President Hears TV Executives Commit to Ratings System

Representatives of every major production studio, cable company and broadcast television network met with President Clinton at the White House for more than two hours Thursday and committed themselves to warning labels on violent and sexually explicit television programs.

Clinton hailed the agreement to create a new ratings regime for virtually all television programming, combined with new “V-chip” technology, as a “breakthrough” that will give parents more control over their children’s TV viewing.

“We’re handing the TV remote control back to America’s parents so that they can pass on their values and protect their children,” Clinton said after the first White House meeting of its kind on television violence.

But the president made clear that he believes the ratings system, while necessary, is only a modest first step toward improving the content of programming beamed into American homes.

“It is not enough for parents to be able to tune out what they don’t want their children to watch,” Clinton said. “They want to be able to tune in good programs that their children will watch.”

Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, outlined at the session how the industry intends to design and implement the ratings system. He said that individual distributors of programming would rate their products according to a system modeled on the 27-year-old MPAA movie ratings scale.

The industry also will create a ratings review board that periodically will review the operation of the system to ensure that it is being applied consistently by production studios.

A group will begin work immediately to design the ratings system and to “find answers to hard, perplexing, tormenting and complicated questions” raised by the agreement, Valenti said.

Participants described the session as “historic” and friendly, but industry officials showed the strains of being driven to a “voluntary” ratings system under political pressure and legal duress.

They also complained about the size of the task that confronts them between now and next January, when they promised to have the new ratings system in place.

The typical 72-channel cable television system broadcasts more than 600,000 hours of programming a year, most of which will have to be rated and encoded for use with the V-chip, which allows parents to screen out objectionable programs.

Under the agreement announced Thursday, only news and sports programs will be exempt from the ratings requirement.

Industry executives, who met with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) at the Capitol before caravaning to the White House, took pains to assert that they were acting voluntarily on the ratings system but would brook no further government intrusion into their artistic and 1st Amendment freedoms.

The voluble Valenti said that while the entertainment industry has been accused of polluting American culture, the answer is not more regulation but a national moral renaissance.

“I will say this,” Valenti declared in the East Room as Clinton and Vice President Al Gore looked on, “absent that kind of moral regeneration, in the home and in the family and in the school and in the church, frankly no ratings system, however purposeful, no V-chip or electronic device and no government law is going to salvage that child’s conduct or locate a lost moral core.”

A senior White House official who attended Thursday’s meeting in the State Dining Room said that the discussion was subdued, reflecting the reluctance of the media executives to undertake what they consider a monumental and expensive task.

And Valenti and the other industry executives made clear to Clinton that they would fight any attempt to impose censorship on their products or government edicts on the operation of their self-regulating scheme.

Gore, who has been the administration’s point man on telecommunications issues, denied that rating television programming and requiring installation of V-chips will violate free speech.

The plan raises “no 1st Amendment questions whatsoever, no more than the movie rating system does,” the vice president said.

But Daniel E. Katz, legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview that ratings in conjunction with the V-chip will have “a severe chilling effect on the creative community” because advertisers will be reluctant to support programs that millions of households will block because they are rated as containing violent or suggestive material.

Katz, who did not attend the meeting, said that it is “ludicrous” to say that the industry is “voluntarily” adopting the standards. “They came in with at least three guns to their heads,” he said. “They had no choice but to work this out.”

Walt Disney Co. President Michael Ovitz was perhaps the most sanguine of the industry officials on hand Thursday, speaking publicly and privately in favor of the new ratings system.

“Our company’s track record speaks for itself,” Ovitz said in an interview. “You should remember that this group [Hollywood], minus the broadcasters, created movie ratings years ago.

“If you look at TV right now, except for sexual innuendo and a few 10 p.m. shows, there are not a lot of ratings issues,” he said.

But he and other officials warned that it will be difficult to devise and implement a ratings system by their self-imposed January 1997 deadline.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who blistered Hollywood last year for producing sex- and blood-drenched “nightmares of depravity,” said Thursday’s announcement is “welcome news, as far as it goes, to those of us who have been consistently challenging Hollywood to do more to clean up its act.”

* UNITY VOW: Entertainment executives assert unity on TV ratings. D5