Let the V-Chips Fall Where They May for Reluctant Volunteers

Even when you don’t inhale, secondary fumes from television viewing can complicate pregnancy and be dangerous to your health.

So, glasses raised! Hail the television industry for its “voluntary” agreement to institute a ratings system encoded for the now mandatory V-chip.

Voluntary the way Richard Nixon fled the White House. The way Manuel Noriega visited the United States. The way Connie was severed from Dan on “The CBS Evening News.” The way Hollywood cruiser Hugh Grant surrendered to the cops.

“We got the message,” plain-speaking cable mogul Ted Turner said in Washington last week. “We were either gonna do it or it was gonna be done for us.”

That silky Texan Jack Valenti, on the other hand, is a master spinner of epic yarns. So, wearing his best possible sunshine face for the TV cameras, the president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America last week repeatedly euphemized as “voluntary--and I stress voluntary” the TV industry’s decision to embrace the “daunting, massive, monumental task” of rating TV programs for sex and violence.

The same MPAA-style ratings the TV industry had vigorously resisted for so many years. The same ones it is now voluntarily--and I stress voluntarily--creating under the hammer of political pressure and a recently enacted telecommunications law that ordered a ratings system to coincide with a program-blocking V-chip to be installed in new TV sets starting in 1998. What an amazing coincidence that the industry’s epiphany came at precisely this moment.

Technically, Valenti was correct. The new law doesn’t require TV’s selfless volunteers to institute a ratings system, only that one be devised--if not by them then by a body appointed by the Federal Communications Commission. Thus, as Turner noted, TV folks surveyed their single viable option and took it, wisely choosing themselves over government-appointed outsiders. So much for volunteerism.

In a sense, Valenti’s word-dancing across reality symbolized the industry’s own state of denial in the ‘90s over some of its programming, its rather cavalier dismissal of loudly expressed anger by many Americans (and their surrogates in Congress) over both the content of sexy or violent programs and, in many cases, their easy availability to young kids.

It was money in the bank, especially in an election year, that President Clinton and other selective moralists and purveyors of Beltway family values would usurp this as an issue. So it was that Valenti and the TV industry’s hottest shots converged in Washington last week for a private meeting with the president that he described as an “entirely voluntary gathering.” Just as his response to Whitewater has been entirely voluntary.

Ideally, you don’t want anyone’s White House turning TV into an election chip. Let’s face it, however. Like a serial killer seeking intervention before harming again, the industry has been asking for this for years, in effect falling to its knees and begging for it by continuing to flaunt questionable programming in the cross hairs of public criticism.

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So it has only itself to blame for the coming V-chip and ratings that broadcast and cable moguls such as Barry Diller, a former chairman of Fox, fervently oppose.

“What does make sense is for broadcasters to exercise more responsibility, which they have not done in the last several years,” Diller, now chairman of Silver King Communications, told “NBC Nightly News” Thursday. “I’ve made mistakes in broadcasting, everyone who’s in it has made mistakes, [and] they need to be reminded of their public-service responsibilities.”

And they haven’t been? Again and again and again without any perceptible results? Please!

If five years ago, for example, the major networks had voluntarily stopped deploying adult, coarse-talking, sexually provocative programs at 8 and 8:30 p.m., if stations had voluntarily rejected twisted, debilitating, exploitative, irresponsible daytime talk shows regardless of their lewd appeal, then the V-chip probably would still be on someone’s drawing board instead of in a law.

Not that the V-chip is necessarily something to fear, its detractors notwithstanding. Its purpose is noble: Empower parents to electronically block selected programs from reaching their children at home by activating the chip in advance. Parents are their families’ censors, as they should be, and even if they’re not present, even if a baby sitter or someone else is in charge, the chip would still do its job.

Although details of the technology remain vague, the chip presumably will have settings corresponding to the ratings for violent and sexual content of programs, and once activated will automatically accept or reject those programs.

“Critics say it’s like inviting Big Brother into your home,” a TV reporter said last week. Get a grip. On the contrary, it strengthens Big Parent. What does Big Brother have to do with it?

A device that gives parents more advance information about programs, and facilitates them acting on that knowledge on behalf of their kids, is a free-speech issue, not a parents’ rights issue? Come again? Just how are 1st Amendment rights being violated here? The consumer who rejects a program is Big Brother? The marketplace is Big Brother? We’ll now see TV ads from lawyers soliciting business from second-graders whose rights have been violated by their parents? Even the most farcical program on TV would reject that premise as absurd.

V-chip critics also somberly predict that the new technology will dilute TV by frightening advertisers from investing in bold programs. “I think there’ll be more ‘Brady Bunch’-type programming,” said Turner, “and less of what we call cutting-edge programming.” Hmmmm. Cutting-edge programming. Now what might that be? How much of it do you find on TV now?

This entire argument is especially curious, the forecast being that advertisers--who already prescreen programs they buy--will be much less inclined to sponsor them when ratings tip viewers to what they contain. In other words, keeping viewers uninformed is the American way, informing them--and risking rejection--isn’t? Companies will buy time on an 8 p.m. comedy that’s risque or raunchy only if it bears no label warning parents that it’s risque or raunchy?

If true, this is an indictment of television as being driven largely by the trickery of viewers.

Valenti is right to anticipate a “daunting, massive, monumental task” for those creating the ratings. Given the complexity of TV, how could it be otherwise?

“The number of questions that arise are endless,” Diller said on NBC.

True. So, too, will be sneaky attempts by fringe ideologues to use this reform climate to impose on television a V-chip and ratings for values--corresponding to their values. Just how this holier-than-others crowd will be blocked from achieving its agendum remains to be seen.

Yet none of these questions is unanswerable. And the industry would have addressed them more leisurely if, in a truly voluntary way, it had acted sooner instead of resisting for so long the tornadic winds of change.