House Hearing on TV Violence, Impact on Children Opens Today

Because of what its chairman called growing evidence of “a direct link between the amount of violence on American television and the amount of violence in our society,” a House subcommittee will hold a hearing today examining television violence and its impact on children.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the session will begin to examine the depth of the problem and look for potential solutions.

“The sheer saturation of all the violent programming creates a culture of tolerance for it and we just have to begin to turn it around,” Markey said. “We can’t pretend there isn’t some connection.”

Among the issues scheduled to be discussed is the practice by some cable system operators of unscrambling pay-cable networks for promotional purposes and the resultant criticism by parents after their children watch programming they had not expected to be available.

Violence on television has long been studied and debated by academicians, researchers, government, the public and the medium itself. But Markey said it continues to be a concern because of the increased quantity and realism of the violence portrayed.

While discussion on the issue has been plentiful, workable solutions--including the mid-1970s family hour, which sought to limit violence and tone down frank language in network programming before 9 p.m., only to be struck down by the courts--have been rare. Markey advocates legislation requiring that all new television sets be equipped with “time-channel lock circuitry.”

Under such a plan, parents would be able to program their sets to keep their children from watching programming they deem objectionable. These choices, he said, would be aided by an industry-developed rating system on violence, similar to what the motion picture industry’s system.