A Deck Chair on the Titanic of Television : The V-chip would do little to address the overall problems of inferior programming and commercialization.

President Clinton has declared his support for a congressional bill that proposes to tackle the unchecked proliferation of TV violence. If passed, the bill would require television manufacturers to install a microchip enabling parents to block reception of certain television programs in their homes. Accompanying introduction of the so-called V-chip would be a voluntary rating similar to that employed in the movie industry.

Child and family advocates hail the V-chip as empowering parents to combat the more pernicious influences of our culture on children. The media, meanwhile, see an implicit violation of First Amendment rights and a dangerous step toward government censorship. It doesn’t take a great deal of common sense to penetrate the fallacy of both positions. The V-chip legislation hardly goes so far as to censor the television industry from producing and broadcasting whatever it wants, no matter how violent or otherwise inappropriate for young people. Thus, the legislation in no way threatens freedom of speech. But because it contains no provision for TV quality control, it’s no great boon to parents, either.

Indeed, the irony of the current V-chip hullabaloo is that it all boils down to much ado about nothing. For a research project on the cultural environment of childhood, I have talked with hundreds of median-income parents about raising kids in the 1990s. Parents are fed up with TV violence, to be sure. But it isn’t only the violence that disturbs them. It’s everything about TV, the general decline in the quality of programming. From news to entertainment and advertising, they say, television dishes up a relentless diet of sensationalism, stupidity and vulgarity.

Hard-working and pressed for money and time, American parents are as reliant as ever on television for family entertainment and news. And that makes it all the more tragic that even with cable and a profusion of broadcast stations, their most modest requirements for informative and tasteful programming are not being met. Parents are aware of the connection between TV violence and aggressive behavior in children. They complain that their children are desensitized by the ubiquity of violence on television, from cartoons to cop shows. But there is more. A father of four from San Francisco puts it this way: “TV is the biggest villain in family life.”

“With the TV you have no control,” says a New Jersey mother of three. “The news is the horror story of the week, and the movie-of-the-week is always two people in bed with each other and no [deeper] context.”

Curiously, even television advertising increasingly irks parents, who complain that suggestive ads encourage their children to premature sexual behavior and make them unduly materialistic. “We live in a fast-food society--I mean instant gratification--and a lot of it has to do with the media,” says a father of two from Austin, Tex. Many parents I’ve talked to are turning the TV off evenings, having come to the conclusion that it is a wasteful imposition on family time and inhibits their children’s ability to socialize and engage in independent play.

Thus acquiring the technology to screen their children’s television viewing is quite beside the main issue: how to counteract the contentious social irresponsibility of the broadcast and entertainment industries; their perverse determination to serve up trash.

If the Clinton Administration and Congress are going to make headway in addressing parental concerns, they had better consider far more comprehensive measures for improving and overseeing media standards than installing V-chips and begging industry executives for a ratings system. They might consider re-establishing afternoon and prime-time broadcasting standards suitable for family viewing, setting some limits on commercial time in those periods and prescribing a certain number of broadcasting hours weekly for cultural and educational programming.

Just as the chemical industry has been made responsible for holding air and water pollution to acceptable levels, broadcasting and entertainment industries must be made responsible for reducing the currently unacceptable levels of air-wave pollution. A decade of deregulation in television has proved that they won’t do it voluntarily. The sad fact is, government must do it for them.