Hollywood Warily Joining Clinton’s TV Ratings Push

Like parties to a peace treaty ending a bitter war, President Clinton and the leading moguls of the entertainment industry will step before the cameras separately Thursday to announce the creation of a ratings system that may change forever how families use their television sets and mark a milestone in the nation’s struggle over popular values.

The inevitable smiles will mask uncertainty, though, over how the new ratings system will work and what it means, both to the entertainment industry and to American families, reflecting how volatile the issue remains.

The TV networks, which have fought government-mandated ratings for years, will come to the White House more as hostages to new legislation and a public outcry for more wholesome programming than as voluntary participants. Michael Ovitz, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and other Hollywood leaders who produce TV shows will join in the meeting.

Thursday’s White House media event will produce little more than an agreement in principle to devise an industrywide ratings system based on that of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which determines whether a production is suitable for children. The mechanisms and the standards for rating television content will be determined in the future.

The situation is complicated by differences between Republicans and Democrats. The smile on Clinton’s face will be sincere because he believes that he is on the right side of an issue that resonates deeply with voters. He also will have trumped former Vice President Dan Quayle and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who have led a rhetorical assault on what they see as the corrosive influence of sex and violence on television and in the movies.

But House Republicans, who backed the networks in their earlier opposition to a ratings system, are also looking for a chance to associate themselves with a popular public issue.

After resisting for decades and threatening to challenge TV ratings and the technology to block objectionable programming in court on free speech grounds, the networks are joining with Hollywood studios, cable television, syndicators and other major players in the TV industry to create a ratings system that they hope will satisfy parental concerns and forestall a government-mandated program.

Thursday’s meeting will mark a milestone in a long and until now fruitless effort to impose ratings on a powerful medium that comes into American homes for hours every day.

“We’re getting close to closure on a ratings system that will provide information for parents without impinging on free speech,” said one network executive.

Some network executives remain opposed to linking an electronically encoded “V-chip” and a mandated ratings system required by Congress in the recent telecommunications bill.

Clinton challenged the industry in this year’s State of the Union address to devise a voluntary ratings system before the passage of the telecommunications bill.

Entertainment-industry leaders do not want to offend House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.); Rep. Jack Fields (R-Texas), who chairs the House Commerce telecommunications subcommittee, and other Republicans who not only backed the networks in their opposition to the V-chip and ratings legislation but also will be voting on a proposal to auction airwaves spectrum space for billions of dollars.

“The Republicans took an unpopular position by opposing the V-chip and ratings legislation in Congress,” said one executive involved in the negotiations, “and we’re going to need their support on spectrum space. We need to have some kind of agreement to announce on Thursday to show that we’re responding to the concerns of the president and the public. But we can’t cut off Gingrich and other Republicans by giving Clinton the only ‘photo-op’ on the issue of children and television in a presidential election year.”

Gingrich has scheduled a breakfast meeting with the industry executives, who later will be meeting with the president. White House officials greeted word of Gingrich’s move with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.

“Newt smells credit available and he’s trying to steal some of it,” said a White House official involved in the negotiations. “It baffles me how he can claim credit for people responding to the president’s challenge to do something he has opposed for years.”

Another administration official acknowledged that, while who would determine ratings remains unsettled, the meeting and the broad-brush agreement are significant.

“All the details aren’t there but it’s still a really big deal,” a senior White House official said. “We’re now in a position that nobody would have predicted three or four months ago.”

The broadcast networks had threatened to challenge the telecommunications legislation in court. According to the new law, they have one year to devise their own ratings system--or face having the Federal Communications Commission impanel a group to set up the system for them. Faced with public pressure and a government-imposed system, some networks and Hollywood studios decided that it was better for the industry to come up with its own system.

Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, has played a key role, sources said, in bringing the industry to the ratings table. Valenti, a longtime lobbyist for the movie business in Washington, is expected to head a “working group” to work out details of the new system.

But industry executives said Tuesday that they have not ruled out the idea of challenging the V-chip and ratings legislation on 1st Amendment grounds. To that end, they said, any announcement that they make will not come at the White House meeting or any other meeting with government leaders. A press conference with industry executives has been scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday at a Washington hotel.

One network executive said: “We want to preserve our options, including the option to sue. If this system is voluntary, as it’s supposed to be, then we don’t want to appear to be under the boot of government censorship by announcing it at the White House or any other governmental setting.”

According to one legal expert who requested anonymity, the networks would be likely to fail if they challenged the V-chip and ratings legislation on 1st Amendment grounds in court without trying to come up with a ratings system of their own. If they come up with a system that is rejected by the government, they would stand a better chance of winning a legal challenge in the future.

Times staff writers Paul Richter and John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this story.