Beware the Real Evil of Violence Warnings : Television: Far more dangerous would be the tacit admission that government has a right to control content.

Representatives of the broadcasting, cable, production and syndication industries gather in Los Angeles today for a “summit” on television violence. The conference is billed as a voluntary effort by the entertainment community to police itself. In reality it is an attempt to stave off possible congressional legislation. At best the summit is “coerced voluntarism.”

The threat of government regulation has already prompted the networks--ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox--to impose coercive regulations on themselves. They have sought to buy time by agreeing “voluntarily” to run parental advisories before and during “excessively violent” programming.

The networks are reacting to those who are concerned--and rightly so--about violence in society. But to view this strictly as a violence issue is to risk overlooking the critical point: If government is thinking of imposing restrictions on program content, the issue becomes a constitutional one involving the 1st Amendment.

There is no guarantee that, under mounting pressure from government and interest groups, the networks would limit advisories only to those programs offering “gratuitous” violence. Nor is there a guarantee that critics of TV violence will be content with advisories only.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications, wants to mandate that television sets carry “V chips,” which, when activated by parents, would block out all programming carrying a “violence” rating, regardless of the violence’s context.

In the meantime, parental advisories are red flags for interest groups like the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn. Such groups target the sponsors of “objectionable” programming without regard to the context of the objectionable material.

Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” and “Cops,” both widely respected by law enforcement, have come under fire for their depictions of actual violent behavior.

Fictional portrayals of the social impact of violence could also be jeopardized. ABC’s miniseries “War and Remembrance” contained realistic and necessarily graphic depictions of Nazi atrocities. To gloss over such brutalities would have been a public disservice. Yet parental advisories could make such programming easy prey for activist critics.

The high-profile warnings adopted by the networks will be featured in all program advertising and TV listings, and will only make boycotts of sponsors easier. Advertisers are justly skittish.

Infinitely more dangerous than the parental advisories themselves, however, is the precedent the advisories set. By bowing to congressional pressure, the networks have tacitly admitted that government can, if it so chooses, regulate television content.

If the content of entertainment programming can be dictated by government, what about the content of so-called reality programming? Programs like “Hard Copy” and “Inside Edition” not only blur the line between entertainment and news, but also have received some of the harshest criticisms for their depictions of violence.

It may be premature to worry about warning labels being applied to actual newscasts, but even hard-news shows are being attacked for violent content.

One might wonder where the 1st Amendment enters the discussion. It doesn’t. TV watchdogs and their congressional allies skirt free-speech issues by defining TV violence as a “public health” issue. Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has stated that we “must approach television violence as a public-health crisis as we have with the danger of smoking.”

Once government asserts a public-health interest in TV violence, however, controlling that violence through various forms of content censorship could quite easily be seen as a reasonable means of advancing the government’s interest.

The 1st Amendment cannot be ignored in our discussions of electronic media regulation--whether the regulation is in the form of legislation or threats of legislation. With ever-increasing amounts of information reaching consumers through electronic means, defending free speech in the electronic media is very much in the real public interest.