Senate Grapples With Children’s TV Issues

As a witness Wednesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on children’s television, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) found himself in a rather unusual position.

He urged his colleagues who sit on the communications subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to pass his bill dealing with children’s television. Then, as he concluded his statement, Metzenbaum said his real preference was for an even stronger bill introduced by Sen. Timothy Wirth (D-Col.), of which he, Metzenbaum, is a co-sponsor.

As Metzenbaum explained, “Tim’s bill is a better bill than my bill.”

To the Ohio lawmaker, the apparent ambiguity was not without rationale. “The stronger the children’s television bill we come up with, the better,” he said.

But like many other supporters of legislation to reregulate children’s television, Metzenbaum believes that, realistically, the provisions of his bill may prove the most palatable to lawmakers.

Metzenbaum’s bill is similar to the measure passed by Congress last year, which was then vetoed by President Ronald Reagan, and to a bill approved again this year by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It would limit commercials aired during children’s programs to 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10 1/2 minutes per hour on Saturday and Sunday. The bill requires broadcast stations to serve the needs of children through their “overall programming,” and requires broadcasters to prove that they have provided children’s programming when they seek station license renewal from the Federal Communications Commission.

By contrast, Wirth’s bill--whose co-sponsors include Metzenbaum, Sen. Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)--limits the ad time to 9 1/2 minutes per hour on weekends and 12 minutes on weekdays. The measure also requires broadcasters to provide information in TV listings and program promotions for children’s programs, and requires stations to provide programs specifically designed for preschool and school-aged children. The bill also would restrict program-length commercials.

At the hearing Wednesday, the issue for many clearly was not whether Congress should act, but how far it should go in setting restrictions for the nation’s broadcasters and advertisers.

“We tend to underestimate how important this is,” Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) said of children’s television. “We are strip-mining our children’s minds.”

After listening to his colleague, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) subcommittee chairman, said that Gore’s words should become the battle cry for children’s television legislation. “I’m going to make bumper stickers,” he said.

Inouye, who said he spends two weekends each month watching television, said that “we are feeding rubbish to our children.” He said that the subcommittee will consider the bills in early August. “This the most important legislation that will be considered by this subcommittee,” he said.

But realistically, Inouye said he isn’t sure he can persuade his colleagues to accept the tougher measure.

At the hearing, Wirth said that tougher measures were needed, especially today, when America faces a severe education crisis. And to many people, he added, television has become as powerful a force in society as the traditional influences of family, churches and schools.

The paradox, Wirth said, “is that the more we understand the impact and power of television, the less we’re using it.”

Representatives of the nation’s broadcasters, who last year agreed to support children’s television legislation, and who view Metzenbaum’s bill as a “reasonable compromise,” consider Wirth’s proposal “unwise and unworkable.”

Edward O. Fritts, president and chief executive officer of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, testified that the Wirth bill places unnecessary burdens on broadcasters and “attempts to specifically regulate content, which we believe clearly violates the First Amendment.”

Representatives for the nation’s advertisers opposed both bills.

DeWitt F. Helm, president of the National Assn. of Advertisers, told the panel that “it is essential that advertisers and program producers be given the flexibility to best determine how to balance the entertainment needs of the audience with the financial requirements of good programming.”

Helm also said that while advertisers believe deceptive advertising to children needs to be eradicated, it should be done through industry self-regulation. By passing legislation that would, for example, limit the number of commercial minutes aimed at children each hour, “Congress would be attempting to micro-manage the economics of children’s television,” Helm said.

Such legislation, he said, “throws open the door to vastly increased governmental censorship of the broadcast media.”

Others who testified, including representatives of the National Education Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics, urged passage of Wirth’s bill.

Peggy Charren, the president of Action for Children’s Television, who has been working 21 years for legislation to improve children’s television, called Metzenbaum’s bill good legislation that represents “a most constructive step forward.” While she did not mention Wirth’s bill in her testimony, she said later that if lawmakers passed these tougher measures, she would support them.

Charren and other supporters of the legislation are hopeful that, unlike Reagan, who allowed a pocket-veto of last year’s bill on children’s television, President Bush will sign a bill.

“I think he will sign it and I think his wife will pat him on the back,” Charren said.

Dale Kunkel, assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, who testified for the American Psychological Assn., said that the 1984 FCC policy that essentially deregulated broadcasters’ obligation to provide educational programs for children should be called “the Disneyland rule.”

Applying the FCC’s logic, Kunkel said, one could argue that there is no need for public parks in Anaheim because Disneyland is there. The flaw in that logic, he noted, is that Disneyland charges an admission price that not all can afford.

Current FCC policy on children’s television is clearly “a flawed policy that may serve the privileged well, but the under-privileged not at all,” Kunkel said.