less than 27 separate networks that are totally, or mostly family-friendly, that didn’t make the list…Another problem with the family tier approach involves the must-carry ‘basic’ tiers that customers will necessarily subscribe to in order to get access to the family tier of programming. In all cases, the basic tier would include the local broadcast stations, but in many markets this basic tier includes some cable networks” that are not considered family-friendly.
