TV Industry’s Path From Indignation to a Political Reality

Network television executives were in Las Vegas on Jan. 22 at the industry’s annual convention for hawking syndicated programming when they learned that President Clinton intended to take on television that night in his State of the Union address.

Devoting more time to television than to the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Clinton urged passage of the then-pending telecommunications bill requiring TV sets to be equipped with an electronic V-chip to block objectionable programming, called on the TV industry to adopt the ratings system needed to make the computer chip work and issued an invitation that broadcast and cable executives could not refuse: a Feb. 29 meeting at the White House to discuss ways “we can work together to improve what our children see on television.”

“We’ve been summoned to the woodshed,” one executive recalls thinking after watching the speech.

In the immediate wake of the president’s speech, the networks remained defiant: They didn’t want a TV ratings system; they had opposed the V-chip when that component of the telecommunications bill was passed by Congress last summer.

When the legislation finally was approved Feb. 1, they were still declaring publicly that they intended to sue on grounds that it violated their free speech rights. They already had quietly hired noted 1st Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams to advise them on a legal strategy. “This is a bunch of people in Washington who don’t watch TV and can’t do anything about the major issues,” NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer said in February. “Until somebody tells me it’s unconstitutional, I’m not going to worry about it.”

Yet little more than a month after Clinton’s speech, the presidents of the four major networks and PBS rode to the White House in chartered minibuses last Thursday. They formed a parade of sorts with the chieftains of the Hollywood studios, Ted Turner and other cable-TV titans to announce their commitment to the first ratings system for television.

What happened in between, according to interviews with TV and movie executives and other participants, was a shotgun marriage of principle and political reality.

A few days after the president’s speech, Jack Valenti, the silver-haired president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America and a longtime lobbyist for the entertainment industry in Washington, asked the lobbyists for the broadcast networks to meet with him at the MPAA’s offices here.

“My pitch was basically, ‘Let’s preempt the field,’ ” Valenti said in an interview last week in an office decorated with a huge gilt American eagle on the wall. “Having been through a time with the movie industry some 27 years ago when some communities were creating local movie censor boards and the movie industry decided to create its own ratings system, I thought it would be better for TV to adopt its own ratings system before the government did it for us.”

Besides, Valenti told the meeting, “How does it look for us to be against helping parents and children? That’s kind of hard to defend.” In meetings over the next few weeks with the lobbyists and phone calls with their bosses, Valenti proposed that the networks adopt a ratings system modeled on the familiar code of the MPAA--G, PG, PG-13 and so on.

This suggestion, executives say, was critical to the networks because it offered them a fairly benign alternative to the harsh-sounding “V” for violence label. Broadcasters fear that advertisers will shun negatively rated shows, and even an MPAA-like system, they say, will cost them millions of dollars in lost revenue.

“We remain concerned about the prospect of government intervention in TV content and the impact of ratings on risk-taking shows,” NBC general counsel Richard Cotton said in an interview Friday. “But the MPAA code is at least positive. The ‘V’ sounds like a Scarlett Letter that says, ‘Stay away.’ ”

Another important consideration in terms of changing the networks’ minds, sources say, was that they are facing a crucial decision by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission over whether new portions of spectrum space will be given to them or auctioned. “If we fought ratings, we might lose on spectrum space,” one source said. “That could cost us billions of dollars.”

At the same time, despite the networks’ public pronouncements, the president’s speech had added considerable pressure on them. Both the telecommunications bill and its V-chip/ratings component had passed by an overwhelming majority in Congress, there was strong public support for it and the cable-TV industry had voiced its willingness to comply. (Privately, cable executives acknowledge broadcasters’ contention that cable has far less to lose from rating shows, because they also derive income from subscribers, whereas broadcasters are solely dependent on advertising.)

“We were concerned about . . . this issue becoming politicized,” Capital Cities/ABC President Robert Iger said in an interview. “But it’s not just Washington--viewers were telling us they want more information about programming.”

CBS and NBC in particular remained concerned about 1st Amendment issues in the V-chip law. But the networks were advised that an immediate lawsuit was not an assured “slam-dunk” victory, and that they probably would stand a better chance of winning a lawsuit later if they first demonstrated that they sought to devise a ratings system on their own and had it found wanting by the government.

Valenti, a power broker whose roots in Washington go back to his days as an aide to fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, was considered a neutral figure who could mediate among the networks and studios and be a spokesman to the White House.

On Feb. 15, Valenti met with the board of the MPAA at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills to brief them on the progress of the negotiations.

At the meeting, which was attended by the heads of the major studios, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner and President Michael Ovitz, whose company had just taken control of ABC, “made clear their support for doing ratings,” according to one studio chief who attended.

Everyone agreed, sources say, that all four networks would act in concert, with no one network making a separate announcement before all came to agreement.

But a few hours later that day, Rupert Murdoch surprised the other networks and his own staff by making an end run. He issued a news release saying that his Fox network would begin rating its shows with an MPAA-style system, “acting unilaterally” if need be.

When a wire-service story about Murdoch’s announcement was read over a conference call among the network negotiators, “there was stunned silence,” one listener says.

Executives at the other networks were furious with Murdoch. “This was grandstanding designed to win points in Washington, where he has a lot of [business] issues on the table,” said one network source. After Murdoch’s move, it took several days to get the participants back to the table.

With the Feb. 29 White House meeting closing in, there still were many issues to be resolved: Who would rate the shows, the networks or a central ratings body? What kind of ratings would there be?

“There were many groups involved,” said CBS vice president Martin Franks, “and we were trying to come up with a ratings system that might actually be useful to viewers.”

In the end, they announced only their commitment to ratings by January, with details to come later.

“Now comes the really hard part--who’s going to be on the task force and what specific ratings will there be,” said Winston H. Cox, vice president of Viacom, which owns the pay-TV Showtime and MTV networks.

Despite their assent, the broadcast networks continue to have deep misgivings about the leap they’re taking. And they say they’ll sue if the government pushes them any further.

“I firmly believe that we would win on constitutional grounds,” NBC’s Ohlmeyer said in an interview Friday. “This V-chip is a political football. But if we follow MPAA guidelines, people are going to find out that it’s Showtime and HBO that have R-rated shows; almost everything on NBC would be rated PG or PG-13. If that’s what it shows, I guess I can live with it.”